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Archbishop of Canterbury resigns over church abuse scandal

Justin Welby's resignation as the Archbishop of Canterbury came after days of mounting pressure following a damning report into the cover-up of horrific abuse.




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What is Justin Welby’s legacy as Archbishop of Canterbury?

From women bishops to same-sex marriage, Justin Welby spent his eleven years as head of the Church of England brokering compromises between deeply divided factions in the Anglican church. 




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Research monkeys still having a ball days after busting out of lab, police say

They pose no risk to human health, and they're living their best lives.






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Gallery DTALE ARCHIST opens in Bengaluru

The inaugural show of Gallery DTALE ARCHIST, a new art space in the city, will be on till November 15




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Archbishop of Canterbury Resigns Over Church Abuse Scandal...


Archbishop of Canterbury Resigns Over Church Abuse Scandal...


(Third column, 6th story, link)





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Standing desks may be bad for your health, new research finds...


Standing desks may be bad for your health, new research finds...


(Second column, 22nd story, link)





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Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby resigns over sex abuse scandal

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has resigned over accusations that he failed to report physical and sexual abuse to the police.




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Is bilingualism good for your brain? Montreal researchers are seeing tangible results

Researchers in Montreal are pointing to the benefits of bilingualism for the brain's health and efficiency — suggesting it could even help prevent diseases associated with aging, including Alzheimer's.



  • News/Canada/Montreal

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Dalhousie researchers design low-cost device that can help fight water scarcity

A dome-shaped device floating in Halifax’s Northwest Arm could easily be confused with a buoy, but it is actually a contraption meant to turn ocean water into fresh water. Two Dalhousie University researchers hope it can help with water scarcity in the real world.



  • News/Canada/Nova Scotia

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Chrome for iOS now lets you add text to Google Lens visual searches

If you use Chrome on your iPhone, you’re about to see some features sliding over from the Android version. Google Lens will let you add text to your image searches, and you can save files and pictures directly to Google Drive and Photos. You can get “Shopping Insights” for products you’re browsing.

Chrome for iOS now lets you add words to your Google Lens visual searches, allowing you to add nuance to your query or “perform more complex and specific searches,” as Chrome Product Manager Katia Muradyan wrote in a blog post. After activating Lens by tapping the camera icon in the Chrome search bar, you can ask questions about the object you’re snapping a pic of, and it will produce corresponding results. Google says AI Overviews will also appear for some of these search results.

The feature shares some common ground with an Apple Intelligence feature for iPhone 16 owners in iOS 18.2, which is currently in beta. Visual Intelligence lets you point your camera at something and get info about it, including asking ChatGPT questions about it or searching for it on Google.

Chrome for iPhone now has a feature that lets you save a file directly to Google Drive or Google Photos, sparing you from using your phone’s internal storage. When saving files from Chrome, you’ll see a new option to save the file to Drive. Similarly, when browsing a photo you want to save, long-press on it, and you’ll see a new “Save in Google Photos” option in the context menu. Of course, the feature requires you to be signed into a Google account.

Chrome for iOS also adds a feature that pops up a mini-map when you click on an address. Look for an underlined link to specific addresses; clicking on it will take you to the mini-map without leaving the browser.

Finally, Google is adding Shopping Insights for US users. The company frames it as a way to help you find great prices on items you’re shopping for, but it’s hard to imagine this feature exists strictly from the kindness of Google's heart. Regardless, you’ll soon see a “Good Deal Now” alert in Chrome’s address bar when browsing for products for which it’s available. You’ll see details like price history / tracking and buying options if you tap it.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/chrome-for-ios-now-lets-you-add-text-to-google-lens-visual-searches-170920556.html?src=rss




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Rain soaks parched areas

WIDESPREAD rain fell across NSW at the weekend.




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Gas search ban ‘stumbling block’

The Grattan Institute has warned Victoria’s gas moratorium may have to be partially lifted to save the smelter.




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ICMR announces call for CAR proposals under extramural research programme

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has issued a call for proposals for its Centre for Advanced Research (CAR) initiative under the Extramural Research Programme, inviting experienced research teams to




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Dora Richardson Took Her Research Underground to Develop Lifesaving Tamoxifen

When chemist Dora Richardson’s employer decided to terminate the breast cancer research on the drug Tamoxifen in the early 1970s, she and her colleagues continued the work in secret.




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These Bird Nests Show Signs of an Architectural ‘Culture’

Culture may play a role in how birds build collectively in the Kalahari Desert




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Cardiology Research: Business As Usual During the Pandemic

At this moment in time the pre-pandemic cardiology research agenda needs to be completely reprioritized. There are two broad areas that now take precedence over all existing research concerns. On the one hand, researchers need to achieve a better understanding of the staggering incidence of deferred or delayed treatment of cardiovascular events and conditions as...

Click here to continue reading...




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Risk of mortality drops in COVID-19 patients given anticoagulation within a day of hospital admission, research finds

Starting COVID-19 patients on prophylactic anticoagulation within 24 hours of being admitted to hospital has been linked to a reduced risk of mortality.




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Semaglutide effective for weight loss in non-diabetic adults, research suggests

The type 2 diabetes mellitus drug semaglutide is effective for weight loss in non-diabetic overweight or obese adults, when taken alongside a reduced-calorie diet and exercise, researchers have found.




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Looking for Opportunities to Accelerate Clinical Research in Rare Diseases

By Mike Cloonan, Chief Executive Officer of Sionna Therapeutics, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC The drug development process in rare diseases is rife with challenges especially when companies target significant differentiation or first-in-class targets. Identifying

The post Looking for Opportunities to Accelerate Clinical Research in Rare Diseases appeared first on LifeSciVC.




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Tell the UK’s research regulator to do more on clinical trial transparency

The UK body that oversees health research is writing a new strategy on clinical trial transparency and it wants to hear opinions on it. The Health Research Authority (HRA) says its strategy aims to “make transparency easy, make compliance clear and make information public.” It has opened a public consultation on the strategy and some […]




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The first paid research subject in written history?

On this date 349 years ago, Samuel Pepys relates in his famous diary a remarkable story about an upcoming medical experiment. As far as I can tell, this is the first written description of a paid research subject.


According to his account, the man (who he describes as “a little frantic”) was to be paid to undergo a blood transfusion from a sheep. It was hypothesized that the blood of this calm and docile animal would help to calm the man.

Some interesting things to note about this experiment:
  • Equipoise. There is explicit disagreement about what effect the experimental treatment will have: according to Pepys, "some think it may have a good effect upon him as a frantic man by cooling his blood, others that it will not have any effect at all".
  • Results published. An account of the experiment was published just two weeks later in the journal Philosophical Transactions
  • Medical Privacy. In this subsequent write-up, the research subject is identified as Arthur Coga, a former Cambridge divinity student. According to at least one account, being publicly identified had a bad effect on Coga, as people who had heard of him allegedly succeeded in getting him to spend his stipend on drink (though no sources are provided to confirm this story).
  • Patient Reported Outcome. Coga was apparently chosen because, although mentally ill, he was still considered educated enough to give an accurate description of the treatment effect. 
Depending on your perspective, this may also be a very early account of the placebo effect, or a classic case of ignoring the patient’s experience. Because even though his report was positive, the clinicians remained skeptical. From the journal article:
The Man after this operation, as well as in it, found himself very well, and hath given in his own Narrative under his own hand, enlarging more upon the benefit, he thinks, he hath received by it, than we think fit to own as yet.
…and in fact, a subsequent diary entry from Pepys mentions meeting Coga, with similarly mixed impressions: “he finds himself much better since, and as a new man, but he is cracked a little in his head”.

The amount Coga was paid for his participation? Twenty shillings – at the time, that was exactly one Guinea.

[Image credit: Wellcome Images]







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Is AI Search a Medical Misinformation Disaster?



Last month when Google introduced its new AI search tool, called AI Overviews, the company seemed confident that it had tested the tool sufficiently, noting in the announcement that “people have already used AI Overviews billions of times through our experiment in Search Labs.” The tool doesn’t just return links to Web pages, as in a typical Google search, but returns an answer that it has generated based on various sources, which it links to below the answer. But immediately after the launch users began posting examples of extremely wrong answers, including a pizza recipe that included glue and the interesting fact that a dog has played in the NBA.

Renée DiResta has been tracking online misinformation for many years as the technical research manager at Stanford’s Internet Observatory.

While the pizza recipe is unlikely to convince anyone to squeeze on the Elmer’s, not all of AI Overview’s extremely wrong answers are so obvious—and some have the potential to be quite harmful. Renée DiResta has been tracking online misinformation for many years as the technical research manager at Stanford’s Internet Observatory and has a new book out about the online propagandists who “turn lies into reality.” She has studied the spread of medical misinformation via social media, so IEEE Spectrum spoke to her about whether AI search is likely to bring an onslaught of erroneous medical advice to unwary users.

I know you’ve been tracking disinformation on the Web for many years. Do you expect the introduction of AI-augmented search tools like Google’s AI Overviews to make the situation worse or better?

Renée DiResta: It’s a really interesting question. There are a couple of policies that Google has had in place for a long time that appear to be in tension with what’s coming out of AI-generated search. That’s made me feel like part of this is Google trying to keep up with where the market has gone. There’s been an incredible acceleration in the release of generative AI tools, and we are seeing Big Tech incumbents trying to make sure that they stay competitive. I think that’s one of the things that’s happening here.

We have long known that hallucinations are a thing that happens with large language models. That’s not new. It’s the deployment of them in a search capacity that I think has been rushed and ill-considered because people expect search engines to give them authoritative information. That’s the expectation you have on search, whereas you might not have that expectation on social media.

There are plenty of examples of comically poor results from AI search, things like how many rocks we should eat per day [a response that was drawn for an Onion article]. But I’m wondering if we should be worried about more serious medical misinformation. I came across one blog post about Google’s AI Overviews responses about stem-cell treatments. The problem there seemed to be that the AI search tool was sourcing its answers from disreputable clinics that were offering unproven treatments. Have you seen other examples of that kind of thing?

DiResta: I have. It’s returning information synthesized from the data that it’s trained on. The problem is that it does not seem to be adhering to the same standards that have long gone into how Google thinks about returning search results for health information. So what I mean by that is Google has, for upwards of 10 years at this point, had a search policy called Your Money or Your Life. Are you familiar with that?

I don’t think so.

DiResta: Your Money or Your Life acknowledges that for queries related to finance and health, Google has a responsibility to hold search results to a very high standard of care, and it’s paramount to get the information correct. People are coming to Google with sensitive questions and they’re looking for information to make materially impactful decisions about their lives. They’re not there for entertainment when they’re asking a question about how to respond to a new cancer diagnosis, for example, or what sort of retirement plan they should be subscribing to. So you don’t want content farms and random Reddit posts and garbage to be the results that are returned. You want to have reputable search results.

That framework of Your Money or Your Life has informed Google’s work on these high-stakes topics for quite some time. And that’s why I think it’s disturbing for people to see the AI-generated search results regurgitating clearly wrong health information from low-quality sites that perhaps happened to be in the training data.

So it seems like AI overviews is not following that same policy—or that’s what it appears like from the outside?

DiResta: That’s how it appears from the outside. I don’t know how they’re thinking about it internally. But those screenshots you’re seeing—a lot of these instances are being traced back to an isolated social media post or a clinic that’s disreputable but exists—are out there on the Internet. It’s not simply making things up. But it’s also not returning what we would consider to be a high-quality result in formulating its response.

I saw that Google responded to some of the problems with a blog post saying that it is aware of these poor results and it’s trying to make improvements. And I can read you the one bullet point that addressed health. It said, “For topics like news and health, we already have strong guardrails in place. In the case of health, we launched additional triggering refinements to enhance our quality protections.” Do you know what that means?

DiResta: That blog posts is an explanation that [AI Overviews] isn’t simply hallucinating—the fact that it’s pointing to URLs is supposed to be a guardrail because that enables the user to go and follow the result to its source. This is a good thing. They should be including those sources for transparency and so that outsiders can review them. However, it is also a fair bit of onus to put on the audience, given the trust that Google has built up over time by returning high-quality results in its health information search rankings.

I know one topic that you’ve tracked over the years has been disinformation about vaccine safety. Have you seen any evidence of that kind of disinformation making its way into AI search?

DiResta: I haven’t, though I imagine outside research teams are now testing results to see what appears. Vaccines have been so much a focus of the conversation around health misinformation for quite some time, I imagine that Google has had people looking specifically at that topic in internal reviews, whereas some of these other topics might be less in the forefront of the minds of the quality teams that are tasked with checking if there are bad results being returned.

What do you think Google’s next moves should be to prevent medical misinformation in AI search?

DiResta: Google has a perfectly good policy to pursue. Your Money or Your Life is a solid ethical guideline to incorporate into this manifestation of the future of search. So it’s not that I think there’s a new and novel ethical grounding that needs to happen. I think it’s more ensuring that the ethical grounding that exists remains foundational to the new AI search tools.




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Researchers Explore How the Human Body Senses Temperature

As winter arrives and daylight hours decrease, it gets easier to hit the snooze button and stay in bed. It turns out that there’s a scientific reason behind this phenomenon that helps to explain why people struggle to adjust their internal clocks—also known as circadian rhythm or sleep-wake cycle—when the weather turns colder.




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Researcher Looks to Plants in Search for New Antibiotics

Dr. Cassandra Quave’s path to her work as a leader in antibiotic drug discovery research initiatives at Emory University in Atlanta started when she was a child and she and her family dealt with her own serious health issues that have had life-long repercussions.




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Fitting Multilevel Hierarchical Mixed Models Using PROC NLMIXED

This paper provides an example that shows you how to use multiple RANDOM statements in PROC NLMIXED to fit nested nonlinear mixed models, and it provides details about the computation that is involved in fitting these models.




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ISP Research Fellow Apekshya Prasai Selected as a 2023 HFG Emerging Scholar

Apekshya Prasai, a political science doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was recently named a 2023 Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Emerging Scholar.   The Emerging Scholars (nine in all) are doctoral candidates who are in the final year of writing dissertations on the nature of and responses to violence around the world.




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'China Marching with India': India's Cold War Advocacy for the People's Republic of China at the United Nations, 1949–1971

Recent scholarship on Sino-Indian relations in the 1950s has emphasized cooperation, revising previous narratives of an inexorable march towards the 1962 border war. This article reassesses that cooperation by focusing on India's role as an intermediary between the unrecognized government in Beijing and the United Nations (UN). Chinese sources reveal that Sino-Indian cooperation over UN affairs was complicated by competing conceptions of how the decolonizing world should fit into the international system and who should be at the helm. Despite such disagreements, the Cold War UN provided a setting where divergent post-colonial visions could be sublimated into meaningful international cooperation.




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Education, Research, and Innovation in Africa: Forging Strategic Linkages for Economic Transformation

Africa is a youthful continent: nearly 41% of its population is under the age of 18. To address the unique challenges of this demographic structure, the African Union (AU) hopes to reposition the continent as a strategic player in the global economy through improved education and application of science and technology in development. The paper proposes the creation of “Innovation Universities” that combine research, teaching, community service and commercialization in their missions and operations. They would depart from the common practice where teaching is carried out in universities that do little research, and where research is done in national research institutes that do not undertake teaching. Under this model, there is little connection with productive sectors. The idea therefore is not just to create linkages between those activities but to pursue them in a coordinated way under the same university structure. Innovation universities can be created in diverse fields such as agriculture, health, industry, services, and environment to advance sustainable development and inclusive growth.




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How Technoscientific Knowledge Advances: A Bell-Labs-Inspired Architecture

Authors Narayanamurti and Tsao propose a new architecture for how technoscientific knowledge advances, which maps to the actual operational practice of research and development nurtured at the iconic Bell Labs.




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Database on U.S. Department of Energy Budgets for Energy Research, Development, and Demonstration (1978–2025R)

The July 2024 update to our database on the U.S. government investments in energy research, development, demonstration, and deployment (ERD3) through the U.S. Department of Energy.




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Setting a Course for Arctic Research: Arctic Initiative at Arctic Science Summit Week 2024

The Arctic Initiative team helped kick off discussions for the International Conference on Arctic Research Planning Process 2022-2026 (ICARP IV) research priority teams at the Arctic Science Summit Week (ASSW) 2024 in Edinburgh, Scotland. 




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Not So Innocent: Clerics, Monarchs, and the Ethnoreligious Cleansing of Western Europe

Ethnic cleansing is not only a modern phenomenon. The medieval Catholic Church saw non-Christians as a threat and facilitated the ethnoreligious cleansing of Muslim and Jewish communities across Western Europe. Three conditions made this possible: The rising power of the papacy as a supranational religious authority; its dehumanization of non-Christians; and competition among Catholic Western European monarchs that left them vulnerable to papal-clerical demands to eradicate non-Christians. These findings revise our understanding twentieth- and twenty-first-century ethnic cleansing in places like Cambodia, Iraq, Myanmar, the Soviet Union, and Syria.





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Nexity conjoncture logement - 9m 2014: Un march� fragile soutenu par les ventes en bloc - NEXITY CONJONCTURE LOGEMENT - DATA MARCHE ET CHIFFRES NEXITY

NEXITY CONJONCTURE LOGEMENT - DATA MARCHE ET CHIFFRES NEXITY





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Conjoncture logement au 1er semestre 2015 : un march� soutenu par l'investissement locatif des particuliers, un march� qui repart ? - Les tendances du march� neuf

Les tendances du march� neuf




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LG Gives Team Uniform Colors A New Purpose, Enlists Color Commentator Jay Bilas To Help NCAA March Madness Fans 'Do Game Day Right' - Jay Bilas shares his tips on how to do game day right.

ESPN College Basketball Analyst and LG Color Commentator Jay Bilas shares his tips on how to do game day right.




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Changing the Research Paradigm with a Patient-Powered Network - CCFA Partners: A patient-powered research network

CCFA Partners is an innovative network where patients and researchers work together. Become a part of groundbreaking research: www.ccfapartners.org.






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L'Oreal Paris and Melanoma Research Alliance (MRA) Unveil It's THAT Worth It To Me, a Public Health Campaign and Social Media Call-to-Action that Drives Melanoma Awareness, Raises Funding for Research and Encourages Sun Protection and Sunless Tann

Eva Longoria :30 English




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#pass4prostate Challenge Raises Prostate Cancer Awareness and Research Funds - Nick Cummins promotes #pass4prostate

Qantas Wallabies player Nick Cummins promotes the #pass4prostate challenge and USA vs. Australia match coming up on Sept. 5 in Chicago. #pass4prostate and the match are presented by Astellas Pharma




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American Association for Cancer Research National Survey Shows 74 Percent of Voters Want More Federal Funding for Cancer Research - AACR Survey and Cancer Progress Report 2015 Video

AACR Survey and Cancer Progress Report 2015 Video








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March Of Dimes Premature Birth Report Card Grades Cities, Counties; Focuses On Racial And Ethnic Disparities - Photographer Anne Geddes

March of Dimes volunteer ambassador and world famous photographer Anne Geddes is featured in a PSA to raise awareness about preventing preterm birth and give more babies a healthy start in life.