This blog was written by BMC-series Editor Ben Ragen and was originally posted on BioMed Central blog. The Stonewall Riots occurred on June 28, 1969. It was this summer evening that sparked the Gay Rights Movement. Now, forty-eight years later, the world celebrates Pride Month every June to celebrate, honor, support, and fight for the… Read more »
Can we tell if a person is physically ill by the way they tweet? On a recently published article in the journal EPJ Data Science, researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory uncover links between the health of users and the emotional tone of their social media output.
It’s a widely held view that adolescents spend far too much time communicating with peers on their smartphones. However, new research published in Large-Scale Assessments in Education could help ease parents’ concerns as it finds a strong positive relationship between students’ computer and information literacy proficiency levels and the frequency of their use of electronic devices for social communication.
The way we live in cities—where we go or shop—can have deep effects on the dynamics and wealth of different communities. In this guest post, Thomas Louail and Maxime Lenormand explain how they analyzed credit card transactions data to explore the flow of money in urban areas, discussing the ways in which this tool can help spread wealth more evenly among neighborhoods.
A new research article by Prof. I-Son Ng’s group in National Cheng Kung University and published in Bioresources and Bioprocessing finds Multicopper oxidase enzyme has exciting potential in gold absorption.
5Every day we are faced with a deluge of information, and not all of it is mirrored in reality. How do we decide to accept something as the truth? In Applied Network Science, Giuseppe Primiero and colleagues tackle the dissemination of contradictory information.
Behavioral interventions are often complex, resource intensive and extend beyond healthcare settings. Combined with the lack a market driven, regulatory structure of medical interventions; behavioural interventions often fail to be adopted. Facilitating the adoption of these interventions is now the priority of the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR). Here to discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with this priority is William T. Riley, author of a commentary on this topic published in Translational Behavioral Medicine.
EPJ Data Science welcomes submissions to a new thematic series on Individual and Collective Human Mobility: Description, Modelling, Prediction. The team of guest editors behind the series talk about their vision and motivation to gather experts from different fields in the effort to better understand human behaviour. The deadline for submissions is 31 December 2017.
1In an era of fleeting but constant contact with extended online communities, it is common to find yourself wondering: are your friends happier/more popular than you? To put these feelings to the test, scientists have sifted through the timelines of thousands of Twitter users, to understand the ways in which social networks affect how we feel and relate to one another.
The vast digital resources, or “big data”, associated with natural history collections provide invaluable but underutilized opportunities to prepare students to explore, understand, and resolve challenges such as global climate change. A new paper published in Evolution: Education and Outreach describes an online, open-access educational module that harnesses the power of collections-based information to introduce students to climate change, evolutionary, and ecological biology research.
