The authors analyze political endorsement patterns and impacts from the 2018 and 2020 midterm elections and find that such endorsements may be predictable based on the ideological and demographic factors of the endorser.

To explore the parent-child relationship during college planning, authors surveyed high school juniors from two private schools (boarding school vs. non-boarding parochial school). After coding, survey answers indicate students at boarding schools were found to have greater fear of parental control and disappointment, while students at non-boarding parochial schoolexpressed a greater need for parental assistance.

Here the authors investigated the motivation of a short squeeze of GameStop stock where users of the internet forum Reddit drove a sudden increase in GameStop stock price during the start of 2021. They relied on both qualitative and quantitative analyses where they tracked activity on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit in relation to mentions of GameStop. With these methods they found that while initially the short squeeze was driven by financial motivations, later on emotional motivations became more important. They suggest that social phenomena can be dynamic and evolve necessitating mixed method approaches to study them.

Crumpling is the process whereby a sheet of paper undergoes deformation to yield a three-dimensional structure comprising a random network of ridges and facets with variable density. The authors hypothesized that the more times a paper sheet is crumpled, the greater its compressive strength. Their results show a relatively strong linear relationship between the number of times a paper sheet is crumpled and its compressive strength.

Medicinal plants could be a good source of medication to combat antibiotic resistance. Dombeya wallichii, which is commonly called Pink Ball Tree in the family Sterculiaceae, has been documented to have medicinal potential. We observed the highest antibacterial activity in the stem extracts, followed by leaf and bark extracts. The extracts were more effective against tested Gram-positive bacteria when compared with Gram-negative strains.

Fat can be chemically altered during cooking through a process called lipid oxidation, which can have a negative impact on health. In this study, the authors measured the extracted fat in raw, fried and hard-boiled eggs and found that cooking eggs to a higher temperature resulted in a lower amount of extracted fat, indicating a greater amount of oxidized fat.

Wang and Gong developed a novel dynamic gene-searching algorithm called Dynamic Gene Search (DyGS) to create a gene panel for each of the 12 cancers with the highest annual incidence and death rate. The 12 gene panels the DyGS algorithm selected used only 3.5% of the original gene mutation pool, while covering every patient sample. About 40% of each gene panel is druggable, which indicates that the DyGS-generated gene panels can be used for early cancer detection as well as therapeutic targets in treatment methods.

The current five-year survival rate of metastasized prostate cancer is only 30% and occurs in every one in nine men. Researchers have shown that people with a type of dwarfism called Laron’s Syndrome are immune to cancer due to their low levels of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1). For this reason, experimentally modifying the level of IGF-1 could provide better insight into whether lowering the levels of IGF-1 in prostate cancer cell lines (e.g. PC-3) could be an effective treatment to reduce their rates of proliferation and migration and increase apoptosis. We selected three compounds, which researchers have shown decrease IGF-1 levels, to test and combine to determine which is the most promising.

The consumption of sugar substitute non-nutritive sweeteners (NNS) has dramatically increased in recent years. Despite being advertised as a healthy alternative, NNS have been linked to adverse effects on the body, such as neurodegenerative diseases (NDs). In NDs, neural stem cell function is impaired, which inhibits neuron regeneration. The purpose of this study was to determine if the NNS acesulfame potassium (Ace-K) and neotame affect planaria neuron regeneration rates. Since human neurons may regenerate, planaria, organisms with extensive regenerative capabilities due to stem cells called neoblasts, were used as the model organism. The heads of planaria exposed to either a control or non-toxic concentrations of NNS were amputated. The posterior regions of the planaria were observed every 24 hours to see the following regeneration stages: (1) wound healing, (2) blastema development, (3) growth, and (4) differentiation. The authors hypothesized that exposure to the NNS would slow planaria regeneration rates. The time it took for the planaria in the Ace-K group and the neotame group to reach the second, third, and fourth regeneration stage was significantly greater than that of the control. The results of this study indicated that exposure to the NNS significantly slowed regeneration rates in planaria. This suggests that the NNS may adversely impact neoblast proliferation rates in planaria, implying that it could impair neural stem cell proliferation in humans, which plays a role in NDs. This study may provide insight into the connection between NNS, human neuron regeneration, and NDs.

In this article, the authors use datasets of professional and youth soccer players' movements to map and statistically compare them. Analysis compared movements that led to goals or no-goals and differences between pros and youth.