Browse Articles

Evaluating cinnamaldehyde as an antibacterial agent in a produce wash for leafy greens

Drennan et al. | Oct 28, 2021

Evaluating cinnamaldehyde as an antibacterial agent in a produce wash for leafy greens

Recognizing a growing demand for organic produce, the authors sought to investigate plant-based antibiotic solutions to meet growing consumer demand for safe produce and also meet microbial standards of the USDA. The authors investigated the use of cinnamaldehyde as an antibacterial again E. coli, finding that lettuce treated with cinnamaldehyde displayed significantly lower colony-forming units of E. coli when compared to lettuce treated with chlorine bleach.

Read More...

DyGS: A Dynamic Gene Searching Algorithm for Cancer Detection

Wang et al. | Jun 05, 2018

DyGS: A Dynamic Gene Searching Algorithm for Cancer Detection

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.

Read More...

Innovative fake health news detection: Integrating emotional features into graph neural networks

Wang et al. | Jul 03, 2026

Innovative fake health news detection: Integrating emotional features into graph neural networks
Image credit: Wang and Wang

This manuscript tackles a major social issue in the health news sector, with social media being one of the primary sources of information and a prime spot to propagate fake news. The author proposes X-HND , which is a unique architecture that combines emotional and contextual analysis in a Graph Neural Network to accurately detect fake news. This was a multi-step process which involved the creation of a custom health news dataset (HNDataset), and an emotional variant that uses RoBERTa to extract emotion. These dataset were then used to prove the hypothesis that accuracy increases when the custom dataset is used to train the model and that with the integration of emotion capture, the detection accuracy increases further.

Read More...

Mitigating skin color bias in dermatology AI using CycleGAN-based data augmentation

Kannan et al. | Jun 24, 2026

Mitigating skin color bias in dermatology AI using CycleGAN-based data augmentation
Image credit: Kannan and Ramasamy

This study investigates skin tone bias in artificial intelligence models used for dermatological disease classification and evaluates a CycleGAN-based data augmentation approach to improve diagnostic performance on darker skin types. We generated synthetic dark-skinned images to enhance dataset diversity and compared model performance before and after augmentation. The results demonstrate that augmentation with synthetic dermatological images can help reduce disparities in diagnostic performance across skin tones, highlighting a practical strategy for improving fairness in dermatology AI systems.

Read More...

The growth of bacteria on everyday objects and the antimicrobial effects of household spices

Daehan Yi et al. | Apr 29, 2026

The growth of bacteria on everyday objects and the antimicrobial effects of household spices
Image credit: Daehan Yi, Boughaleb Hassani and Ribeiro

The study investigates the antibacterial properties of household spices on bacteria isolated from everyday objects, aiming to address the limited understanding of bacterial resilience on surfaces and the potential of spices as antibacterial agents. Researchers hypothesized that bacteria would grow faster on some surfaces than others and that spices like honey, chili powder, turmeric, and sumac would inhibit bacterial growth at varying rates. The findings suggest that household spices possess significant antibacterial properties and could be used as emergency disinfectants, particularly in under-resourced settings. However, they cannot replace medical treatments but offer insights into alternative health solutions using common ingredients.

Read More...