Transmitted

Empathy is the sensing of another's emotions and ability to imagine how they are feeling, a quality that seems in pretty short supply in large parts of today's world.The good news is, we might be able to spread empathy and compassion through social interaction. That's the conclusion of a new study from an international team of researchers which conducted four separate experiments designed to measure shifts in empathy based on the actions of more than 50 volunteers.Assessments of the participants showed empathy levels…

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If 2022 was the year mpox infections exploded globally, 2023 was the year much of the world stopped paying attention.Yet Canadian researchers, in collaboration with scientists working on the ground in hot spots such as Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), are still shining a spotlight on the virus that sparked last year's unprecedented global outbreak — and one that still seems capable of new surprises. One joint Canadian-DRC research team, co-led by Jason Kindrachuk from the University of Manitoba, has…

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs), such as chlamydia, syphilis, and gonorrhea, are increasing across the nation, particularly affecting men who have sex with men and transgender women. Recent studies suggest that post-exposure prophylaxis with doxycycline (doxy-PEP) could reduce the risk of these STIs in these high-risk groups.A study by scientists at UCSF and the <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>University of…

Medicine may be about to achieve a long-sought goal: a “morning-after pill” to prevent sexually transmitted infections. It could sharply reduce soaring rates of illness and huge health care costs.The effectiveness of this pill—and it literally is a pill, a 200-milligram tablet of the antibiotic doxycycline—has been studied for a decade, and people have taken it covertly for years. But study results published in The New England Journal of Medicine look likely to tip the pill into clinical practice. In the study, conducted…

Years after it was first proven to work, a new tool for preventing sexually transmitted infections (STIs) is on the brink of entering mainstream medicine. That tool is doxyPEP, an antibiotic that works like a morning-after pill — but instead of preventing pregnancy within hours of unprotected sex, it prevents STIs like chlamydia and syphilis. Ever since a 30-person trial first suggested hope for the strategy in 2015, people worldwide have begun trying doxyPEP for themselves, often without the approval or…

Scientists continue to blow through data transmission records, with the fastest transmission of information between a laser and a single optical chip system now set at 1.8 petabits per second. That's well in excess of the amount of traffic passing across the entire internet each second.Here's another comparison: the average broadband download speed in the US is 167 megabits per second. You need 1,000 megabits to get to a gigabit, and then 1 million gigabits to get up to 1 petabit.No matter how you present it, 1.8…

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We could one day charge our phones and tablets wirelessly through the air, thanks to newly developed technology.Researchers have used infrared laser light to transmit 400mW of light power over distances of up to 30 meters (98 feet). That's enough juice to charge small sensors, though in time it could be developed to charge up larger devices such as smartphones too.All this is done in a way which is perfectly safe – the laser falls back to a low power mode when not in use.The technical term for it is distributed laser…

As data come in from around the world, a clear picture is emerging of who is being affected by the recent outbreak of monkeypox (MPX): Outside Africa, 99 percent of the cases have been in men, and 92 to 98  percent have been in self-identified men who have sex with men. Also, many of the cases in the Europe Union, the U.S. and the U.K. have been in men who are living with HIV. In the U.S., MPX is overwhelmingly affecting Black and Latino men who have sex with men. If this dynamic is not corrected, this racial disparity…