Just being exposed to new things makes people ‘ready to learn’
Peer-Reviewed Publication
A new study is one of the first to provide experimental evidence that people learn from incidental exposure to things that they know nothing about and aren’t even trying to understand.
A team of researchers from SWOG Cancer Research Network, a cancer clinical trials group funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), have shown that they can use methylation patterns in cell-free DNA (cfDNA) extracted from blood samples to predict which patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer are likely to benefit from chemotherapy before their surgery. In the future, such a biomarker from a blood sample, or “liquid biopsy,” might save some patients from having to undergo a difficult chemotherapy regimen that would provide them little benefit.
A high rate of response to neoadjuvant immunotherapy in patients with desmoplastic melanoma suggests such therapy could reduce the extent of surgery needed on the face and neck, which can often be disfiguring.
Adding standing physician orders to electronic record systems did not improve adherence to guidelines for prophylactic prescribing of colony-stimulating factors for febrile neutropenia and did not lower the rate of the chemotherapy side effect.
Northwestern University engineers have taken their transient pacemaker and integrated it into a coordinated network of four soft, flexible, wireless wearable sensors and control units placed on different anatomically relevant locations on the body. The sensors communicate with each other to continuously monitor the body’s various physiological functions, including body temperature, oxygen levels, respiration, muscle tone, physical activity and the heart’s electrical activity. The system then uses algorithms to analyze this combined activity in order to autonomously detect abnormal cardiac rhythms and decide when to pace the heart and at what rate.