A few weeks ago we reported on the challenges facing rural hospitals during the Covid-19 pandemic. But a new study in the journal JAMA Network Open finds that patients showing up at rural hospital ERs have extremely similar outcomes compared to patients in urban-area ERs. The condition bringing the patient in also didn’t matter—a whole variety of conditions, including stroke and heart attacks, reported similar outcomes in rural and urban area hospitals. Researchers admit the results surprised them.
Why don’t more girls go into computer science and engineering? In part because little kids think girls don’t like those subjects. A group of four studies in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that children as young as six think fairly conclusively that girls are less interested than boys in STEM fields. So by the time they get to high school, girls don’t think they belong. Only about 25% of computer scientists and 15% of engineers are women.
Researchers have known for months that depression is way up since the start of the pandemic… and a new study in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry finds that sitting around more is a big reason. Among people who met federal physical activity guidelines before the pandemic, stay-at-home orders cut activity by a third. Almost all those people felt more anxious, depressed, and lonely… but researchers say those who couldn’t get moving again within a few weeks were likely to feel worse.
And finally… if you ask Alexa or Siri for health information, you may come up short. A study in the journal Annals of Family Medicine finds that voice assistants are often unable to provide any verbal answer at all for health questions, while others offer unreliable sources or inaccurate answers. Google says that about one search in 20 is related to health.
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