PLOS ONE News and Media Roundup
Last month, the media covered PLOS ONE papers on germs in airports, skin cancer in fish, a potentially life extending pill, and more!
Research by a team at MIT identified New York City’s JFK, Los Angeles’s LAX and Honolulu’s HNL as the nation’s airports most likely to influence the spread of a major pandemic in the first few days of an emerging disease. The team used geographical information, traffic structure and individual mobility patterns to model contagious disease dynamics through the air transportation network. The study was covered by NPR, CNN, and Wired.
A recent study comparing a hunter-gatherer population with a modern Western population found that daily energy expenditure between the two populations is not all that different; challenging the view that obesity in Western society is largely due to a lack of exercise. This research may encourage shifting the focus of this debate to the importance of calorie consumption and was covered by The Atlantic, Mother Nature Network and the BBC.
Dark patches found on fish in the Great Barrier Reef have been identified as a deadly form of skin cancer, melanoma. “Evidence of Melanoma in Wild Marine Fish Populations” is the first published study of melanoma in a wild fish population but it is unlikely the problem is new. The Great Barrier Reef sits under the largest hole in the ozone, exposing fish populations there to high levels of UV radiation. The image above is Figure 1 of the manuscript. The study was covered by Science, LA Times and Scientific American.
Autistic children may benefit from getting a pet. According to this study by a French research team, children who received a pet around the age of five showed improved social skills, including increased ability to share with and comfort others, compared to autistic children who either grew up with a pet or never had one. US News, Fox and Time all covered this study.
Findings from the study “Randomized Polypill Crossover Trial in People Aged 50 and Over” suggest that people over fifty may benefit from taking a once daily “polypill” comprised of three blood pressure-lowering drugs and a cholesterol-lowering statin. Read more at CBS, Reuters and ABC.
For more in-depth coverage on news and blog articles about PLOS ONE papers, please visit our Media Tracking Project.