The WHO Disease Outbreak News during the Covid-19 pandemic.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) was an important public source of information - not only about the pandemic, but also thousands of other potential health emergencies. Here, we examine the 242 reports published in the WHO Disease Outbreak News (DON) during the first four years of the Covid-19 pandemic (2020 to 2023), and document the diseases and regions that were reported. We find that multinational epidemics of diseases like Ebola virus and MERS-CoV continue to dominate the DON.

Semblans: automated assembly and processing of RNA-seq data.

Motivation: Recent advancements in parallel sequencing methods have precipitated a surge in publicly available short-read sequence data. This has encouraged the development of novel computational tools for the de novo assembly of transcriptomes from RNA-seq data. Despite the availability of these tools, performing an end-to-end transcriptome assembly remains a programmatically involved task necessitating familiarity with best practices.

The inductive effect does not explain electron density in haloacetates: are our textbooks wrong?

The inductive effect is a central concept in chemistry and is often exemplified by the p values of acetic acid derivatives. The reduction in p is canonically attributed to the reduction in the electron density of the carboxylate group through the inductive effect. However, wave functional theory calculations presented herein reveal that the charge density of the carboxylate group is not explained by the inductive effect.

Early alterations of functional connectivity, regional brain volumes and astrocyte markers in the beta-sitosterol beta-d-glucoside (BSSG) rat model of parkinsonism.

The β-sitosterol-β-ᴅ-glucoside (BSSG) rat model of experimental parkinsonism develops pathological behaviour and motor changes that progress over time. The purpose of this study was to identify early changes in structure and function of the brain of rats treated with BSSG using both structural and resting-state functional MRI. BSSG and non-BSSG rats were fed five days a week for sixteen weeks, then underwent in vivo MRI scans and an assessment of motor performance 2 and 8 weeks later (18 and week 24 from BSSG).