Does a brief exposure to literary fiction improve social ability? Assessing the evidential value of published studies with a p-curve.

Humans have long suspected that stories can help us better understand others, and, indeed, lifelong exposure to narrative fiction does predict better social cognition. Several experiments have attempted to investigate the causal direction of this relationship to see if random assignment to a brief narrative directly improves social cognition. Although these experiments have yielded mixed results, a recent meta-analysis did find a small causal effect of narrative fiction on social cognition.

The representation of authors of color in schizophrenia research articles published in high-impact psychiatric journals.

Objective: We evaluate how often scholars of color publish papers on schizophrenia in high-impact psychiatric journals, and whether they are more likely than white authors to prioritize race/ethnicity as a primary variable of interest in analyses.

Methods: Prior work categorized the types of ethnoracial analyses reported in 474 papers about schizophrenia published in high-impact psychiatric journals between 2014 and 2016. In this study, the photographs of the first and last author for each paper were coded as "person of color" (POC) or "white".

A Markov chain-based model for structural vulnerability assessmentof corrosion-damaged reinforced concrete bridges.

The deterioration and cracking of reinforced concrete (RC) bridges due to the chloride-induced corrosion of steel reinforcement is an inherently time-dependent stochastic phenomenon. In the current practice of bridge management systems, however, the determination of the condition states of deteriorated bridges is highly dependent on the opinion of experienced inspectors. Taking such complexity into account, the current paper presents a new stochastic predictive methodology using a non-homogeneous Markov process, which directly relates the visual inspection data (corrosion rate and crack widths) to the structural vulnerability of deteriorated concrete bridges.

From clocks to dominoes: lessons on cell cycle remodelling from embryonic stem cells.

Cell division is a fundamental cellular process and the evolutionarily conserved networks that control cell division cycles adapt during development, tissue regeneration, cell de-differentiation and reprogramming, and a variety of pathological conditions. Embryonic development is a prime example of such versatility: fast, clock-like divisions hallmarking embryonic cells at early developmental stages become slower and controlled during cellular differentiation and lineage specification. In this review, we compare and contrast the unique cell cycle of mouse and human embryonic stem cells with that of early embryonic cells and of differentiated cells.

Engagement: what is it good for? The role of learner engagement in healthcare simulation contexts.

Learner engagement matters, particularly in simulation-based education. Indeed, it has been argued that instructional design only matters in the service of engaging learners in a simulation encounter. Yet despite its purported importance, our understanding of what engagement is, how to define it, how to measure it, and how to assess it is limited.