Strike a chord: How observed ostracism and perceived similarity affect observers' willingness to socialize.

Research has shown that ostracism negatively affects the social willingness of those who are ostracized, but the impact of observers, who play an important role in ostracism situations, has been less studied. Three studies examined whether observed ostracism affects observers' willingness to socialize and the underlying mechanism. The results showed that (1) observed ostracism decreased observers' willingness to socialize; (2) perceived future rejection mediated the relationship between observed ostracism and observers' willingness to socialize; and (3) perceived similarity had a moderating effect on the mediation model.

Identification of circulating metabolites associated with wooden breast and white striping.

Current diagnostic methods for wooden breast and white striping, common breast muscle myopathies of modern commercial broiler chickens, rely on subjective examinations of the pectoralis major muscle, time-consuming microscopy, or expensive imaging technologies. Further research on these disorders would benefit from more quantitative and objective measures of disease severity that can be used in live birds. To this end, we utilized untargeted metabolomics alongside two statistical approaches to evaluate plasma metabolites associated with wooden breast and white striping in 250 male commercial broiler chickens.

Dynamic estimation of epidemiological parameters of COVID-19 outbreak and effects of interventions on its spread.

Background: A key challenge in estimating epidemiological parameters for a pandemic such as the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan is the discrepancy between the officially reported number of infections and the true number of infections. A common approach to tackling the challenge is to use the number of infections exported from the originating city to infer the true number. This approach can only provide a static estimate of the epidemiological parameters before city lockdown because there are almost no exported cases thereafter.