- Friendly’s, Hershey’s ice cream products among various brands recalled over bacterial contamination concerns
- ‘This disorder has almost killed me’: His addiction to ultraprocessed food began as a child
- The rise of the AI beauty pageant and its complicated quest for the ‘perfect’ woman
- Ancient bone could reveal how Neanderthals cared for a child with Down syndrome
- The science of protests: how to shape public opinion and swing votes
- Estonians gave their DNA to science — now they’re learning their genetic secrets
KMU Weekly: News around the World
Issue 127 - Jul. 01. 2024
Friendly’s, Hershey’s ice cream products among various brands recalled over bacterial contamination concerns
因細菌污染問題，Friendly's、Hershey's等多個品牌的冰淇淋產品被召回
Health
Totally Cool, Inc recalled ice cream products from over a dozen brands distributed through retail stores and home delivery nationwide, according to a recall notice posted on the US Food and Drug Administration’s website. The Maryland-based company halted ice cream production and distribution and recalled the products after FDA sampling revealed potential traces of Listeria monocytogenes. There are no reports of illnesses so far, the company said. Listeria monocytogenes is a bacterium that can cause listeriosis, the third leading cause of death from foodborne illness in the United States, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Listeria can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in pregnant women, children, the elderly, and immunocompromised individuals, while healthy people may experience short-term symptoms like high fever, severe headache, stiffness, nausea, abdominal pain, and diarrhea, according to the recall notice.
---from CNN
根據美國食品藥物管理局網站上發布的召回通知，Totally Cool, Inc 召回了透過全國零售店和送貨上門分銷的十多個品牌的冰淇淋產品。 這家總部位於馬裡蘭州的公司在 FDA 抽樣發現潛在的Listeria monocytogenes後，停止了冰淇淋的生產和分銷並召回了產品。 該公司表示，到目前為止還沒有任何疾病報告。 根據美國疾病管制與預防中心的數據，Listeria monocytogenes是一種可引起李斯特菌症的細菌，李斯特菌病是美國食源性疾病死亡的第三大原因。 據FDA召回通知內容，李斯特菌可能對孕婦、兒童、老年人和免疫功能低下的人造成嚴重甚至致命的感染，而健康人可能會出現高燒、嚴重頭痛、僵硬、噁心、腹痛和腹瀉等短期症狀。
---摘錄翻譯自CNN
‘This disorder has almost killed me’: His addiction to ultraprocessed food began as a child
「這種疾病幾乎要了我的命」：他對超加工食品的癮從小時候就開始了
Health
Chicago native Jeffrey Odwazny says he has been addicted to ultraprocessed food since he was a child. “I was driven to eat and eat and eat, and while I would overeat healthy food, what really got me were the candies, the cakes, the pies, the ice cream,” said the 54-year-old former warehouse supervisor. “I really gravitated towards the sugary ultraprocessed foods — it was like a physical drive, I had to have it,” he said. “My parents would find hefty bags full of candy wrappers hidden in my closet. I would steal things from stores as a kid and later as an adult.” Some 12% of the nearly 73 million children and adolescents in the United States today struggle with a similar food addiction, according to research. To be diagnosed, children must meet Yale Food Addiction Scale criteria as stringent as any for alcohol use disorder or other addictions. “Kids are losing control and eating to the point where they feel physically ill,” said Ashley Gearhardt, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who conducted the research and developed the Yale addiction scale. “They have intense cravings and may be sneaking, stealing or hiding ultraprocessed foods,” Gearhardt said. “They may stop going out with friends or doing other activities they used to enjoy in order to stay at home and eat, or they feel too sluggish from overeating to participate in other activities.”
----from CNN
芝加哥人 Jeffrey Odwazny 表示，他從小就對超加工食品上癮。 這位 54 歲的前倉庫主管說：“我被迫吃啊吃啊，雖然我會吃得太多健康食品，但真正吸引我的是糖果、蛋糕、餡餅、冰淇淋。” 「我真的很喜歡含糖的超加工食品——這就像一種身體驅動力，我必須擁有它，」他說。 「我的父母會在我的衣櫃裡發現裝滿糖果包裝紙的大袋子。我小時候會從商店偷東西，成人後也是這樣做。 研究表明，當今美國近 7,300 萬名兒童和青少年中，約有 12% 患有類似的食物成癮。要獲得診斷，兒童必須符合耶魯大學食物成癮量表標準，其標準與酒精使用障礙或其他成癮的標準一樣嚴格。 安娜堡密西根大學心理學教授 Ashley Gearhardt 表示：「孩子們正在失去控制，吃得越來越多，以至於他們感到身體不適。」他進行了這項研究並製定了耶魯大學成癮量表。 Gearhardt說：“他們有強烈的渴望，可能會偷偷地偷竊或隱藏超加工食品。” “他們可能會停止與朋友外出或進行其他他們以前喜歡的活動，而是留在家裡和進食，或者他們因暴飲暴食而感覺太遲鈍，無法參加其他活動。”
---摘錄翻譯自CNN
The rise of the AI beauty pageant and its complicated quest for the ‘perfect’ woman
人工智慧選美的興起及其對「完美」女性的複雜追求
Culture
Ten women participating in a beauty pageant is nothing new. Some pose candidly, some play to the camera, their beauty forever frozen in this moment in time. Like many other pageants held in countries around the world, the contestants are young, thin and embody many of the standards defining traditional “beauty.” But that is where the similarities to a traditional beauty pageant end. None of these women are real — everything about them, even the emotion that flickers across their faces, is generated by artificial intelligence (AI), for the world’s first ever AI beauty pageant. Each has a creator or team of creators, who use programmes like Open AI’s DALL·E 3, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion to generate images of the women from text prompts. These 10 contestants have been selected from a pool of more than 1,500 entrants to make the final of “Miss AI,” scheduled to be held at the end of June and broadcast online by its organizers “The World AI Creator Awards.” For those involved, the event is an opportunity to showcase and demystify the technology’s extraordinary abilities. But for others, it represents a further proliferation of unrealistic beauty standards often linked to racial and gender stereotypes and fueled by the ever-increasing number of digitally enhanced images online. “I think we’re starting to increasingly lose touch with what an unedited face looks like,” Dr Kerry McInerney, a research associate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, told CNN in a video interview.
---from CNN
十名女性參加選美比賽並不是什麼新鮮事。有的擺姿勢，有的對著鏡頭嬉戲，她們的美麗永遠定格在這一刻。與世界各國舉辦的許多其他選美比賽一樣，參賽者年輕、瘦弱，體現了許多定義傳統「美」的標準。 但這就是與傳統選美比賽的相似之處。這些女性中沒有一個是真實的——她們的一切，甚至她們臉上閃過的情感，都是由人工智慧 (AI) 生成的，這是世界上首次人工智慧選美比賽的結果。每個都有一個創作者或創作者團隊，他們使用 Open AI 的 DALL·E 3、Midjourney 或 Stable Diffusion 等程式根據文字提示生成女性圖像。 這 10 名選手是從 1,500 多名參賽者中選出的，將進入「人工智慧小姐」決賽，決賽定於 6 月底舉行，並由主辦方「世界人工智慧創造者獎」在線直播。 對於參與者來說，這次活動是一個展示和揭開該技術非凡能力的機會。但對其他人來說，它代表了不切實際的美容標準的進一步擴散，這些標準通常與種族和性別刻板印象有關，並受到網路上數位增強圖像數量不斷增加的推動。 劍橋大學萊弗休姆未來智慧中心研究員Kerry McInerney博士在接受 CNN 視訊採訪時表示：“我認為我們開始越來越不了解未經編輯的面孔是什麼樣子。”
---摘錄翻譯自CNN
Ancient bone could reveal how Neanderthals cared for a child with Down syndrome
古代骨頭可以揭示尼安德特人如何照顧患有唐氏症的孩子
Culture
People with Down syndrome can lead a long life today, but it was surprising the child lived beyond the age of 6, Conde-Valverde said. Life in the Stone Age would have been demanding. The study noted that Neanderthals were highly mobile, regularly moving from place to place. The care required for the child to survive for an extended period of time likely involved the mother’s reliance on the cooperation and support of other members of the group. Even in the recent the past, it was common for people with Down syndrome to die in childhood. According to the study, life expectancy in 1929 for children with Down syndrome, a condition caused by an extra partial or full chromosome, was 9 years. By the 1940s, the expected lifespan had increased to 12 years. Today, about 1 in 772 babies in the United States are born with Down syndrome, and life expectancy now exceeds 60 years, according to the National Down Syndrome Society in the United States. The oldest known case of Down syndrome in Homo sapiens, our own species, dates back at least 5,300 years. Using ancient DNA, the authors of a study published in February identified six cases in prehistoric populations. None of the children lived longer than 16 months.
---from CNN
Conde-Valverde 說，患有唐氏症的人時至今日可以活得很長壽，但令人驚訝的是這個孩子竟然活到了 6 歲以上。 石器時代的生活要求很高。研究指出，尼安德塔人的流動性很強，經常從一個地方遷移到另一個地方。孩子長時間生存所需的照顧可能涉及母親對團體其他成員的合作和支持的依賴。 即使在最近的過去，患有唐氏症的人在童年時期死亡也很常見。根據這項研究，1929 年患有唐氏症（一種由額外的部分或完整染色體引起的疾病）兒童的預期壽命為 9 歲。到了 20 世紀 40 年代，預期壽命增加到 12 年。 據美國國家唐氏症協會稱，如今，美國大約每 772 名嬰兒中就有 1 名出生時患有唐氏症，預期壽命現已超過 60 歲。 已知最古老的智人唐氏症病例可以追溯到至少 5,300 年前。在二月發表的一項研究的作者利用古代 DNA，在史前人群中發現了 6 個病例。沒有一個孩子的壽命超過 16 個月。
---摘錄翻譯自CNN
The science of protests: how to shape public opinion and swing votes
抗議的科學：如何塑造公眾輿論與搖擺選票
Sciences
Protests are erupting around the globe. Thousands have broken out since October over the Israel–Hamas conflict. Farmers massed this year in Germany, Belgium, India and many other countries in clashes over new rules. And demonstrators last month set fire to the trademark Olympic rings in Paris to protest against the games being held there this summer, as part of a bid for higher wages. Researchers say that these events are part of a broader trend. The number of protests each year more than tripled between 2006 and 2020 according to one global study, thanks to demonstrations about political regimes, injustice, inequality, climate change and more (see ‘Protests on the rise’). “That increase in activism has eclipsed even the turbulent 1960s,” says Lisa Mueller, who studies social movements at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. “We really are in an empirically exceptional time of global protests.” But are protests effective at driving change? Politicians rarely admit it, but “the honest answer is ‘sometimes’,” says Mueller, who is one of several social and political scientists studying the question. Research shows that protests can influence media coverage, public opinion, policy and politics — at least in the short term. For instance, studies suggest that civil-rights protests in the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020 changed voting behaviour and even flipped elections, although not always in the way that protesters intended. Protests can also help to spur longer-term changes in public opinion — yet such influences are harder to trace.
---from Nature
抗議活動正在全球各地爆發。自十月以來，已有數千人因以色列與哈馬斯衝突而爆發。今年，德國、比利時、印度和許多其他國家的農民聚集在一起，因新規定而發生衝突。上個月，示威者在巴黎焚燒了標誌性的奧林匹克五環，以抗議今年夏天在那裡舉行的奧運會，作為爭取更高工資的一部分。 研究人員表示，這些事件是更廣泛趨勢的一部分。根據一項全球研究，由於有關政治政權、不公正、不平等、氣候變遷等的示威活動，2006 年至2020 年間，每年的抗議活動數量增加了三倍多（參見「抗議活動不斷增加」） 。 「激進主義的成長甚至使動盪的 20 世紀 60 年代黯然失色，」明尼蘇達州聖保羅馬卡萊斯特學院研究社會運動的Lisa Mueller 說。 “從經驗來看，我們確實正處於全球抗議的特殊時期。” 但抗議能有效推動改變嗎？政客很少承認這一點，但「誠實的答案是『有時，』」 Mueller說，他是研究這個問題的幾位社會和政治科學家之一。研究表明，抗議活動可以影響媒體報導、公眾輿論、政策和政治——至少在短期內是如此。例如，研究表明，20 世紀 60 年代的民權抗議活動和 2020 年的「黑人生命也是命」示威活動改變了投票行為，甚至顛覆了選舉，儘管情況並不總是如抗議者所願。抗議也有助於刺激公眾輿論的長期變化——但這種影響很難追蹤。
---摘錄翻譯自Nature
Estonians gave their DNA to science — now they’re learning their genetic secrets
愛沙尼亞人將自己的 DNA 獻給了科學——現在他們正在了解自己的遺傳秘密
Sciences
This month, the 210,000 Estonians who have contributed samples to the country’s biobank — around 20% of the adult population — were given the opportunity to learn about some of their genetic traits, including disease risk, ancestry markers and how they handle caffeine. So many people flocked to the online portal that parts of it crashed soon after it launched. “Genetic literacy in the Estonian population is maybe higher than elsewhere,” says Lili Milani, head of the Estonian Biobank and a pharmacogenomicist at the University of Tartu. “The interest is really high.” The project is one of the world’s biggest efforts to return genetic results to research participants — most biobanks do not provide such information. One reason for sharing the results, say scientists, is to recognize the value that participants contribute. “People have donated their data for this research, and they want something back,” says Andrea Ganna, a statistical geneticist at the University of Helsinki. “It’s a no-brainer. We need to do it and participants want it.”
--from Nature
本月，向該國生物庫提供樣本的 21 萬名愛沙尼亞人（約佔成年人口的 20%）有機會了解他們的一些遺傳特徵，包括疾病風險、祖先標記以及他們如何看待咖啡因對個人影響。 如此多的人湧入該線上入口網站，以至於其部分內容在推出後不久就崩潰了。 「愛沙尼亞人口的基因素養可能高於其他地方，」愛沙尼亞生物庫負責人、塔爾圖大學藥物基因組學家Lili Milani 說。 “興趣確實很高。” 該計畫是世界上向研究參與者返回基因結果的最大努力之一——大多數生物樣本庫不提供此類資訊。科學家表示，分享結果的原因之一是認識到參與者貢獻的價值。 「人們為這項研究捐贈了數據，他們希望得到一些回報，」赫爾辛基大學統計遺傳學家Andrea Ganna 說。 “這是理所當然的。我們需要這樣做，參與者也希望這樣做。
--摘錄翻譯自Nature