BY ADAM GORLICK
Flu season is here. And with every social interaction comes a game of chance: Does the person you're talking to, shaking hands with or kissing have a bug? And if they do, what are the odds you'll catch it?
Doctors and public health experts try to make mingling with the sick safer. They develop vaccines, promote the need for frequent handwashing and enforce other common-sense measures to keep coughs, sniffles and sneezes from spreading.
But in order to follow and better understand how infectious diseases spread through real-life social networks, a group of Stanford researchers used wireless sensors to track high school students, teachers and staff members throughout one day during the height of last January's swine flu outbreak.
"Do you know how many contacts you have with infectious people on a daily basis? Do you know how many contacts you have with anybody on a daily basis?" said James Holland Jones, an associate professor of anthropology and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. "Very often, those are the things we know the least about because they're the hardest to measure."
Epidemiologists have always tried to answer those questions through pen-and-paper surveys, asking individuals to recall who they were in contact with on any given day. They've been forced to rely on shaky memories and vague recollections for their data.
Jones and his colleagues – led by Marcel Salathé, a former postdoctoral researcher at Stanford – used the wireless sensors to design a better method for tracking interactions in order to study how a flu outbreak might be headed off in a school. Their work is detailed in an article published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers outfitted each teacher, student and staff member at an unnamed American high school with credit card-size gadgets that transmitted and received radio signals every 20 seconds during one day.
The devices logged more than 760,000 incidents when two people were within 10 feet of each other, roughly the maximum distance that a disease can be transmitted through a cough or sneeze.
"The enormous amount of interactions that occur in a single day is mind-blowing," said Salathé, who is now an assistant professor of biology at the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Pennsylvania State University.
So are the chances to catch a cold.
After collecting the electronic tracking data, the researchers ran thousands of simulations of what would happen if there were a flu outbreak in the school.
New research shows fighter pilots have super-brains
In addition to being supplied with the finest in government grade methamphetamines, fighter pilots have other significant advantages over the rest of us. They have "superior cognitive control."
A new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience compared 11 front-line RAF pilots against a control group in two cognitive tasks, while an MRI was used "to examine the structure of white matter connections between brain regions associated with cognitive control."
The pilots showed superior cognitive control and greater accuracy, despite being more sensitive to distracting minutiae. The MRI showed the structure of their brains differed from the control, with relevant areas of the right side of the brain being larger, and connections between key areas in the brain laid out differently.
It's not known at this point if the differences come from training or if pilots are just born that way.
The tests showed that when presented with significant visual distractions, the pilots weren't much quicker than the rest of us baseline human beings, but were far more accurate.
Reference: 'Expert cognitive control and individual differences associated with frontal and parietal white matter microstructure' by Roberts RE, Anderson E & Husain M, Published in the Journal of Neuroscience
Send an email to Tim Barribeau, the author of this post, at tim@io9.com.
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