“I Heard That COVID-19 Was...”: Rumors, Pandemic, and Psychological Distance

The spread of misinformation through a variety of communication channels has amplified society’s challenge to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. While existing studies have examined how misinformation spreads, few studies have examined the role of psychological distance in people’s mental processing of a rumor and their propensity to accept self-transformed narratives of the message. Based on an open-ended survey data collected in the U.S. ( N = 621) during an early phase of the pandemic, the current study examines how psychological distance relates to the transformation and acceptance of conspiratorial narratives in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two instances of misinformation are examined, both of which were widely heard at the time of data collection: the role of (a) Bill Gates and (b) government during the outbreak of the pandemic. This study uses topic modeling techniques to capture distinctive topical attributes that emerged from rumor narratives. In addition, statistical analyses estimate the psychological distance effects on the salience of topical attributes of a rumor story and an individual’s propensity to believe them. Findings reveal that psychological distance to the threats of COVID-19 influences how misinformation evolves through word-of-mouth, particularly in terms of who is responsible for the pandemic and why the world finds itself in the current situation. Psychological distance also explains why people accept the message to be true. Implications for misinformation and rumor psychology research, as well as avenues for future research, are discussed.

Experimental investigations on two-sided upward flame spreading over thin flax fabric under the influence of restricted distance

Up to 2021, most previous work focused on upward flame spread over thin solid fuel completely attached to objects or with both sides freely exposed to the air, but did not take the restricted distance (distance between fuel and objects) effects into account. In this paper, the restricted distance effects on upward flame spread over thin solid fuels were investigated using 0.65 mm thick, 120 cm tall and 6.0 cm wide flax fabric sheets under various restricted distances of 1.0–3.5 cm. The essential parameters were monitored and analyzed simultaneously, including flame length, pyrolysis spread rate, surface temperature and ignition time. The main conclusions drawn are as follows: when the restricted distance is no more than 1.5 cm, the flame length on the unrestricted side is larger than that on the restricted side, whereas the variation exhibits the opposite trend when the restricted distance is beyond 1.5 cm. As the restricted distance increases from 1.0 to 3.5 cm, the flame length and flame spread rate first increase and then decrease, reaching a maximum value at 3.0 cm restricted distance, whereas the ignition time shows the opposite trend. The decrease rate of the surface temperature with the distance from the pyrolysis front first drops and then rises as the restricted distance increases, which qualitatively characterizes that the heat flux received by the virgin surface first increases and then decreases with restricted distance. The non-monotonic trends of heat flux received by the virgin surface and consequently the flame spread rate as a function of restricted distance are due to the combined restricted distance effects of the chimney effect, wall radiation and restricting oxygen supply. The results of this paper are not only helpful in better understanding the upward flame spread over a thin flax fabric under restricted distance, but also provide some basic data for fire prevention of thin solid fuels.

Role of Lateral Inhibition on Visual Number Sense

Lateral inhibition is a basic principle of information processing and widely exists in the human and animal nervous systems. Lateral inhibition is also involved in processing visual information because it travels through the retina, primary visual cortex, and visual nervous system. This finding suggests that lateral inhibition is associated with visual number sense in humans and animals. Here, we show a number-sensing neural network model based on lateral inhibition. The model can reproduce the size and distance effects of the output response of human and animal number-sensing neurons when the network connection weights are set randomly without adjustment. The number sense of the model disappears when lateral inhibition is removed. Our study shows that the first effect of lateral inhibition is to strengthen the linear correlation between the total response intensity of the input layer and the number of objects. The second one is to allow the output cells to prefer different numbers. Results indicate that lateral inhibition plays an indispensable role in untrained spontaneous number sense.

Extremal effective field theories

Effective field theories (EFT) parameterize the long-distance effects of short-distance dynamics whose details may or may not be known. Previous work showed that EFT coefficients must obey certain positivity constraints if causality and unitarity are satisfied at all scales. We explore those constraints from the perspective of 2 → 2 scattering amplitudes of a light real scalar field, using semi-definite programming to carve out the space of allowed EFT coefficients for a given mass threshold M. We point out that all EFT parameters are bounded both below and above, effectively showing that dimensional analysis scaling is a consequence of causality. This includes the coefficients of s2 + t2 + u2 and stu type interactions. We present simple 2 → 2 extremal amplitudes which realize, or “rule in”, kinks in coefficient space and whose convex hull span a large fraction of the allowed space.

The role and application of small extracellular vesicles in gastric cancer

Gastric cancer (GC) is a common tumour that affects humans worldwide, is highly malignant and has a poor prognosis. Small extracellular vesicles (sEVs), especially exosomes, are nanoscale vesicles released by various cells that deliver bioactive molecules to recipient cells, affecting their biological characteristics, changing the tumour microenvironment and producing long-distance effects. In recent years, many studies have clarified the mechanisms by which sEVs function with regard to the initiation, progression, angiogenesis, metastasis and chemoresistance of GC. These molecules can function as mediators of cell-cell communication in the tumour microenvironment and might affect the efficacy of immunotherapy. Due to their unique physiochemical characteristics, sEVs show potential as effective antitumour vaccines as well as drug carriers. In this review, we summarize the roles of sEVs in GC and highlight the clinical application prospects in the future.

EXPRESS: Ordinality: The importance of its trial list composition and examining its relation with adults’ arithmetic and mathematical reasoning

Understanding whether a sequence is presented in an order or not (i.e. ordinality) is a robust predictor of adults’ arithmetic performance, but the mechanisms underlying this skill and its relationship with mathematics remain unclear. In this study, we examined: a) the cognitive strategies involved in ordinality inferred from behavioural effects observed in different types of sequences and b) whether ordinality is also related to mathematical reasoning besides arithmetic. In Experiment 1, participants performed an arithmetic, a mathematical reasoning test and an order task, which had balanced trials on the basis of: order, direction, regularity and distance. We observed standard distance effects (DEs) for ordered and non-ordered sequences, which suggests reliance on magnitude comparison strategies. This contradicts past studies that reported reversed distance effects (RDEs) for some types of sequences, which suggest reliance on retrieval strategies. Also, we found that ordinality predicted arithmetic but not mathematical reasoning when controlling for fluid intelligence. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether the aforementioned absence of RDEs was because of our trial list composition. Participants performed two order tasks; in both tasks no RDE was found demonstrating the fragility of the RDE. Additionally, results showed that the strategies used when processing ordinality were modulated by the trial list composition and presentation order of the tasks. Altogether, these findings reveal that ordinality is strongly related to arithmetic and that the strategies used when processing ordinality are highly dependent on the context in which the task is presented.