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Die Telekom setzt in einer kleinen Gemeinde an der Mosel auf Holzmasten, um das Glasfaserkabel in den Ort zu bringen. Doch die Telekom baut kein FTTH, es wird ab Oktober in dem Ort eine Versorgung mit nur 100 MBit/s geben. (Glasfaser, Telekom)

Without a doubt, the bubonic plague has been one of the deadliest and most devastating infectious diseases in all of human history. The bacterial infection—caused by Yersinia pestis—has sparked dozens of outbreaks and three massive pandemics, killing hundreds of millions of people. The Justinian Plague from 541 to 767 is estimated to have killed up to 50 percent of the population at the time and spurred the demise of the Roman Empire. Likewise, the fourteenth century Black Death, which circumnavigated Europe in just a few years, ended up slaughtering as much as 60 percent of the continent’s population.

Yet, despite the indelible mark the dark disease has left on humanity, researchers still aren’t certain how exactly Yersinia sweeps through cities and countries. The highly infectious disease has historically been linked to rodents, in which the bacteria can fester, and rat fleas, which take in and then vomit out the bacteria in subsequent bites. Thus, booming vermin populations have long been assumed to spark and sustain outbreaks. But a fresh analysis of a tiny village in England—made famous for its handling of a plague outbreak from 1665 to 1666—stands to challenge the view.

The Derbyshire village of Eyam, estimated to have a population of around 700 at the time of the outbreak, took the remarkable step of imposing a quarantine on itself—a move almost unheard of at the time. While the villagers aimed to spare neighboring parishes—which they did—the quarantine and the villagers’ detailed death records also provided a perfect opportunity for studying plague transmission dynamics.

In a new analysis of the outbreak, researchers estimate that rodent-to-human transmission accounted for only a quarter of all infections, while human-to-human transmission made up the rest. The finding, published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, adds fuel to a hot debate among academics about how plague spreads. And, more importantly, it has the potential to inform public health responses to modern-day plague outbreaks, which still occur around the world, particularly in Africa and South America (albeit on much smaller scales than historical outbreaks).

“This debate is not just of historical importance but also of contemporary relevance to help deal with this neglected tropical disease, which could someday become a worldwide public health priority again,” the study authors, Lilith Whittles and Xavier Didelot of Imperial College London, concluded.

They arrived at the point by first digging into historic population and death records of Eyam—now known as “plague village.” The researchers looked at factors such as age, wealth, household structure, and gender of the 257 people who died of plague. The deaths, which began after the delivery of flea-infested cloth from London, lasted from September 1665 to October 1666.

Next, the researchers used a stochastic compartmental model and Bayesian analytical methods to recreate the pattern of deaths and trajectory of the outbreak revealed by the records. The model included rodent-to-human transmission and human-to-human transmission, which was estimated to occur within a fixed window of 11 days between exposure, infection, and death. (While there were oral reports that three villagers recovered from the plague, those weren’t recorded in documents so the researchers tossed them out of their main analysis. However, when they did try including them, it didn’t alter their overall findings.)

The researchers found that human-to-human transmission accounted for 75 percent of all infections, with age, wealth, and household structure playing big roles in who got sick. Kids and family members of victims were the groups most affected by the plague. The village’s wealthy were less likely to get the plague, possibly due to less contact with general village folk and vermin.

Plague is known to transmit from person-to-person in bodily fluids and aerosols—formed by coughing, which is generally associated with pneumonic plague. But the researchers speculate that such transmission routes were unlikely, given the historical records of people’s symptoms, which rarely included pneumonia. Instead, the researchers hypothesize that lice and human fleas may have been a main bridge by which Yersinia got around. And the finding makes sense with the spread among lower-class kids, who could easily share head lice while playing.

Though the study looked at just one, isolated, historic outbreak, the authors argue that the “results feed into the long ongoing debate about the role of interhuman transmission through human ectoparasites.”

Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2016. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2016.0618  (About DOIs).

Parallel zum hochgelobten Uncharted 4 für die Playstation 4 hat Sony mit Uncharted Fortune Hunter auch ein neues Mobilspiel veröffentlicht. Hier müssen Nathan und Sully Schätze finden - der Weg dorthin gestaltet sich allerdings ganz anders. (Uncharted, Spieletest)

Zum Erkennen natürlicher Sprache hat Google ein neues Modell zum Parsen der Syntax entwickelt und mit seinem Deep-Learning-Framework Tensorflow implementiert. Der daraus erstellte Englisch-Parser Parsey McParseface soll die derzeit beste maschinelle Erkennungsrate für Syntaxbäume aufweisen. (Google, Applikationen)

Id Softwares neues Doom hat es in sich: In der PC-Version sind besonders hohe Grafikeinstellungen möglich und die id Tech 6 ist sehr konfigurierbar. Einzig der Speicherhunger bleibt problematisch. (Doom, Steam)

As we discussed on Tuesday, a lot of the problems with the public's view of current research originate long before journalists get involved. Scientists and the institutions that support the research often portray preliminary work as more definitive than it is, or push the findings as supporting ideas that are, at best, premature. So it's nice to see that one organization of scientists is pushing back against that.

The organization is the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR), which has just released an updated set of guidelines for stem cell researchers. The majority of the text is devoted to research ethics and best practices, and it covers topics like patient data. But the new version includes a section devoted to communications, and it nicely summarizes some of the problems that the field has faced since its inception:

Popular coverage and reporting in the medical literature are frequentlyfar from ideal. Potential benefits are sometimes exaggerated and the challenges to clinical application and risks are often understated. Inaccurate or incomplete representations of this sort can have tangible impacts on the expectations of the general public, patient communities, physicians, and on the setting of health and science policies. Inaccurate or incomplete representations can also be exploited by companies and individuals marketing stem cells for unproven clinical uses.

How to combat this? The ISSCR lays the responsibility on the shoulders of researchers and the press officers who work with them, advising them in a variety of ways to cut out the hype. "Communications about ongoing studies should explain that clinical efficacy is not established," the guidelines state, "and that the results may reveal the intervention to be ineffective or, in some cases, harmful." Clinical trials that focus on establishing safety should not be referred to as treatments. And researchers shouldn't be in the business of predicting the future of uncertain processes like the movement of a treatment through clinical trials—any forward-looking statements "must be accurate, circumspect and restrained."

The guidelines warn against what's become a common practice in clinical studies: when the focus of the work produces a negative result, the researchers go searching for any measure that turns up positive and shift the focus to that. Researchers are advised to always report the intended measures, even if they fail.

Finally, researchers are advised that their work doesn't end when the press coverage starts. If any public representations of research are inaccurate or misleading—be it a press release or ensuing coverage—it's the researchers' job to get them corrected.

Will this cause all stem cell researchers to immediately take their responsibilities as public communicators seriously? Certainly not. But having clear and strong standards—which these certainly appear to be—provides a strong lever to begin to shift behavior. It's much easier to convince someone that they're being irresponsible when an organization of their peers has already clearly described why those actions are irresponsible.

Die Routerhersteller wie AVM wollen sich nicht vorschreiben lassen, welche ihrer Geräte für welche Kabelnetze geeignet sind. Die Kabelnetzbetreiber schließen eine "freiwillige Zertifizierung" jedoch nicht aus. (Router, DSL)

Kein Assassin's Creed, aber dafür Watch Dogs 2: So plant Ubisoft für die nächsten Monate. Bei der Vorstellung von Geschäftszahlen hat sich Firmenchef Yves Guillemot außerdem vehement gegen die drohende Übernahme durch Vivendi ausgesprochen. (Ubisoft, Far Cry)

Wacoms G13-Stift wird die Anzahl der Druckstufen noch einmal verdoppeln. Die neue Generation kommt allerdings erst nach Windows 10 Version 1607 auf den Markt. (Wacom, Eingabegerät)

Kopfschall als biometrisches Merkmal: Deutsche Forscher haben ein biometrisches System entwickelt, bei dem die Beschaffenheit des Schädelknochens eine Rolle spielt. Das System kann bei Datenbrillen, eventuell aber auch bei Smartphones eingesetzt werden. (Biometrie, Technologie)