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Getting the flu shot any time during respiratory virus season is better than not getting it at all. But vaccine protection wanes, so timing the shot properly can help antibodies peak when cases are highest. Researchers wanted to figure out the optimal time for getting a flu shot, and took advantage of the fact that children tend to get vaccinated in the month they were born. In a study published in BMJ, they analyzed health insurance data from more than 800,000 children, ages 2-5, who got a flu shot from 2011 to 2018. The data showed that kids vaccinated in October had the strongest protection—they were about 12% less likely to get the flu compared to kids vaccinated in August.“It makes sense that October is the ideal time to get vaccinated,” says the study's senior author Dr. Anupam Jena,...

Play is a microcosm of childhood, a protective shell like a butterfly’s chrysalis that safeguards children from the slings and arrows of life, one that allows them to grow. What happens, however, when, through no fault of your own, you are born into conditions—poverty, racism, and other adversities—that groom children for bad outcomes? Can play, if nurtured and supported in such adverse conditions, create resilience? Can increased opportunities for play encourage better-than-expected life outcomes, and possibly even provide a buffer against the odds of the cycle of poverty being perpetuated?I think back to my own childhood; when the violence and abuse started, I think I stopped playing entirely until I managed to escape that home. For me, as for so many other children, school was no place ...

First came the students, who wanted help with their homework and essays. Now, ChatGPT is luring scientists, who are under pressure to publish papers in reputable scientific journals.AI is already disrupting the archaic world of scientific publishing. When Melissa Kacena, vice chair of orthopaedic surgery at Indiana University School of Medicine, reviews articles submitted for publication in journals, she now knows to look out for ones that might have been written by the AI program. “I have a rule of thumb now that if I pull up 10 random references cited in the paper, and if more than one isn’t accurate, then I reject the paper,” she says.But despite the pitfalls, there is also promise. Writing review articles, for example, is a task well suited to AI: it involves sifting through the existi...