1. With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Common Errors in Meta-Analyses and Meta-Regressions in Strength & Conditioning Research by Kadlec et al. (2022). The paper takes a look at the 20 most cited meta-analyses in the strength and conditioning and finds that 85% of them contain at least one statistical error. The most common errors included miscalculating effect sized (45%), a mistaken focus on within-group results (45%), failing to account for in-study correlation (45%).
  2. Temporal Trends in Sperm Count: A Systematic Review and Meta-Regression Analysis of Samples Collected Globally in the 20th and 21st Centuries by Levine et al. (2022). While evidence for reduced sperm count has been piling up in the western countries, this new study shows that it indeed seems to be a global phenomenon. This and other studies also suggest that the speed of this sperm count decrease is accelerating.
  3. Age that Kids Acquire Mobile Phones Not Linked to Well-Being, says Stanford Medicine Study by Erin Digitale at Stanford Medicine. 250 children were studied for five years, a time during which most of them acquired their first cell phones. Instead of comparing phone-using kids with those who don’t have phones at a single point in time, the scientists tracked the participants’ well-being as they transitioned to phone ownership.
  4. Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation vs Sham for the Treatment of Inattention in Adults With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder by Teixeira Leffa et al. (2022). The randomized, placebo-controlled trial of tDCS in 64 adult patients diagnosed with moderate to severe ADHD showed an improvement in attention. Improvements were measured at week 2 and week 4, superiority of the stimulation was only seen after week 4 (CASRS-I of 18.88 (5.79) in the active tDCS group vs 23.63 (3.97) in the sham group).
  5. Why Upper Respiratory Infections Are More Common in Colder Temperatures by Ryan Jaslow for Harvard Medical School. For the longest time it was unclear why certain diseases spread more during winter season, a likely culprit being close cohabitation in closed spaces. New research suggests it’s rather that usually bacteria in the nose fights of viruses, but these bacteria are negatively impacted when the temperature gets too low.
  6. The State of AI in 2022 — And a Half Decade in Review by MyKinsey. The article lays out how companies are using AI and how this has evolved over the past five years. Adoption has more than doubled since 2017, although remaining between 50% and 60% in the past few years. Interestingly, the biggest effects on revenue are seen in marketing and sales, product and service development, and strategy and corporate finance, and the highest cost benefits in supply chain management.
  7. Talking About Large Language Models by Murray Shanahan at Imperial College London. Even before advances like ChatGPT, we already had plenty of interesting intersections between technology and philosophy, but the recent release by OpenAI has made these discussions ever so present. The outcome of language models are improving rapidly, to the point that their output is indistinguishable from a human’s.