Both cyberbullies and their victims can suffer from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a new British study finds. Cyberbullying is bullying online rather than in person. It’s so pervasive that pediatricians should routinely ask their patients about it as part of psychological assessment, the researchers said. “Parents, teachers and health professionals need to be aware of possible PTSD symptoms in young people involved in cyberbullying,” said study author Ana Pascual-Sánchez and colleagues. She’s in the psychiatry division at Imperial College London. Cyberbullying among teenagers is estimated to range from 10% to 40%, said the researchers. Because it can be done anonymously day or night, it poses special risks, they noted. For the study, Pascual-Sánchez and her team collected data on more than 2,200 11- to 19-year-olds from four London schools who were surveyed about their experiences. The survey found that 46% had a history of any kind of bullying: 17% were victims; 12% were perpetrators; and 4% were both. Traditional bullying was more common than cyberbullying, the researchers found. Still, about 13% of the teens had been cyberbullied; 8.5% had bullied others online; and 4% had been both victims and perpetrators. About 16% of the kids had been bullied in person; 12% had bullied others in person; and 7% had been both victims and perpetrators, the researchers found. There was some overlap between types…  read on >

Both cyberbullies and their victims can suffer from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a new British study finds. Cyberbullying is bullying online rather than in person. It’s so pervasive that pediatricians should routinely ask their patients about it as part of psychological assessment, the researchers said. “Parents, teachers and health professionals need to be aware of possible PTSD symptoms in young people involved in cyberbullying,” said study author Ana Pascual-Sánchez and colleagues. She’s in the psychiatry division at Imperial College London. Cyberbullying among teenagers is estimated to range from 10% to 40%, said the researchers. Because it can be done anonymously day or night, it poses special risks, they noted. For the study, Pascual-Sánchez and her team collected data on more than 2,200 11- to 19-year-olds from four London schools who were surveyed about their experiences. The survey found that 46% had a history of any kind of bullying: 17% were victims; 12% were perpetrators; and 4% were both. Traditional bullying was more common than cyberbullying, the researchers found. Still, about 13% of the teens had been cyberbullied; 8.5% had bullied others online; and 4% had been both victims and perpetrators. About 16% of the kids had been bullied in person; 12% had bullied others in person; and 7% had been both victims and perpetrators, the researchers found. There was some overlap between types…  read on >

Bright yellow and looking like a headless deer, Spot can travel across ground too risky for humans. “Built for dirt and danger,” in the words of its maker Boston Dynamics, this robot is now helping humans battle a different threat: the spread of coronavirus. Equipped with an iPad and two-way radio, Spot has been making the rounds at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston since April. Medical technicians use the robot to interview patients with suspected COVID-19 remotely, with no need to don personal protective equipment. Think of it as mobile telemedicine. Then there’s computer programs that pore through mountains of information to pluck out and analyze the relevant bits to help find a promising drug for COVID-19 after just two days’ work. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are tackling the pandemic on every front: Robots that blast surfaces with high-power ultraviolet light are decontaminating hospitals around the world. Robots also stepped in to help Chinese hospitals cope with coronavirus, checking visitors’ temperatures, delivering food and medicine, keeping isolated wards clean and even offering a little entertainment. Medical robots can go where human doctors can’t, and process information much faster. But scientists are still only in the very early stages of using AI to treat patients. “There’s still a big gap between this kind of research and the clinical applications,” said Steve Jiang, a professor at…  read on >

Preschoolers may spend more time on smartphones or tablets than their parents realize, and some use apps intended for teens and adults, researchers report. A new study tracked mobile device use among 350 children aged 3 to 5 over nine months and compared their findings with parents’ estimates of their use. Preschoolers with their own smartphones or tablets averaged two hours of screen time a day. Nearly three-quarters of their parents underestimated it. More than half of kids used devices for an hour or more, including 15% who spent at least four hours a day on mobile devices. Thirty-four percent of kids in the new study had their own digital device, according to the findings published recently in the journal Pediatrics. Kids in the study used between one and 85 apps. The most commonly used apps included YouTube, YouTube Kids, browsers, and streaming services such as Netflix. However, some apps related to gambling, violent games and general audience games without restrictions on the data they collect or share with third-party advertisers. “We found that most parents miscalculated their children’s time on mobile devices,” said lead author Dr. Jenny Radesky, a behavioral pediatrician at Michigan Medicine’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor. “They may also not be aware of what content is being shared or what apps are being marketed to children while they’re using…  read on >

More than one-quarter of popular English-language COVID-19 information videos posted to YouTube are misleading, researchers warn. There are posts, for example, falsely claiming that drug companies already have a cure for COVID-19, but won’t sell it, and that different countries have stronger strains of coronavirus, a new study finds. YouTube viewers “should be skeptical, use common sense and consult reputable sources — public health agencies or physicians — to fact-check their information,” said study lead author Heidi Oi-Yee Li, a medical student at the University of Ottawa in Canada. With billions of viewers, YouTube has enormous potential to bolster or hamper public health efforts, Li and her colleagues said in background notes. But what they turned up in their recent YouTube search is “alarming,” Li said. “In an ideal world, social media platforms should take more responsibility for content uploaded,” she said. But “this is an unrealistic expectation, given the billions of users uploading information every second across the globe.” Li’s team did a simple keyword search for “coronavirus” and “COVID-19” on March 21, 2020. After compiling the top 75 videos for each of the search words, the team excluded all non-English clips, those exceeding an hour, duplicates, and anything not actually about COVID-19. The remaining 69 videos had already been viewed nearly 258 million times, they said. Just under one-third (29%) were clips from…  read on >