Friday Five: The Therapeutic Value of Bonding with Fellow Sports Fans

Friday Five: The Therapeutic Value of Bonding with Fellow Sports Fans

In this week's Friday Five, attending sports events is linked to greater life satisfaction, AI can identify specific brain tumors in under 90 seconds, LSD - minus hallucinations - raises hopes for mental health, new research on the benefits of cold showers, and inspiring awe in your kids leads to behavior change.

Adobe Stock

The Friday Five covers five stories in research that you may have missed this week. There are plenty of controversies and troubling ethical issues in science – and we get into many of them in our online magazine – but this news roundup focuses on new scientific theories and progress to give you a therapeutic dose of inspiration headed into the weekend.

This episode includes an interview with Dr. Helen Keyes, Head of the School of Psychology and Sports Science at Anglia Ruskin University.



Listen on Apple | Listen on Spotify | Listen on Stitcher | Listen on Amazon | Listen on Google

- Attending sports events is linked to greater life satisfaction
- Identifying specific brain tumors in under 90 seconds with AI
- LSD - minus hallucinations - raises hopes for mental health
- New research on the benefits of cold showers
- Inspire awe in your kids and reap the benefits

Matt Fuchs
Matt Fuchs is the host of the Making Sense of Science podcast and served previously as the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org. He writes as a contributor to the Washington Post, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, WIRED, Nautilus Magazine, Fortune Magazine and TIME Magazine. Follow him @fuchswriter.
Inside Scoop: How a DARPA Scientist Helped Usher in a Game-Changing Covid Treatment

Amy Jenkins is a program manager for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Biological Technologies Office, which runs a project called the Pandemic Prevention Platform.

Photo credit: Neil Jenkins

Amy Jenkins was in her office at DARPA, a research and development agency within the Department of Defense, when she first heard about a respiratory illness plaguing the Chinese city of Wuhan. Because she's a program manager for DARPA's Biological Technologies Office, her colleagues started stopping by. "It's really unusual, isn't it?" they would say.

At the time, China had a few dozen cases of what we now call COVID-19. "We should maybe keep an eye on that," she thought.

Early in 2020, still just keeping watch, she was visiting researchers working on DARPA's Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3), a project to develop treatments for "any known or previously unknown infectious threat," within 60 days of its appearance. "We looked at each other and said, 'Should we be doing something?'" she says.

Keep Reading Keep Reading
Sarah Scoles
Sarah Scoles is a freelance science journalist based in Denver. She is a contributing writer at Wired, a contributing editor at Popular Science, and the author of the book Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Everyone Should Hear My COVID Vaccine Experience

Dr. Ranney immediately after receiving her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on December 18, 2020.

Credit: Bill Murphy, Lifespan

On December 18th, 2020, I received my first dose of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. On January 9th, 2021, I received my second. I am now a CDC-card-carrying, fully vaccinated person.

The build-up to the first dose was momentous. I was scheduled for the first dose of the morning. Our vaccine clinic was abuzz with excitement and hope, and some media folks were there to capture the moment. A couple of fellow emergency physicians were in the same cohort of recipients as I; we exchanged virtual high-fives and took a picture of socially distanced hugs. It was, after all, the closest thing we'd had to a celebration in months.

Keep Reading Keep Reading
Megan L. Ranney
Dr. Megan L. Ranney is a practicing emergency physician, researcher, and advocate for innovative approaches to public health. She is Founding Director of the Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health, where her research focuses on using technology to improve adolescent mental health and reduce violence. She is also Chief Research Officer of AFFIRM Research, the country’s leading nonprofit committed to ending the gun violence epidemic through a non-partisan public health approach, and Co-Founder of GetUsPPE.org, a national nonprofit that gets donated personal protective equipment to healthcare workers in need. She is a Fellow of the fifth class of the Aspen Institute’s Health Innovators Fellowship Program.