The science news of the week: People who meet through phone dating often have the most serious intentions. In the 2010s, with the advent of smartphones and mobile applications, the popularity of quick dating sites skyrocketed. Indeed, just a few taps – and an electronic matchmaker is at your service. But with convenience and popularity came criticism that all these applications only contribute to casual connections and that true love cannot be found this way.
Gina Potarka from the University of Geneva decided to find out if there really is a difference in the quality of relationships developed through conventional circumstances and through applications. “In recent years, I have heard so many horror stories in the media about the harm that all these fast dating apps are doing to human relationships that I wanted to empirically test whether there is really a reason to panic,” says the researcher.
In order to find out the difference between two types of relationship development, Potarka studied the results of the survey of the population of Switzerland for the year 2018 and identified over 3 thousand couples who had met in the last 10 years. They were asked to fill out questionnaires that included questions about how exactly they met, whether they were satisfied with their relationship, and whether they planned to develop it further.
It turns out that couples who met through mobile applications are no different from those who met offline in their desire to start a family. They derive the same amount of pleasure from relationships and life in general. However, when it came to the desire to live under one roof and have children in the next three years, application users, especially women, outperformed everyone else. “The main conclusion of my research is that relationships that start with the push of a button on a cell phone are qualitatively no different from any other, and the people who enter them do not consider them temporary. On the contrary, they are even more interested in sharing their lives together. In such cases, women want to become mothers even more,” Potarka explains. “I’m not going to argue with the theory that a large number of people use apps for casual connections that do not lead to official relationships and therefore do not fall into the statistics,” admits the author of the study. “But based on data from various sources about people’s intentions, users of such apps are even more interested in establishing long-term, possibly family relationships, even at the stage of their first meetings, compared to those who do not use such apps.” Of course, says Potarka, there is also a Swiss specificity here, where cultural traditions place an emphasis on starting a family, so research in other countries could provide a more complete picture.
We explain quickly, simply, and clearly what happened, why it matters, and what happens next. Episodes End of story. Advertising Podcasts. In the UK there is an expression “green fingers”: it is used to describe people who let everything in their garden, vegetable patch, and even flower pots on the windowsill, bloom and flourish. Apparently, they give a piece of themselves to the plants, and in return… Here is the most interesting part. Researchers at the University of Sheffield have found that regular gardening (raking and pruning several times a week instead of watering a cactus once every hundred years), in addition to the culinary-practical and decorative-aesthetic benefits, actually reduces stress levels and improves your psychological state. The authors of a new study say that, until now, people have focused only on the physical benefits of gardening, forgetting the psychological component. Scientists have conducted numerous surveys in which participants explained in different ways what motivated them to garden, but more than half said they did it for pleasure alone, while a quarter said it improved their well-being, including reducing stress, allowing relaxation, and in some cases even helping to overcome depression.
“It is sad that despite growing evidence of the health benefits of home gardening, this area is not considered a priority by politicians and urban planners, the authors of the study lament. Kindergartens near residential buildings are becoming less common and some developers, especially in densely populated urban areas, are not including them in their plans at all.” “Actually, it could be fishing instead of gardening. It doesn’t really matter, the important thing is to maintain the right balance between work and play,” says Ross Cameron, one of the authors of the new study. Although the study was conducted before the start of the coronavirus pandemic, scientists say there is ample evidence that the forced stay-at-home measures and the near absence of social life have led people to seek out new or reclaim old hobbies, including gardening, which turned out to be an unexpected source of relief from the stress and inconvenience caused by the lockdowns and related restrictions. “It seems that home gardening is good for protecting our mental health, people literally turn off the news that brings only unpleasant thoughts, and working in the garden actually protects them from negative emotions,” says Cameron.
Singaporean engineers have found biomedical applications for 3D printers, paving the way for a new technology to create affordable, personalized, and precisely dosed medicines at home. The scientists, who published the details of their development in the International Journal of Pharmaceutics, assumed that large pharmaceutical companies that produce drugs on an industrial scale offer the same drugs to patients with different needs. As a result, people often have to dose the medication themselves, which is inconvenient (try breaking a tiny hard tablet into quarters or pouring a third of the powder out of a sealed capsule) and sometimes dangerous, as it can lead to errors. “Each person has their own biological cycles, so each person needs individualized medications,” explains the development’s lead author, Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at the National University of Singapore, Sou Xiao Lin. The method proposed by Xiao Lin is based on pill molding. Instead of manufacturing drugs, the Singaporean engineers propose to print shells of different sizes and shapes on a 3D printer, which would allow not only the selection of the necessary dose, but also the precise control of the timing and speed of drug release in the patient’s body. 3D printers have long been used in the medical field to successfully print dental and other prostheses. Xiao Lin and his colleagues suggest using a standard 3D printer to print their pills, which costs about $200 and is reliable and affordable. He had previously experimented with 3D printing pills, but found that using the drug itself as a printing material quickly clogged the printer. That’s how the idea of printing tablet shapes came about. First, a necessary geometric shape is created from the regular plastic used in 3D printing (typically ABS or PLA type plastic). After the mold is made, it is filled with a water-soluble and biodegradable shell of the future tablet with a predetermined hole size and shape tailored to the patient’s needs so that the drug is released at the appropriate time and the process of its release from the shell is also controlled and adjusted according to the patient’s needs. Each capsule can contain multiple medications at the same time, so the new technology promises to simplify the lives of patients who need to take multiple medications at different times. The only hope is that domestic chemists who are not interested in pharmaceuticals will not be interested in three-dimensional printing, if they are not already.