Journalists

The fire that originated on August 15 between the Tenerife municipalities of Arafo and Candelaria, in the northeast of the island, is advancing on several fronts and has affected more than 13,000 hectares, although the firefighting services have stabilized it in some points. The people evacuated in the last days have been thousands. As confirmed by the president of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, the fire has been caused.

Rising temperatures, droughts, heat waves and abundant untreated material in forests are the perfect cocktail for fires to break out. When they are beyond the control of firefighting services - because of their intensity, speed and unpredictability - we speak of mega-fires or sixth generation wildfires, a phenomenon that is not new but whose frequency could increase due to rural abandonment and climate change. Some experts have thus described the fire in Tenerife that began on August 15 and has forced the evacuation or confinement of thousands of people.

Today it is difficult to see science policies that do not mention citizen science or citizen participation in science. On World Mosquito Day, which is celebrated on August 20, we analyze what has been achieved by the Mosquito Alert project, based on citizen science and which the Ministry of Health has supported this summer within the framework of the National Plan for Disease Prevention, Surveillance and Control Transmitted by Vectors.

A clinical team in the US has successfully transferred kidneys from pigs to a brain-dead man. The organs came from animals that had been genetically modified to prevent rejection by the immune system of the patient, who had kidney disease. The transplanted organs were functional - they could make urine and clear creatinine - seven days after the operation, explains a research letter summarising the case in JAMA Surgery. The team says this type of xenotransplantation - from animal to human - could be a solution to the shortage of donor organs. 

The fires in Hawaii, which have left at least a hundred dead and hundreds missing, have devastated entire towns and villages and have put the issue of how to prevent such intense fires back on the table. World Wildfire Prevention Day is celebrated this Friday 18 August. The increase in the occurrence and recurrence of large wildfires jeopardizes the resilience of socio-ecological systems. Efforts in prevention must be a priority and constant throughout the year. We have a joint responsibility as a society to face this unprecedented problem, which will worsen in the coming years.

Any infection can lead to sequelae and SARS-CoV-2 is no exception. However, the lack of rigorous studies has meant that, in 2023, uncertainty about the number of people affected remains high and treatments are scarce.

A US study measures the risk of breast cancer overdiagnosis in screening campaigns for women over 70. These are women who are misdiagnosed with cancer after a mammogram, leading to unnecessary treatments that can cause complications, anxiety and financial costs. The study includes more than 54,000 women over the age of 70 who have had a screening mammogram. The retrospective analysis compares the cumulative incidence of breast cancer between two groups: women who continued screening up to 15 years later, and women who did not. The research estimates that 31% of breast cancer cases in women aged 70-74 result from overdiagnosis: it finds 6.1 cases per 100 women who had continued screening, compared with 4.2 cases per 100 women in the second group. The percentage of overdiagnosis increases with the age of the women. The article is published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, along with an editorial.

Speech deepfakes are synthetic voices produced by machine learning models that can resemble real human voices. Research published in PLoS ONE involving half a thousand participants shows that they were able to correctly identify that they were not real voices 73% of the time. The results of the study—conducted in English and Mandarin—showed only a slight improvement in those people who were specifically trained to spot these deepfakes.

A randomized trial of more than 80,000 Swedish women has shown that artificial intelligence is as good as two specialized radiologists working together when it comes to detecting breast cancer, without increasing false positives and reducing the workload by almost half.

An opinion piece signed by researchers from the Universities of Aberdeen and Nottingham (UK) has outlined some of the inaccuracies, exaggerations and misconceptions they say are taking place around research on the human microbiome. Some of these are curiosities, like the false belief that we have ten bacteria for every human cell. Others are more relevant, such as the fact that many specific associations between the microbiome and disease have not been confirmed in follow-up studies. According to the authors, it is important to raise awareness about myths and misconceptions to avoid unproductive research projects and preserve public confidence in microbiome science. The article is published in the journal Nature Microbiology.