During language comprehension, what guides how wedistinguish between objective facts and subjective opinions?Our three experiments investigate whether people’s ability todetect subjective content – which we indicated by means ofopinion-conveying adjectives (e.g. amazing, frustrating) – ismodulated by the adjective’s structural position. Our resultsindicate that altering the linguistic structure of a sentenceinfluences our perception of how subjective it is: Even whenthe basic information being conveyed is held constant,packaging this information in different ways elicits differentlevels of perceived subjectivity. When a subjective adjectiveoccurs in a structural position associated with newinformation, the text is rated as more subjective compared to atext that conveys the same basic information but has the sameadjective in a position associated with already-knowninformation. This suggests that the difference between factand opinion, or at least our ability to recognize opinion-basedinformation, can be distorted by linguistic packaging.

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus two (SARS-CoV-2), which causes the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19), has infected patients worldwide. Physicians have increasingly identified cutaneous findings as a significant clinical manifestation of COVID-19. In this review, we describe the clinical presentation, onset, duration, associated symptoms, treatment, and outcome of cutaneous manifestations thus far reported to be related to COVID-19. We have included data from 63 studies and subdivided reported cutaneous manifestations into the categories of viral exanthem, urticarial, vesicular, chilblains/chilblains-like, non-chilblains vasculopathy-related, pityriasis rosea-like, erythema multiforme-like, Kawasaki/Kawasaki-like disease, and others. Physicians should be aware of the known common cutaneous manifestations of COVID-19 and future research is required to better understand the pathophysiology and prognosis of each COVID-19-related skin manifestation.

Short tandem repeats (STRs) have been implicated in a variety of complex traits in humans. However, genome-wide studies of the effects of STRs on gene expression thus far have had limited power to detect associations and provide insights into putative mechanisms. Here, we leverage whole-genome sequencing and expression data for 17 tissues from the Genotype-Tissue Expression Project to identify more than 28,000 STRs for which repeat number is associated with expression of nearby genes (eSTRs). We use fine-mapping to quantify the probability that each eSTR is causal and characterize the top 1,400 fine-mapped eSTRs. We identify hundreds of eSTRs linked with published genome-wide association study signals and implicate specific eSTRs in complex traits, including height, schizophrenia, inflammatory bowel disease and intelligence. Overall, our results support the hypothesis that eSTRs contribute to a range of human phenotypes, and our data should serve as a valuable resource for future studies of complex traits.

The “job talk” is a standard element of faculty recruiting. How audiences treat candidates for faculty positions during job talks could have disparate impact on protected groups, including women. We annotated 156 job talks from five engineering and science departments for 13 categories of questions and comments. All departments were ranked in the top 10 by US News & World Report. We find that differences in the number, nature, and total duration of audience questions and comments are neither material nor statistically significant. For instance, the median difference (by gender) in the duration of questioning ranges from zero to less than two minutes in the five departments. Moreover, in some departments, candidates who were interrupted more often were more likely to be offered a position, challenging the premise that interruptions are necessarily prejudicial. These results are specific to the departments and years covered by the data, but they are broadly consistent with previous research, which found differences comparable in magnitude. However, those studies concluded that the (small) differences were statistically significant. We present evidence that the nominal statistical significance is an artifact of using inappropriate hypothesis tests. We show that it is possible to calibrate those tests to obtain a proper P-value using randomization.