Matt Shipman

Researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed a new surgical tool that uses low-frequency intravascular ultrasound to break down blood clots that cause deep vein thrombosis. The tool is the first ultrasound “drill” that can be aimed straight ahead, allowing doctors to better target clots – which holds promise for significantly reducing treatment time. To date, the technology has been tested only in synthetic blood vessels. Existing intravascular ultrasound tools for clearing clots emit ultrasound waves laterally. This makes it harder to target clots exclusively, meaning that the ultrasound...

A recent analysis of research into how so-called “sexting” may affect sexual behavior finds that it has little impact on sexual activity – but highlights significant shortcomings in the research itself. “There’s a lot of work being done on the phenomenon of sexting and how it may influence sexual behavior, but the work is being done in a wide variety of populations by researchers from many different backgrounds,” says Kami Kosenko, an associate professor of communication at North Carolina State University and lead author of a paper on the meta-analysis. “We wanted to analyze this broad body of work...

A recent study by researchers at North Carolina State University and the Montreal Clinical Research Institute (IRCM) finds that “moral enhancement technologies” – which are discussed as ways of improving human behavior – are neither feasible nor wise, based on an assessment of existing research into these technologies. The idea behind moral enhancement technologies is to use biomedical techniques to make people more moral. For example, using drugs or surgical techniques to treat criminals who have exhibited moral defects. “There are existing ways that people have explored to manipulate morality, but the question we address in this paper is...

A study comparing acceptance rates of contributions from men and women in an open-source software community finds that, overall, women’s contributions tend to be accepted more often than men’s – but when a woman’s gender is identifiable, they are rejected more often. “There are a number of questions and concerns related to gender bias in computer programming, but this project was focused on one specific research question: To what extent does gender bias exist when pull requests are judged on GitHub?” says Emerson Murphy-Hill, corresponding author of a paper on the study and an associate professor of computer science...

A new study of military veterans who went through trauma finds that those veterans who have related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are also more likely to experience “post-traumatic growth” – such as an increased appreciation of life, awareness of new possibilities and enhanced inner strength. “There’s been a lot of attention paid to PTSD in our military population, but very little research on post-traumatic growth,” says Sarah Desmarais, an associate professor of psychology at North Carolina State University and author of a paper on the new study. “But these findings are important, because they show that the way veterans...

A new study from North Carolina State University finds a significant shortfall in the amount of “refuge” cropland being planted in North Carolina – likely increasing the rate at which crop pests will evolve the ability to safely devour genetically engineered Bt crops. However, the study also identified actions that may make farmers more likely to plant refuge crops in the future. For about 20 years, growers have made use of Bt crops to limit crop damage from pests. Bt crops, including corn, are genetically engineered to produce proteins from the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) bacterium. These proteins are harmless...

Researchers from North Carolina State University, Boston University and George Mason University have developed a Bitcoin-compatible system that could make it significantly more difficult for observers to identify or track the parties involved in any given Bitcoin transaction. Bitcoin was initially conceived as a way for people to exchange money anonymously. But then it was discovered that anyone could track all Bitcoin transactions and often identify the parties involved. Bitcoin operates by giving each user a unique public key, which is a string of numbers. Users can transmit money in the form of digital bitcoins from one public key...