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Stateline Editors Picks; What We're Reading: Top State Stories 10/26
Voters in New York City waited hours to cast ballots during the first time early voting has been allowed in the state in a presidential election. Recent mishaps involving mail-in ballots seemed to drive many voters to the polls. Massachusetts acknowledged it has not been able to determine the source of infection in about half of COVID-19 cases, an information gap that epidemiologists say could limit the ability to respond to outbreaks and control transmission of the disease. The Trump campaign and Nevada Republicans asked a state judge to stop the count of Las Vegas-area mail-in ballots, alleging that “meaningful observation” of signature-checking is impossible in the state’s biggest and most Democratic-leaning county. more »
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Scientists Use Gene Therapy and A Novel Light-sensing Protein to Restore Vision in Mice; NIH-funded therapy will now be tested in humans
A newly developed light-sensing protein called the MCO1 opsin restores vision in blind mice when attached to retina bipolar cells using gene therapy. The National Eye Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, provided a Small Business Innovation Research grant to Nanoscope, LLC for development of MCO1. The company is planning a U.S. clinical trial for later this year. “The beauty of our strategy is its simplicity,” said Samarendra Mohanty, Ph.D., Nanoscope founder and corresponding author of a report on the mouse study that appears today in Nature Gene Therapy. “Bipolar cells are downstream from the photoreceptors, so when the MCO1 opsin gene is added to bipolar cells in a retina with nonfunctioning photoreceptors, light sensitivity is restored.” ... However, no one knows how the restored vision will compare to normal vision. more »
A GAO* Report: Workplace Sexual Harassment; Experts Suggest Expanding Data Collection to Improve Understanding of Prevalence and Costs
After filing sexual harassment charges or engaging in other protected activity, employees may experience retaliation, such as firing or demotion, and EEOC data show that retaliation charges constitute a growing portion of its workload. EEOC's planning documents highlight its intention to address retaliation and use charge data to inform its outreach to employers. However, while EEOC can review electronic copies of individual charges for details, such as whether a previously filed sexual harassment charge led to a retaliation charge, its data system cannot aggregate this information across all charges. more »
US Presidential Debates: Three Studies Journalists Should Know About (And The Public!)
Kenneth Winneg and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, American Behavioral Scientist, 2017: In this study, University of Pennsylvania researchers look at whether people gained knowledge about policy issues and changed their minds about the candidates after watching televised presidential debates in 2016. What the two scholars learned: While debate watchers gained knowledge about policies, their assessment of candidates’ qualifications did not change. Neither did their opinions of whether individual candidates, if elected, would threaten the well-being of the nation.
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