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There are plenty of good reasons behind the recent trend of schools banning cell phones and other digital technology. Teachers at phone-free schools report that students are more attentive in class and more social at lunchtime, and less anxious because they’re no longer worried about being caught on camera. More than 30 states have now banned phones.
But some students actually learn better with technology, like Soraya Martin, a ninth grader with dyslexia in Concord, Calif. Soraya had struggled to keep up with reading and writing. But last school year she started using tech that lets her listen to books instead of reading them, dictate rather than type, and take photos of notes on the board. Soraya’s grades improved. "It made me feel like … 'I can do this, I can do school and I can be good at it,” she told NPR’s Jonaki Mehta.
Advocates for students with disabilities worry kids like her are getting left behind as new laws remove phones, laptops and tablets from classrooms.
There are more than 8 million disabled students in the United States, a growing number. Many rely on assistive technology to get through the school day.
"My concern is that that's a really fast period of time for this to happen," says Lindsay Jones, CEO of the Center for Applied Special Technology, an education research nonprofit that focuses on making learning environments accessible. Some of these laws do make exceptions to restrictions on screens for students with disabilities, but Jones says the laws could have unintended consequences.
Soraya Martin’s school started locking up students’ phones in pouches this year, and it's made things more complicated for her. She is supposed to receive accommodations and modifications at school, including assistive technology. But she has several different classes and teachers throughout the day, and she says some teachers are unfamiliar with her accommodations. She also feels singled out when she has to ask to get her phone out of its locked pouch for note-taking.
"We need educators, we need people with disabilities, we need assistive technology providers," to weigh in on how such policies are implemented in the classroom, says Jones. "That is going to be the best way forward for everyone to achieve their goals without trampling on people's rights."
Find out more about disability advocates’ concerns around school phone bans.
ICYMI: A brain-controlled system may help listeners with hearing loss cut through the noise |
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When you hear the words “mRNA vaccine” your mind might go straight to COVID-19. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine authorized for use in December 2020 and the Moderna vaccine that came soon after it were the first two vaccines to use messenger RNA, or mRNA, technology.
Now, mRNA technology is being used to create customized vaccines to prevent the recurrence of melanoma, as NPR’s Allison Aubrey reports. The skin cancer can be difficult to treat if it's not detected and treated early, and it can spread to other parts of the body.
The COVID-19 vaccines were the same for everyone. But to treat melanoma, each dose is tailored to a particular individual. To make this vaccine, named intismeran, scientists sequence a patient's tumor to identify up to 34 molecular fingerprints called neoantigens, and then encode them into a custom vaccine. When the vaccine is injected, the idea is that it trains the immune system to recognize and target those specific antigens, giving the immune system a blueprint to attack the cancer.
A recent clinical trial tested the new personalized vaccines in combination with the immunotherapy drug Keytruda. It included 157 patients who had had previous surgery to remove melanoma tumors. Some patients were given the combination of two drugs, and some were treated just with Keytruda. Five years after treatment, nearly 70% of patients who received the combination therapy remained cancer-free, compared with 49% of patients who received Keytruda alone.
"I think this is strong evidence that this therapy, when used in combination with immunotherapy, can demonstrably reduce the risk of dying from this disease," says Dr. Janice Mehnert, a melanoma specialist at NYU Langone Health who authored a paper analyzing the results.
One patient in the trial was Connie Franciosi, who received a late melanoma diagnosis in 2020. Now 80, she remains cancer-free, and spends her days gardening, volunteering at playing golf. "I have some good shots and some not-so-good shots, but I just enjoy the game," she says. "I have a very satisfying life."
Read the full story to learn more about this novel way to keep cancer from coming back.
Also: Public health experts dismayed by RFK Jr.'s defunding of mRNA vaccine research |
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