The Association for Computing Machinery’s global Technology Policy Council has released “TechBrief: Government Digital Transformation.” It is the latest in a series of TechBriefs—short technical bulletins that present scientifically grounded perspectives on the impact and policy implications of specific technological developments in computing.

More than 50% of lung-transplant recipients experience a rejection of their new lung within five years of receiving it, yet the reason why this is such a prevalent complication has remained a medical mystery. 

Now, a new Northwestern Medicine study has found that, following transplant and in chronic disease states, abnormal cells emerge and “conversations” between them drives the development of lung damage and transplant rejection.  

These findings not only help answer why rejection occurs, but they also have spurred immediate exploration of new drugs to treat transplant rejection and other lung-scarring diseases.

A new study in Nature reveals that patients with advanced lung or skin cancer who received a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine within 100 days of starting immunotherapy drugs lived significantly longer than those who did not get the vaccine, researchers have found.

In her book “Sonic Socialism: Crisis and Care in Pandemic Hanoi” (University of California Press, 2025), Christina Schwenkel, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, explores how the Vietnamese government used both old and new media technologies to inform, regulate, and connect people during the pandemic.

Patients with cancer who received mRNA-based COVID vaccines within 100 days of starting immune checkpoint therapy were twice as likely to be alive three years after beginning treatment, according to a new study led by researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Patients with advanced lung or skin cancer who received a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine within 100 days of starting immunotherapy drugs lived significantly longer than those who did not get the vaccine, researchers have found.

At least eight bat species commute or forage over pig farms in Northern Italy, and the frequent absence of physical barriers and biosafety measures preventing contact between bats or bat feces and pigs could increase exposure risks to the diverse coronaviruses that circulate in these species

During the Covid-19 pandemic, there was an unexpected increase in the number of cases of type 1 diabetes in Sweden, particularly among children under five and young adult men. The infection accelerated the onset of diabetes among children between the ages of five and nine.

Researchers from the Department of Microbiology, School of Clinical Medicine, LKS Faculty of Medicine of the University of Hong Kong (HKUMed) and the InnoHK Centre for Virology, Vaccinology and Therapeutics (CVVT), in collaboration with Sichuan University, have discovered a powerful bispecific inhibitor capable of combating all existing human-pathogenic coronaviruses, including those resistant to existing treatments like Paxlovid. This promising inhibitor, named TMP1, offers hope for more effective and resilient treatments against future outbreaks. A patent has been filed for further exploration in clinical applications. The study’s findings were published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Communications.

Many traditional metapopulation models often overlook the spread of infectious disease through commuting, because they are designed primarily for migration, so in the journal Chaos, researchers from South Korea introduce a Commuter Metapopulation Model to include daily mobility patterns. The model was used to simulate the spread of COVID-19 with actual commuting data, revealing it could better capture spatial variety in outbreak patterns.