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Thanksgiving is often a time for thinking about your belly. For those with an inflammatory bowel diseases like ulcerative colitis, feasting can be associated with stress, even when food isn’t a trigger for the painful symptoms. New research in mice suggests that certain foods — especially those high in tryptophan, like turkey, pork, nuts and seeds — could reduce the risk of a colitis flare. The findings point to a noninvasive method of improving long-term colitis management, if the results are validated in people.
“Although there are some treatments for ulcerative colitis, not everyone responds to them,” says senior author Sangwon Kim, Ph.D., an assistant professor of immunology at Thomas Jefferson University. “This disease has a huge impact on quality of life, and can lead to surgery to remove the colon or cancer.” The research was published last week in Nature Communications.
Since ulcerative colitis is caused by inflammation of the inner lining of the colon and rectum, Dr. Kim and his colleagues looked for ways to cool down the inflamed tissue. They focused on a group of immune cells called T-regulatory (T-reg) cells, which can help break the cycle of inflammation. If they could get more T-reg cells to the colon, perhaps they could reduce the inflammation that causes colitis.
Dr. Kim’s team thought about how to attract the T-reg cells, and found a specific receptors on the surface of T-reg cells that acts like a magnet for the colon. The more of this receptor, called CPR15, the T-reg cells have, the more strongly they’re attracted to the colon. So they searched for molecules that could make T-reg cells produce more GPR15 to turn up the power of the magnet. They found tryptophan — or one of the molecules that tryptophan breaks down into in the body — could increase these receptors called GPR15.
To test whether these molecules could control colitis, the researchers supplemented tryptophan in the diet of mice over a period of two weeks. They saw a doubling in the amount of inflammation-suppressing T-reg cells in the colon tissue compared to mice that weren’t fed extra tryptophan. Dr. Kim’s team also saw a reduction in colitis symptoms. What’s more, the effects seemed to last for at least a week after tryptophan was removed from the diet. “In human time that might translate to about a month of benefit,” explained Dr. Kim who is also a research at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center — Jefferson Health.
However, when tryptophan was given to mice during a colitis flare, it provided little benefit, suggesting this dietary change might only be effective at preventing future flares rather than treating them.
In a chance finding, while looking for molecules that could increase GPR15, the researchers also stumbled across a molecule that helps explain why smoking seems to be protective against colitis. Researchers have long observed that people who smoke cigarettes have a lower incidence of ulcerative colitis than the general public. Dr. Kim’s team found a molecule that is prevalent in smoke — from cigarettes and barbeque alike — that can also increase GPR15 levels on T-reg cells “Although both might help protect against colitis, tryptophan is obviously the much safer and healthier option,” says Dr. Kim.
In the future, the researchers plan to test whether these results can be translated to people with colitis. Tryptophan supplement is considered safe, as long as the dose doesn’t exceed 100 milligrams per day. Using the mouse data as a guide, Dr. Kim expects that 100 milligrams could be enough to see an effect in humans, and is planning further testing in clinical trials.

Scientists have discovered that bacteria can create something like memories about when to form strategies that can cause dangerous infections in people, such as resistance to antibiotics and bacterial swarms when millions of bacteria come together on a single surface. The discovery — which has potential applications for preventing and combatting bacterial infections and addressing antibiotic-resistant bacteria — relates to a common chemical element bacterial cells can use to form and pass along these memories to their progeny over later generations.
Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin found that E. coli bacteria use iron levels as a way to store information about different behaviors that can then be activated in response to certain stimuli.
The findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Scientists had previously observed that bacteria that had a prior experience of swarming (moving on a surface as a collective using flagella) improve subsequent swarming performance. The UT-led research team set out to learn why. Bacteria don’t have neurons, synapses or nervous systems, so any memories are not like the ones of blowing out candles at a childhood birthday party. They are more like information stored on a computer.
“Bacteria don’t have brains, but they can gather information from their environment, and if they have encountered that environment frequently, they can store that information and quickly access it later for their benefit,” said Souvik Bhattacharyya, the lead author and a provost early career fellow in the Department of Molecular Biosciences at UT.
It all comes back to iron, one of the most abundant elements on Earth. Singular and free-floating bacteria have varying levels of iron. Scientists observed that bacterial cells with lower levels of iron were better swarmers. In contrast, bacteria that formed biofilms, dense, sticky mats of bacteria on solid surfaces, had high levels of iron in their cells. Bacteria with antibiotic tolerance also had balanced levels of iron. These iron memories persist for at least four generations and disappear by the seventh generation.
“Before there was oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere, early cellular life was utilizing iron for a lot of cellular processes. Iron is not only critical in the origin of life on Earth, but also in the evolution of life,” Bhattacharyya said. “It makes sense that cells would utilize it in this way.”
Researchers theorize that when iron levels are low, bacterial memories are triggered to form a fast-moving migratory swarm to seek out iron in the environment. When iron levels are high, memories indicate this environment is a good place to stick around and form a biofilm.
“Iron levels are definitely a target for therapeutics because iron is an important factor in virulence,” Bhattacharyya said. “Ultimately, the more we know about bacterial behavior, the easier it is combat them.”
The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Rasika Harshey, a professor of molecular biosciences and Mary M. Betzner Morrow Centennial Chair in Microbiology, is the senior corresponding author on the paper. Nabin Bhattarai, Dylan M. Pfannenstiel and Brady Wilkins, along with Abhyudai Singh of University of Delaware, also contributed to the research.

Neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s, affect millions of people in the United States, and the cost of caring for people who live with these conditions adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
Now, researchers from The University of Texas at El Paso may potentially have found a solution in used coffee grounds — a material that is discarded from homes and businesses around the world every day.
A team led by Jyotish Kumar, a doctoral student in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and overseen by Mahesh Narayan, Ph.D., a professor and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in the same department, found that caffeic-acid based Carbon Quantum Dots (CACQDs), which can be derived from spent coffee grounds, have the potential to protect brain cells from the damage caused by several neurodegenerative diseases — if the condition is triggered by factors such as obesity, age and exposure to pesticides and other toxic environmental chemicals. Their work is described in a paper published in the November issue of the journal Environmental Research.
“Caffeic-acid based Carbon Quantum Dots have the potential to be transformative in the treatment of neurodegenerative disorders,” Kumar said. “This is because none of the current treatments resolve the diseases; they only help manage the symptoms. Our aim is to find a cure by addressing the atomic and molecular underpinnings that drive these conditions.”
Neurodegenerative diseases are primarily characterized by the loss of neurons or brain cells. They inhibit a person’s ability to perform basic functions such as movement and speech, as well as more complicated tasks including bladder and bowel functions, and cognitive abilities.
The disorders, when they are in their early stages and are caused by lifestyle or environmental factors, share several traits. These include elevated levels of free radicals — harmful molecules that are known to contribute to other diseases such as cancer, heart disease and vision loss — in the brain, and the aggregation of fragments of amyloid-forming proteins that can lead to plaques or fibrils in the brain.
Kumar and his colleagues found that CACQDs were neuroprotective across test tube experiments, cell lines and other models of Parkinson’s disease when the disorder was caused by a pesticide called paraquat. The CACQDs, the team observed, were able to remove free radicals or prevent them from causing damage and inhibited the aggregation of amyloid protein fragments without causing any significant side effects.

The team hypothesizes that in humans, in the very early stage of a condition such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, a treatment based on CACQDs can be effective in preventing full-on disease.
“It is critical to address these disorders before they reach the clinical stage,” Narayan said. “At that point, it is likely too late. Any current treatments that can address advanced symptoms of neurodegenerative disease are simply beyond the means of most people. Our aim is to come up with a solution that can prevent most cases of these conditions at a cost that is manageable for as many patients as possible.”
Caffeic acid belongs to a family of compounds called polyphenols, which are plant-based compounds known for their antioxidant, or free radical-scavenging properties. Caffeic acid is unique because it can penetrate the blood-brain barrier and is thus able to exert its effects upon the cells inside the brain, Narayan said.
The process the team uses to extract CACQDs from used coffee grounds is considered “green chemistry,” which means it is environmentally friendly. In their lab, the team “cooks” samples of coffee grounds at 200 degrees for four hours to reorient the caffeic acid’s carbon structure and form CACQDs. The sheer abundance of coffee grounds is what makes the process both economical and sustainable, Narayan said.
The research was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. In addition to Kumar, dozens of graduate and undergraduate UTEP students have worked on this project with Narayan including Sofia Delgado a former UTEP undergraduate student who is now pursuing her Ph.D. at Yale University.
The researchers will now seek additional funding to support further testing.
Narayan and Kumar both said they know the finish line is still far off. But, for now, they are moving forward on a journey that may ultimately lead to a medication — a pill, perhaps — that may prevent the vast majority of neurodegenerative disorders that are caused by factors other than genetics.

Published15 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, PA MediaBy Harrison Jones BBC NewsWhen the government’s chief scientific adviser started a “brain dump” of diary entries on the Covid crisis in 2020, he says he did not expect – or want – it to be published. Instead, Sir Patrick Vallance said his private notes on the UK’s pandemic response were intended to protect his mental health at the end of long days helping ministers.The high-profile scientist is far from alone among diarists in predominantly writing for themselves as a kind of therapeutic ritual. In the modern world – often seen as overly fast-paced and digital – could something as simple as keeping a handwritten diary help clear our heads?Julia Samuel, a psychotherapist and author of Grief Works, believes so.’Good for our immune system’She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday: “It’s very well evidenced that when we write what we feel we release our emotions as we would when we talk. “In fact, writing a journal is as effective as talking therapies – it helps regulate emotions, anxieties and stress, it even improves our immune system, our mood and it often problem-solves.”Ms Samuel added that whether diaries are meant to be read subsequently or not, “it is the release of emotion and the clarification by writing that calms us”.That would suggest that diarists writing in the knowledge – or perhaps hope – that their thoughts will be read by others can also benefit from the soothing effect it can have. Image source, BBC/Mighty ProductionsYet former doctor Adam Kay says writing for a wider audience changes the way you explain things.”My diaries are now an awful lot better written, but they are less helpful for me psychologically because I know full well that at some point I am going to be emailing them off to a publisher,” he told Today.His entries, which he first tentatively read out at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2016, have since been turned into a book called This Is Going to Hurt and an award-winning TV series with the same name.The author began writing a diary with the intention of his thoughts remaining private. Mr Kay believes the diary was his way of coping amid the pressures of a hectic working life. What makes a truly great diary?A point of view: The art of the diaryHe joins a long line of diarists who have captured the public imagination, from Samuel Pepys’ works in the 1600s to the likes of Anne Frank, Alan Clark, Tony Benn, Sasha Swire, Alan Rickman, Captain Scott, Nella Last and Lena Mukhina.The late Queen’s private diary, were it ever to be published, would undoubtedly cause a huge stir, particularly since she reportedly placed significant importance on the entries. Image source, Getty ImagesTravis Elborough, the author of Our History of the 20th Century: As Told in Diaries, Journals and Letters, told BBC News that writing diaries can offer society, as well as individuals, benefits now and in the future.Alongside “being an outlet for creativity” for writers, he says diaries of the past can offer lessons about original responses to previous innovations.Mr Elborough says that often includes points “that more official sources fail to notice or simply neglect to mention.”Exeter University historian Alun Withey believes diaries can be “extraordinarily rich historical sources”, useful records of daily life or a reminder of memorable personal events.But there can also be negatives, like feeling guilty when you haven’t kept up to date, as Kathryn Carter explains to BBC News.The Wilfrid Laurier University professor, who teaches courses on autobiography and life writing, argues that diaries are not really ever private, regardless of what the author intends.”I would suggest that, quite aside from the long history of diary writing as a fairly public activity, it is not always intended to remain private even in contemporary times,” she explains.Mr Elborough also highlights how people reading a diary critical of them can be upset, a point echoed by Dr Withey, who adds that regular writing requires effort and discipline. Image source, Getty ImagesThe historian also cautions that some diaries can deliberately exclude or include things for the author’s own ends.What has Sir Patrick Vallance said in his diaries?Scientists not told of Eat Out to Help Out – VallanceWhat is the UK Covid inquiry and how long will it take?But Sir Patrick explained to the Covid inquiry that he felt a few minutes jotting down some thoughts each evening helped him “concentrate on the following day”.He said he then put his diary in a drawer and “never looked” at it again.Yet his notes ended up adding to a host of disclosures at the Covid inquiry, with those personal thoughts morphing into damning public criticisms of the government’s pandemic response.Whether he found that transformation therapeutic or not may be something he only tells his diary. How does keeping a diary help you? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:WhatsApp: +44 7756 165803Tweet: @BBC_HaveYourSayUpload pictures or videoPlease read our terms & conditions and privacy policy

If you are reading this page and can’t see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission. More on this storyWhat has Sir Patrick Vallance said in his diaries?Published1 day agoWhat makes a truly great diary?Published8 September 2009Dear diaryPublished31 December 2010

Many of the more than 200 people seized by Hamas when it raided Israel had serious medical conditions. Some were badly injured in the attack. Doctors say they need medical care urgently.When armed Hamas terrorists invaded her home on Oct. 7, Karina Engelbert was still recovering from a double mastectomy and breast reconstruction surgery that had gone terribly awry. She was weak and easily fatigued, and a buildup of painful scar tissue on her chest caused tightness, limiting her mobility.The militants kidnapped Ms. Engelbert, 51, and her entire family, including her husband, Ronen Engel, 54, and their daughters, 18-year-old Mika and 11-year-old Yuval, snatching them from the safe room inside their home on the Nir Oz kibbutz and taking them to the Gaza Strip, where they have been held for over 40 days.“The last I heard from my sister was on that black sabbath at 9:30 in the morning, and she spoke very quietly, and she said, ‘They’re inside the house,’” Ms. Engelbert’s brother Diego Engelbert said in an interview.He has not received any information about his sister’s condition, and she has not been visited by the International Red Cross, he said.“We don’t know if she’s getting any medical treatment, if anyone is taking care of her, if she is getting any pain relief or any of the medication she needs to keep the cancer from coming back,” Mr. Engelbert said.Ms. Engelbert is one of about 240 hostages abducted from Israel, many of whom need urgent medical attention.They range in age from infants to octogenarians, and include a Thai foreign worker who was nine months pregnant on Oct. 7 and may have given birth in captivity. There are many kibbutz members in their mid-80s who were taking medications for chronic conditions like high blood pressure, and younger adults who have both psychiatric conditions and medical conditions that can be fatal if left untreated.And then there were those who sustained potentially life-threatening injuries in the raid itself, which killed an estimated 1,200 people, most of them civilians.Rachel Goldberg said her son, Hersch Goldberg-Polin, a 23-year-old American citizen, lost his hand during the Oct. 7 attack.Ammar Awad/ReutersMs. Engelbert is one of three women abducted who had breast cancer. Another was 65-year-old Yehudit Waiss, whose body was discovered by Israeli soldiers as they closed in on a hospital in Gaza last week. Israeli officials say she and Noa Marciano, a 19-year-old female soldier, were murdered by their captors. And a few days ago, Hamas said that an 86-year-old kibbutznik, Arye Zalmanovich, had died after suffering a heart attack during the Israeli bombings of Gaza.Most elderly captives depend on medications to manage high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease, according to Hagai Levine, an Israeli physician who has been working with the families of the hostages.Among the roughly 40 children being held, most of whom are girls, there is a 4-year-old boy whose growth is delayed and who takes a nutritional supplement because he is underweight, and the boy’s 10-month-old brother. A photo of the two redheads in the arms of their mother when they were abducted has been widely circulated.Some hostages now being held by Hamas were shot, beaten or otherwise wounded during the attack.Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 23-year-old American citizen, lost a hand to a grenade, gunfire or both, his family says. The redheaded children’s father, Yarden Bibas, was beaten on the head with a hammer, videos circulated by the militants show. Guy Iluz, 26, was shot, according to his mother, Doris Liber, who traveled from Israel to Capitol Hill to plead for help.Doris Liber after speaking about her son Guy Iluz, 26, to members of Congress in Washington earlier this month. Ms. Liber says her son was shot.Tom Brenner for The New York Times“They all need medical attention,” Dr. Levine said in an interview. “They are being held underground, without enough food and water, and with unceasing trauma, for more than 40 days. Even a minor injury could trigger an infection that could become life-threatening.”Families of the hostages have demanded that the International Committee of the Red Cross, or I.C.R.C., be allowed to visit their relatives and tend to the wounded and the sick, as guaranteed under the provisions of the Geneva Convention. So far, that has not happened.Red Cross officials say that the organization has been advocating on behalf of the hostages in Gaza, speaking both directly with Hamas and with other parties that may have influence on Hamas. So far, however, the Red Cross has been unable to visit them to check on their health or deliver medications, a spokeswoman said.“The I.C.R.C. cannot force its way in to where hostages are held,” said Alyona Synenko, a Jerusalem-based spokeswoman for the organization. “We can only visit them when agreements, including safe access, are in place.”Relatives of the hostages have campaigned relentlessly for their release, traveling around the world to meet with foreign officials, speaking with the media, addressing the United Nations, writing guest essays in newspapers and holding daily demonstrations in the newly named Hostages Square in front of the Tel Aviv Museum.On Saturday, families of hostages and thousands of their supporters concluded a five-day march to Jerusalem, where they plan to press the government to obtain the release of the captives. Many are furious with the Israeli government — and with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in particular — both about the failures that led to the Hamas incursion and the lack of support and regular communication with relatives about the status of hostage negotiations.Families of hostages and thousands of their supporters completing their march into Jerusalem on Saturday.Ilan Rosenberg/Reuters“We want the government to do everything possible to bring the hostages back — that has to be the top priority,” Tomer Keshet, Mr. Bibas’s cousin, said in an interview. “Yarden is wounded, and the baby isn’t even standing yet, he is barely crawling.”“We are so worried that the children were separated from their parents, that they are frightened, that they don’t have the right things to eat, and that that could have long-term repercussions,” Mr. Keshet said. “They are being held underground, hungry, not knowing what’s going on, hearing bombing and fighting and shouting in a language they don’t understand. We don’t know what condition they are in, or what condition they will be in when they come back, after this emotional trauma.”Although physicians generally refrain from discussing their patients’ medical conditions out of respect for privacy, several personal physicians of the hostages spoke out publicly last week to draw attention to their plight and stress the urgency of their situation.“In some cases, children were taken moments after watching their parents being brutally murdered,” said Dr. Zion Hagai, chairman of the Israel Medical Association. “They are not only forced to live with this trauma but to experience it in a strange, dark and scary place.”Speakers highlighted the cases of several particularly vulnerable hostages, among them Raz Ben Ami, 57, from the Be’eri kibbutz, who was being treated for neurosarcoidosis, a serious and rare disease that affects the brain, spinal cord or peripheral nerves, causing hearing and vision loss, confusion, agitation and other effects.Dr. Arnon Elizur spoke of a young patient, Yagil Yaakov, who has a life-threatening peanut allergy and could die in minutes if he were exposed to even trace amounts of peanut powder. Islamic Jihad, another militant group in the Gaza Strip, recently published a video of the boy, looking pale and thin, with dark shadows under his eyes.“I can’t imagine what is going through his mind when he is served food,” Dr. Elizur said. “Can he be certain it doesn’t contain trace amounts of peanuts? Every meal for him is like playing Russian roulette.”The son of another hostage, Haim Peri, said that his father had advanced heart disease.“He is an artist, a peace activist and a man who always fought for human rights,” said the son, Noam Peri. “He is a brave man, but at age 80, he is not a healthy man, and requires daily medications. He will not survive captivity for long.”A poster in Canada showing hostage Haim Peri, who is nearly 80 years old and has advanced heart disease, his family says.Alexis Aubin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Published21 NovemberShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Crown CopyrightBy Nick Triggle and Jim ReedBBC NewsScientists were not aware of Rishi Sunak’s Eat Out to Help Out scheme until it was announced, Sir Patrick Vallance has said.Sir Patrick – then the government’s chief scientific adviser – was giving evidence to the Covid inquiry about major decisions taken in the pandemic.He said it would have been “obvious” the hospitality scheme would cause an increase in transmission risk.He also said the then-PM Boris Johnson had been “bamboozled” by some science.He said the first lockdown at the start of the pandemic was imposed about a “week too late”.And he criticised the “lack of leadership” in the run-up to the second national lockdown in autumn 2020. In a witness statement released on Monday evening, he said there were times that he considered resigning.”Like many others I received abuse and threats and I was concerned for the wellbeing and safety of my family,” he said.”At times those factors did lead me to question whether I should continue.”I also found people breaking the lockdown rules very difficult and considered what I should do in response, but decided that I would help most by continuing with my job.”He also said Dominic Raab led more effectively than Mr Johnson when he was briefly put in charge of the pandemic response while the prime minister was in hospital with Covid.Sir Patrick was questioned for about five hours on Monday about decisions taken in and around Downing Street during the pandemic, and excerpts of his diary were read out.His close colleague Sir Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer and the UK government’s top medical adviser at the time the pandemic struck, is due to give evidence later on Tuesday.No involvementSir Patrick was asked about the Eat Out to Help Out scheme – a scheme devised by the then chancellor Mr Sunak to boost the hospitality sector in the post-lockdown summer of 2020 by offering diners a discount in cafes and restaurants.A section of Mr Sunak’s witness statement was read out in which he had said no-one had raised concerns with him about the scheme in the summer of 2020.But Sir Patrick said: “We didn’t see it before it was announced and I think others in the Cabinet Office also said they didn’t see it before it was formulated as policy. So we weren’t involved in the run-up to it.”He added: “I think it would have been very obvious to anyone that this inevitably would cause an increase in transmission risk, and I think that would have been known by ministers.”Asked about Mr Sunak’s understanding of the risks, Sir Patrick said: “If he was in the meetings, I can’t recall which meetings he was in. “But I’d be very surprised if any minister didn’t understand that these openings carried risk.”Becky Kummar, a spokesperson for Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK, said the evidence presented was “horrific”, accusing Mr Johnson and Mr Sunak of making “catastrophic decisions that led to the unnecessary loss of countless lives, crippled the NHS and plunged the country into even longer lockdowns”. “Our loved ones should have been able to trust that their government was prioritising saving life, and that’s why so many people believed that Eat Out to Help Out was safe. Instead masses of people almost certainly died because of Rishi Sunak’s callous and reckless attitude.”Sir Patrick also criticised some of the Treasury’s input into pandemic decision-making.What has Sir Patrick Vallance said in his diaries?What is the UK Covid inquiry and how long will it take?In a diary entry from October 2021, he described some economic predictions as being based on “no evidence, no transparency, pure dogma and wrong throughout”.When questioned on the remarks, he said they were probably made late at night in “frustration”, but he believes there was an “imbalance” between the transparency of economic and scientific advice during the pandemic.He added that the advice was often “not beloved” and advisers sometimes had to “work doubly hard to make sure that the science evidence and advice was being properly heard”.A diary entry mentioned that at one economics-based meeting Mr Sunak had said “it’s all about handling the scientists, not handling the virus”, without realising that Sir Chris Whitty was in the room.’Weak, indecisive PM’His diaries showed he was particularly critical of political decision-making in the run-up to the second national lockdown in the autumn of 2020.He wrote in his diary that by mid-October, Mr Johnson had become frustrated by talk of a second lockdown.He reports him as saying it was time to let it rip – as “most people who died have reached their time anyway”.The diary excerpts say that by late October, Mr Johnson had appeared to swing behind the idea of more restrictions, saying the numbers were “terrible”.”He is so inconsistent,” Sir Patrick writes, on 28 October. “We have a weak, indecisive PM.”Mr Johnson’s special adviser, Dominic Cummings, had said: “[Then Chancellor] Rishi [Sunak] thinks just let people die and that’s OK”, according to Sir Patrick’s diary.Sir Patrick wrote at the time: “This all feels like a complete lack of leadership.”Commenting on it now, Sir Patrick said he had been recording what must have been “quite a shambolic day”.Image source, HM TreasuryIn an entry written at the start of the pandemic, in May 2020, he wrote that Mr Johnson was “clearly bamboozled” by some of the science.He said it was hard work to make sure that the then-prime minister “had understood what a graph of a piece of data was saying”.But he adds that Mr Johnson wasn’t alone among world leaders in struggling to understand “complicated” data.Sir Patrick also revealed he had sometimes disagreed with the UK’s chief medical adviser, Prof Sir Chris Whitty, about whether to introduce restrictions, and that “sometimes [Sir Chris] was right”.However, he said his belief that the March 2020 lockdown came too late – which Sir Chris has disagreed with – had been vindicated.”This was an occasion when I think it’s clear that we should have gone earlier,” he said, meaning that the measures should have started a week sooner.Sir Chris’s remit included public health, so he had been more focused on the consequences to people’s health of restrictions, Sir Patrick said. And it had been “useful and helpful” to debate these with him inside government.Turning to events later in the year, Sir Patrick said more mistakes were made when some areas like Leicester and Liverpool were put into enhanced measures.”The temptation is always to make [the restrictions] as limited as possible – and then that fails because the surrounding areas immediately got overwhelmed,” he said.This had been seen very clearly in October 2020 under the tier system of regional restrictions, where “every MP” had argued their area should not be placed in a higher tier, with tougher rules on meeting up and opening businesses, Sir Patrick said.Sir Patrick also said of former health secretary Matt Hancock: “I think he had a habit of saying things which he didn’t have a basis for and he would say them too enthusiastically, too early, without the evidence to back them up, and then have to backtrack from them days later.”I don’t know to what extent that was sort of over-enthusiasm versus deliberate – I think a lot of it was over-enthusiasm. He definitely said things which surprised me because I knew that the evidence base wasn’t there.”When asked if this meant he “said things that weren’t true”, Sir Patrick answered “yes”.Did you lose someone close to you during the pandemic? Have you been following the inquiry? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:WhatsApp: +44 7756 165803Tweet: @BBC_HaveYourSayUpload pictures or videoPlease read our terms & conditions and privacy policy

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The dominant variant of the coronavirus has proved to be not only staggeringly infectious, but an evolutionary marvel.By November 2021, nearly two years after the coronavirus emerged in Wuhan and spread across the world, the surprises seemed to be over. More than four billion people had been vaccinated against the virus, and five million had died. Two new variants, known as Alpha and Delta, had surged and then ebbed. As Thanksgiving approached, many Americans were planning to resume traveling for the holiday.And then, the day after turkey, the pandemic delivered a big new surprise. Researchers in Botswana and South Africa alerted the world that a highly mutated version of the virus had emerged and was spreading fast. Omicron, as the World Health Organization called the variant, swiftly overtook other forms of the virus. It remains dominant now, on its second anniversary.In the two years since its emergence, Omicron has proved to be not only staggeringly infectious, but an evolutionary marvel, challenging many assumptions virologists had before the pandemic. It has given rise to an impressive number of descendants, which have become far more adept at evading immunity and finding new victims.“It was almost like there was another pandemic,” said Adam Lauring, a virologist at the University of Michigan.Dr. Lauring and other Omicron watchers are now trying to make sense of the past two years in order to prepare for the future. It’s possible that Omicron will become a permanent part of life, steadily mutating like seasonal influenza. But researchers warn that the virus still has the capacity to surprise us, especially if we stop paying close attention.When Omicron first came to light, the United States and other countries wrongly believed they could stop its spread by banning travel from South Africa. In reality, it had already spread far and wide. In a matter of days, Britain, Italy and Germany discovered Omicron in positive Covid tests.Travelers at O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg on Nov. 27, 2021, as travel bans were imposed on people coming from South Africa because of Omicron.João Silva/The New York TimesOmicron’s gift for spreading fast was the result of dozens of mutations. They altered the virus’s surface, so that antibodies produced by vaccines or previous infections could not stick tightly to it and prevent the virus from invading cells.“It was the first virus to figure out in a major way how to escape immunity,” said Dr. Jacob Lemieux, an infectious disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital.Dr. Lemieux and many other Omicron experts suspect that the variant gained its new mutations while infecting a single person with a weak immune system. Immunocompromised people can only fight off some of the coronaviruses in their bodies during an infection, allowing the ones that remain to acquire mutations that can thwart the immune system.“It becomes like a laboratory for virus evolution,” said Peter Markov, a virologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.As epidemiologists tracked the Omicron wave in late 2021, they saw a crucial difference from earlier surges. Compared with previous variants, Omicron put a smaller fraction of infected people in the hospital. One reason for that shift was that so many people had immunity to earlier forms of the coronavirus. Our immune defenses include not just antibodies, but special immune cells that can recognize and kill infected cells. This second line of defense held up even against Omicron, preventing many of the new infections from becoming severe.Still, Omicron caused so many new infections — the initial wave infected almost half of all Americans, according to one recent estimate — that it still unleashed a devastating wave of hospitalizations.The Omicron surge hit the United States and most other countries in early 2022. China managed to hold back the waves with its “zero Covid” policy, but protests against its brutality grew so intense that President Xi Jinping dropped it abruptly in November 2022. The floodgates opened: Within a few weeks, more than a billion Chinese people contracted Omicron, resulting in over a million deaths.A colorized scanning electron micrograph of a cell (red) infected with Omicron virus particles, yellow.NIAIDAs Omicron moved from person to person, its descendants gained more mutations. Sometimes two Omicron viruses would wind up in the same cell, which would produce new hybrid viruses with a mix of their genes. One of these so-called recombinations hit the jackpot by mixing together two sets of evasive mutations. The result was a new hybrid called XBB.XBB easily infected people, even those who had already been infected with Alpha, Delta or earlier forms of Omicron. As a result, XBB became dominant in the United States in early 2023.Vaccine makers tried to keep up with Omicron’s rapid evolution. In August 2022, the Food and Drug Administration authorized booster shots that targeted the BA.5 Omicron variant, which was then dominant. In September 2023, the agency authorized an XBB shot. But XBB is now ebbing as a menagerie of even more evasive variants has evolved.“Right now we’re in a period of chaos,” said Marc Johnson, a virologist at the University of Missouri.Several Omicron experts said the chaos might soon end. In August, a variant called BA.2.86 emerged with a host of new mutations — likely the result, once again, of evolution taking place in an immunocompromised person.At first, BA.2.86 did not seem to live up to its genetic potential, failing to spread fast. “If genetics was all that mattered, it would have gotten its own Greek letter,” said Thomas Peacock, a virologist at the Pirbright Institute in Woking, England. “But BA.2.86 was a bit of a damp squib.”Over the past few months, however, the BA.2.86 lineage seems to have kicked into high gear, gaining a mutation that allows it to evade even more antibodies. JN.1, as this mutated form is known, has become the most resistant version of the coronavirus. It appears to be growing quickly in France, and may soon spread to other countries.Vaccination in Phoenix at the end of 2021. As Omicron continues to evolve, epidemiologists still see a benefit to vaccinations, possibly saving up to 49,000 lives a year.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesIt is hard to predict the future path of a new variant like JN.1. Its success will depend on what kind of immune defenses it encounters while spreading from host to host. At the outset of the pandemic, things were simpler because no one had developed immunity to the coronavirus.“At the beginning, we were one big kindergarten,” said Michael Lässig, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Cologne.Today, in contrast, most people on Earth have immunity of one form or another, whether from a natural infection, vaccination or both. “The virus sees a much more complex ecosystem,” Dr. Lässig said.This worldwide immunity means that a smaller fraction of people will die than did at the start of the pandemic. Still, Omicron’s toll remains heavy. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that between October 2022 and September 2023, more than 80,000 people died of Covid, more than eight times as many as those who died of influenza.As Omicron continues to evolve, epidemiologists still see a benefit to vaccinations. Justin Lessler, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, and his colleagues recently ran a projection of future Covid infections and concluded that annual vaccination campaigns could save up to 49,000 lives a year.Those vaccines will be more effective if they’re updated to keep up with the evolving virus. But Katrina Lythgoe, a biologist at Oxford University, worries that their development will slow down as governments stop paying for genetic sequencing of new variants.“If we don’t sequence things, then we won’t see them,” she said.

Time flows in a continuous stream — yet our memories are divided into separate episodes, all of which become part of our personal narrative. How emotions shape this memory formation process is a mystery that science has only recently begun to unravel. The latest clue comes from UCLA psychologists, who have discovered that fluctuating emotions elicited by music helps form separate and durable memories.
The study, published in Nature Communications, used music to manipulate the emotions of volunteers performing simple tasks on a computer. The researchers found that the dynamics of people’s emotions molded otherwise neutral experiences into memorable events.
“Changes in emotion evoked by music created boundaries between episodes that made it easier for people to remember what they had seen and when they had seen it,” said lead author Mason McClay, a doctoral student in psychology at UCLA. “We think this finding has great therapeutic promise for helping people with PTSD and depression.”
As time unfolds, people need to group information, since there is too much to remember (and not all of it useful). Two processes appear to be involved in turning experiences into memories over time: The first integrates our memories, compressing and linking them into individualized episodes; the other expands and separates each memory as the experience recedes into the past. There’s a constant tug of war between integrating memories and separating them, and it’s this push and pull that helps to form distinct memories. This flexible process helps a person understand and find meaning in their experiences, as well as retain information.
“It’s like putting items into boxes for long-term storage,” said corresponding author David Clewett, an assistant professor of psychology at UCLA. “When we need to retrieve a piece of information, we open the box that holds it. What this research shows is that emotions seem to be an effective box for doing this sort of organization and for making memories more accessible.”
A similar effect may help explain why Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” has been so effective at creating vivid and lasting memories: Her concert contains meaningful chapters that can be opened and closed to relive highly emotional experiences.
McClay and Clewett, along with Matthew Sachs at Columbia University, hired composers to create music specifically designed to elicit joyous, anxious, sad or calm feelings of varied intensity. Study participants listened to the music while imagining a narrative to accompany a series of neutral images on a computer screen, such as a watermelon slice, a wallet or a soccer ball. They also used the computer mouse to track moment-to-moment changes in their feelings on a novel tool developed for tracking emotional reactions to music.

Then, after performing a task meant to distract them, participants were shown pairs of images again in a random order. For each pair, they were asked which image they had seen first, then how far apart in time they felt they had seen the two objects. Pairs of objects that participants had seen immediately before and after a change of emotional state — whether of high, low, or medium intensity — were remembered as having occurred farther apart in time compared to images that did not span an emotional change. Participants also had worse memory for the order of items that spanned emotional changes compared to items they had viewed while in a more stable emotional state. These effects suggest that a change in emotion resulting from listening to music was pushing new memories apart.
“This tells us that intense moments of emotional change and suspense, like the musical phrases in Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ could be remembered as having lasted longer than less emotive experiences of similar length,” McClay said. “Musicians and composers who weave emotional events together to tell a story may be imbuing our memories with a rich temporal structure and longer sense of time.”
The direction of the change in emotion also mattered. Memory integration was best — that is, memories of sequential items felt closer together in time, and participants were better at recalling their order — when the shift was toward more positive emotions. On the other hand, a shift toward more negative emotions (from calmer to sadder, for example) tended to separate and expand the mental distance between new memories.
Participants were also surveyed the following day to assess their longer-term memory, and showed better memory for items and moments when their emotions changed, especially if they were experiencing intense positive emotions. This suggests that feeling more positive and energized can fuse different elements of an experience together in memory.
Sachs emphasized the utility of music as an intervention technique.
“Most music-based therapies for disorders rely on the fact that listening to music can help patients relax or feel enjoyment, which reduces negative emotional symptoms,” he said. The benefits of music-listening in these cases are therefore secondary and indirect. Here, we are suggesting a possible mechanism by which emotionally dynamic music might be able to directly treat the memory issues that characterize such disorders.”
Clewett said these findings could help people reintegrate the memories that have caused post-traumatic stress disorder.
“If traumatic memories are not stored away properly, their contents will come spilling out when the closet door opens, often without warning. This is why ordinary events, such as fireworks, can trigger flashbacks of traumatic experiences, such as surviving a bombing or gunfire,” he said. “We think we can deploy positive emotions, possibly using music, to help people with PTSD put that original memory in a box and reintegrate it, so that negative emotions don’t spill over into everyday life.”
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, UCLA and Columbia University.

When Cara Ocobock was a young child, she often wondered at the images in movies, books, comics and cartoons portraying prehistoric men and women as such: “man the hunter” with spear in hand, accompanied by “woman the gatherer” with a baby strapped to her back and a basket of crop seeds in hand.
“This was what everyone was used to seeing,” Ocobock said. “This was the assumption that we’ve all just had in our minds and that was carried through in our museums of natural history.”
Many years later, Ocobock, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and director of the Human Energetics Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame, found herself as a human biologist studying physiology and prehistoric evidence and discovering that many of these conceptions about early women and men weren’t quite accurate. The accepted reconstruction of human evolution assumed males were biologically superior, but that interpretation wasn’t telling the whole story.
Relying on both physiological and archaeological evidence, Ocobock and her research partner, Sarah Lacy, an anthropologist with expertise in biological archaeology at the University of Delaware, recently published two studies simultaneously in the journal American Anthropologist. Their joint research, coming from these two angles, found that not only did prehistoric women engage in the practice of hunting, but their female anatomy and biology would have made them intrinsically better suited for it.
Of her and her co-author’s dual-pronged research, which was the cover story for the November issue of Scientific American, Ocobock said, “Rather than viewing it as a way of erasing or rewriting history, our studies are trying to correct the history that erased women from it.”
Female physiology and estrogen, the ‘unsung hero of life’
In their physiological study, the two researchers explained that prehistoric females were quite capable of performing the arduous physical task of hunting prey and were likely able to hunt successfully over prolonged periods of time. From a metabolic standpoint, Ocobock explained, the female body is better suited for endurance activity, “which would have been critical in early hunting because they would have had to run the animals down into exhaustion before actually going in for the kill.”
Two huge contributors to that enhanced metabolism are hormones — in this case, estrogen and adiponectin, which are typically present in higher quantities in female bodies than in male. These two hormones play a critical role in enabling the female body to modulate glucose and fat, a function that is key in athletic performance.

Estrogen, in particular, helps regulate fat metabolism by encouraging the body to use its stored fat for energy before using up its carbohydrate stores. “Since fat contains more calories than carbs do, it’s a longer, slower burn,” Ocobock explained, “which means that the same sustained energy can keep you going longer and can delay fatigue.”
Estrogen also protects the body’s cells from damage during heat exposure due to extreme physical activity. “Estrogen is really the unsung hero of life, in my mind,” Ocobock said. “It is so important for cardiovascular and metabolic health, brain development and injury recovery.”
Adiponectin also amplifies fat metabolism while sparing carbohydrate and/or protein metabolism, allowing the body to stay the course during extended periods, especially over great distances. In this way, adiponectin is able to protect the muscles from breaking down and keeps them in better condition for sustained exercise, Ocobock explained.
The female body structure itself is another element Ocobock and Lacy found to be of advantage in terms of endurance and effectiveness for prehistoric hunters. “With the typically wider hip structure of the female, they are able to rotate their hips, lengthening their steps,” Ocobock detailed. “The longer steps you can take, the ‘cheaper’ they are metabolically, and the farther you can get, faster.
“When you look at human physiology this way, you can think of women as the marathon runners versus men as the powerlifters.”
Archaeology tells more of the story of ‘woman the hunter’
Several archaeological findings indicate prehistoric women not only shared in the resulting injuries of the dangerous business of close-contact hunting, but that it was an activity held in high esteem and valued by them. “We have constructed Neandertal hunting as an up-close-and-personal style of hunting,” Ocobock said, “meaning that hunters would often have to get up underneath their prey in order to kill them. As such, we find that both males and females have the same resulting injuries when we look at their fossil records.”

Ocobock described those traumatic injuries as being similar to those received by modern-day rodeo clowns — injuries to the head and chest where they were kicked by the animal, or to the limbs where they were bitten or received a fracture. “We find these patterns and rates of wear and tear equally in both women and men,” she said. “So they were both participating in ambush-style hunting of large game animals.”
Second, Ocobock said, there is evidence of early female hunters in the Holocene period in Peru where females were buried with hunting weapons. “You don’t often get buried with something unless it was important to you or was something that you used frequently in your life.
“Furthermore, we have no reason to believe that prehistoric women abandoned their hunting while pregnant, breastfeeding or carrying children,” Ocobock added, “nor do we see in the deep past any indication that a strict sexual division of labor existed.”
The bottom line, Ocobock noted, was that “hunting belonged to everyone, not just to males,” especially in prehistoric societies where survival was an all-hands-on-deck activity. “There weren’t enough people living in groups to be specialized in different tasks. Everyone had to be a generalist to survive.”
Fighting bias
“This revelation is especially important in the current political moment of our society where sex and gender are in a spotlight,” Ocobock said. “And I want people to be able to change these ideas of female physical inferiority that have been around for so long.”
When talking about reconstructing the past in order to better understand it — and to conduct “good science” — Ocobock said scientists have to be extremely careful about how modern-day bias can seep into one’s interpretations of the past. She cautioned that researchers have to be aware of their own biases and make sure they are asking the proper questions so the questions don’t lead them down the road of looking for what it is they want to see.
“We have to change the biases we bring to the table, or at least to give pause before we assign those biases. And in a broader sense, you cannot outrightly assume somebody’s abilities based on whatever sex or gender you have assigned by looking at them,” Ocobock concluded.

A team led by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine has used an AI-based approach to uncover underlying patterns among the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age, termed social determinants of health (SDoH), and then linked each pattern to children’s health outcomes. Compared with traditional approaches, the strategy, in principle, provides a more objective and comprehensive picture of potential social factors that affect child health, which in turn, can enable better targeted interventions.
As reported Oct. 16 in JAMA Pediatrics, the researchers analyzed data on more than 10,500 American children, in communities across 17 U.S. states. Quantifying more than 80 neighborhood-level SDoH factors for each child, the analysis uncovered four broad patterns in the sample, including affluence, high-stigma environment, high socioeconomic deprivation, and high crime and drug sale rates coupled with lower education and densely populated areas. They found statistical associations between these patterns and outcomes relating to child developmental health, including mental, cognitive and physical health.
“A complex set of social factors can influence children’s health, and I think our results underscore the importance of using methods that can handle such complexity,” said study lead author Dr. Yunyu Xiao, an assistant professor of population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine.
Dr. Xiao co-led the study with Dr. Chang Su, also an assistant professor of population health sciences. Both are in the Division of Health Informatics in the Department of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine. Dr. Jyotishman Pathak and Dr. Fei Wang, also at Weill Cornell Medicine, are co-authors in this joint work.
The Weill Cornell Medicine investigators work with a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary team of experts to study potential social determinants of health for clues to persistent causes of bad health outcomes. The team includes psychiatry expert Dr. John Mann from Columbia University; Drs. Timothy Brown, Lonnie Snowden, and Julian Chun-Chung Chow, experts in health economics, health policy and social welfare, respectively, at the University of California; Berkeley School of Public Health, and social epidemiologist Dr. Alex Tsai of Harvard Medical School. Identifying health-influencing social factors also can guide social policies aimed at improving child health, such as legislation mandating free school lunches for children from low-income families coupled with holistic health care provisions at school and clinical settings, Dr. Xiao said.
A New Approach to a Complex Issue
Prior studies in this field have tended to focus on narrow sets of socioeconomic variables and health outcomes, and typically have examined outcomes that are averaged over large geographic areas such as counties or states.

In the new study, the researchers took a different approach. Drs. Xiao and Su are experts in the use of machine learning and other advanced AI techniques that allow relatively unbiased, fine-grained analyses of large datasets. In recent years, they have been bringing these “big-data” techniques to bear on important social epidemiology problems — for example, examining factors potentially influencing children’s mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Our approach is data-driven, allowing us to see what patterns there are in large datasets, without prior hypotheses and other biases getting in the way,” Dr. Su said.
The dataset in the new study was generated by an ongoing, survey-based, National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored project called the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. It covered a cohort of 10,504 children, aged 9-10 at the start, and their parents at 21 sites across the United States from 2016 to 2021. The sample’s ethnic and racial mix broadly reflected that of the U.S. as a whole.
In the analysis, each child’s record was scored on 84 different SDoH variables relating to educational resources, physical infrastructure, perceived bias and discrimination, household income, neighborhood crime and drugs. The machine learning algorithm identified underlying patterns in the children’s SDoH profiles — and also looked for statistical associations between these patterns and health outcomes.
Child Health Outcomes Vary Depending on Social Determinants
A key finding was that the data clustered into four broad SDoH patterns: affluent; high socioeconomic deprivation; urban high crime and low level of educational attainment and resources; and high-stigma — the latter involving higher self-reported measures of bias and discrimination against women and immigrants and other underrepresented groups. White children were overrepresented in the affluent and high-stigma areas; Black and Hispanic children in the other two.
Each of the four profiles was associated with its own broad pattern of health outcomes, the “high socioeconomic deprivation” pattern being associated with the worst health outcomes on average, including more signs of mental illness, worse cognitive performance, and worse physical health. The other two non-affluent patterns were also associated generally with more adverse outcomes compared with the affluent pattern.
The study had some limitations, including the survey-based, self-reported nature of the ABCD data, which is generally considered less reliable than objectively measured data. Also, epidemiological analyses like these can reveal only associations between social factors and health outcomes — they can’t prove that the former influence the latter. Even so, the researchers said, the results demonstrate the power of a relatively unbiased, machine-learning approach to uncover potentially meaningful links, and should help inform future studies that can discover actual causative mechanisms connecting social factors to child health.
“This multi-dimensional, unbiased approach in principle can lead to more targeted and effective policy interventions that we are investigating in a current NIH-funded project,” Dr. Xiao said.