Publisher Health

Animal offspring may survive better when their groups are in greater conflict with rival factions, research from the University of Bristol has shown for the first time.
Battles between competing groups can lead to serious injury or death and intergroup conflict has always been thought to have a negative effect on reproductive success.
But findings published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B turn that long-held belief on its head.
Using a decade of life-history data from a wild population of dwarf mongooses, University of Bristol researchers found that pup survival rate actually increased when the cumulative threat of conflict with rival groups was greater.
Lead author, Dr Amy Morris-Drake, from Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences, said: “Groups engaged in more intergroup interactions did not produce more young. Rather, a greater threat from outsiders was associated with a higher survival likelihood of pups once they emerged from the breeding burrow.”
The team conducted detailed behavioural observations of the study groups in South Africa to investigate what might drive the improved pup survival. They found that when rivals or indicators of their recent presence are encountered, adults increase their sentinel (raised guarding) behaviour.
Senior author, Professor Andy Radford, also from Bristol, explained: “Increased sentinel behaviour is likely an attempt to gather more information about the other group. But sentinels also detect predatory threats and warn groupmates of danger, so vulnerable pups are potentially safer as a consequence.”
The general expectation is that intergroup conflict will have negative consequences for reproductive success. In a rare previous study, for example, chimpanzee foetal survival was lower and inter-birth intervals were longer when there was a greater threat level from other groups.

Prof Radford said: “We are not suggesting that conflict has a direct positive effect on breeding success. Instead, there could be byproduct benefits of behavioural changes — such as increased vigilance — that result from an increased threat level.”
Dr Morris-Drake concluded: “Our work suggests that if we are to understand the importance of warfare on societies, we must consider threats as well as actual fights. Moreover, we need to investigate not just actions on the battleground but the wider consequences too.”
Dwarf mongooses are Africa’s smallest carnivore, living in cooperatively breeding, territorial groups of 5-30 individuals. The work was conducted as part of the Dwarf Mongoose Research Project, which has studied habituated wild groups continuously since 2011. The study animals are individually marked with blonde hair dye, are trained to climb onto a balance scale to weigh themselves, and can be watched from a few feet away as they go about their natural behaviour in ecologically valid conditions.
The study was funded by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant awarded to Prof Radford.

The 8th update to a major international report shows more people are getting sick and dying from extreme heat, drought and other climate problems.Climate change continues to have a worsening effect on health and mortality around the world, according to an exhaustive report published on Tuesday by an international team of 114 researchers.One of the starkest findings is that heat-related deaths of people older than 65 have increased by 85 percent since the 1990s, according to modeling that incorporates both changing temperatures and demographics. People in this age group, along with babies, are especially vulnerable to health risks like heat stroke. As global temperatures have risen, older people and infants now are exposed to twice the number of heat-wave days annually as they were from 1986 to 2005.The report, published in the medical journal The Lancet, also tracked estimated lost income and food insecurity. Globally, exposure to extreme heat, and resulting losses in productivity or inability to work, may have led to income losses as high as $863 billion in 2022. And, in 2021, an estimated 127 million more people experienced moderate or severe food insecurity linked to heat waves and droughts, compared with 1981-2010.“We’ve lost very precious years of climate action and that has come at an enormous health cost,” said Marina Romanello, a researcher at University College London and the executive director of the report, known as The Lancet Countdown. “The loss of life, the impact that people experience, is irreversible.”The indicators of public health tracked in the report have generally declined over the nine years the researchers have produced editions of the assessment.The analysis also examined health outcomes for individual countries, including the United States. Heat-related deaths of adults 65 and older increased by 88 percent between 2018 and 2022, compared with 2000-04. An estimated 23,200 older Americans died in 2022 because of exposure to extreme heat.For health practitioners, the statistics are not abstract or faceless.“These numbers remind me of the elderly patients I see in my own hospital with heatstroke,” said Dr. Renee Salas, an emergency medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.Dr. Salas is one of the report’s co-authors and said she viewed the project like tracking vital signs in a patient, but on a national and international scale.The data can help fill a gap for federal policymakers.“We have a limited set of indicators for climate change and health that are routinely collected in the United States,” said Dr. John Balbus, director of the office of climate change and health equity in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He did not contribute to this report and is not currently involved with The Lancet Countdown, but previously served as a scientific adviser to the project’s funder.Dr. Balbus cautioned that this report mostly measures people’s exposure to climate-related risks rather than actual health outcomes, such as rates of disease. In order to get from exposures to real health outcomes, he said more investment in research was needed.For the first time, this year’s Lancet Countdown included projections for the future. If the global average temperature rises by 2 degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial temperatures, an increasingly likely future unless society significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions, the number of heat-related deaths each year will increase by 370 percent by the middle of this century, the report found.At the same time, the researchers point out that reducing fossil fuel pollution is proving beneficial for global health. Deaths from air pollution related to fossil fuels have decreased by 15 percent since 2005, with most of that improvement a result of less coal-related pollution entering the atmosphere.The value of The Lancet Countdown is its ongoing monitoring of climate change’s effects on global health, said Sharon Friel, director of the Planetary Health Equity Hothouse at the Australian National University.Dr. Friel was not involved in the report, but read it and wrote an accompanying commentary.Dr. Howard Frumkin, a former special assistant to the director for climate change and health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the report was a valuable dashboard but that the climate impacts he most worried about were not the obvious ones highlighted. Researchers and policymakers need to pay attention to the health effects of people being displaced by climate change and migrating, Dr. Frumkin said.“If you’re on cancer chemotherapy or if you are getting kidney dialysis or if you’re getting addiction treatment and you have to move suddenly, that’s terribly disruptive and threatening,” he said. Dr. Frumkin was not involved in the new report but was a co-author on previous editions.Over the years, the health experts involved in this project have included more research about the continued use of fossil fuels being the root cause of health issues.“The diagnosis in this report is very clear,” Dr. Salas said. “Further expansion of fossil fuels is reckless and the data clearly shows that it threatens the health and well-being of every person.”The researchers point out that health care systems, and other societal infrastructure health care depends on, haven’t adapted quickly enough to our current level of global warming.“If we haven’t been able to cope today, chances are we won’t be able to cope in the future,” Dr. Romanello said.The report is likely to be discussed at the annual United Nations climate summit in the United Arab Emirates that starts in a few weeks. This year the summit will include a greater focus on human health.

A special kind of genetic test that helps determine the best antidepressant for patients with moderate-to-severe depression could generate substantive health system savings and greatly improve patient outcomes, according to new research from the University of British Columbia.
The study, published today in CMAJ, shows that in B.C. alone, implementing pharmacogenomic testing could save the provincial public health system an estimated $956 million over 20 years.
“Pharmacogenomic testing aims to match patients with medications that are more likely to be effective and cause less side effects, based on their genetic profile,” said co-senior author Dr. Stirling Bryan (he/him), professor at UBC’s school of population and public health, and senior scientist at Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute (VCHRI). “Our findings show that the benefit to patients in B.C. could be enormous, including increased remission rates and better quality of life, while generating significant cost savings by keeping people out of hospitals and more intensive treatment pathways.”
One in 10 Canadians will experience major depression at some point in their lives, making it one of the largest public health burdens. While more than 35 antidepressant medications are available in Canada, over half of patients don’t respond to the antidepressant they are initially prescribed and roughly 27 per cent report adverse effects.
Previous studies have shown that up to 42 per cent of the variation in how patients respond to these medications is due to genetic factors. Pharmacogenomic testing uses genetic information, typically obtained using a cheek swab, blood test or saliva sample, to help guide medication selection and dosing.
“Genes play an important role in how our bodies metabolize different antidepressants, which ultimately influences their efficacy,” said co-senior author Dr. Jehannine Austin, professor of medical genetics and psychiatry at UBC. “The genetic insights provided by pharmacogenomic testing can help physicians make more informed treatment decisions and reduce the lengthy trial-and-error process that many patients experience in finding an effective medication.”
For the study, the researchers worked with patient partners, clinicians and health system and government partners to develop a simulation model that mimics the experience of patients with major depression, from diagnosis through to treatment, recurrence and recovery. By incorporating B.C. health administrative data, clinical trial data and defined treatment strategies, the model compared the projected journey of 194,149 adults with and without pharmacogenomic testing over a 20-year period.

The model showed that pharmacogenomic testing would result in 37 per cent fewer patients experiencing treatment-resistant depression, a situation in which the patients’ depression does not improve despite trying several kinds of treatment. Pharmacogenomic testing would also result in patients spending 15 per cent more time without depression symptoms, resulting in an anticipated 1,869 fewer deaths and 21,346 fewer hospital admissions over 20 years.
“By incorporating the perspectives of patients with lived and living experience into this model, alongside robust data sets, we are able to carefully simulate the treatment journey of people with major depression,” said first author Dr. Shahzad Ghanbarian, a mathematical modeler and health economist at the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluation, a research group within the VCHRI and affiliated with UBC. “The simulation model is designed to be flexible and could be applied to other jurisdictions beyond B.C., where we might expect to see similar benefits, particularly within a comparable Canadian context.”
Linda Riches, who lives in Salmon Valley, B.C., has been living with major depression for over 30 years and was one of the patient partners who helped undertake the study.
“All people with major depression deserve to feel hopeful about their life. Genetic testing may give them the opportunity to know what treatment they need, not the 10 they didn’t need,” said Riches.
Pharmacogenomic tests are not currently offered through the public health systems across Canada, but patients can pay for them through private companies.
The researchers say their analysis makes a strong case for including pharmacogenomic testing as part of routine, publicly-funded health care for people with major depression in B.C., but more work is needed to determine how such testing could be put into practice.
“We’ve shown here this can be effective, and our next step is to figure out the best way to do it, with input from patients, physicians, government and health sector partners,” said Dr. Bryan. “Exploration of implementation strategies, such as which health-care professionals are best-suited to deliver pharmacogenomic testing, is the natural next step and remains unexplored in Canada.”
This study was funded by Genome BC, Genome Canada and Michael Smith Health Research BC.

Exposure to ultrafine particles from traffic alters the expression of many genes in human olfactory mucosa cells, a new study shows. The study, led by the University of Eastern Finland, is the first to combine an analysis of emissions from different diesel fuels and exhaust after-treatment systems with an examination of their effects in a human-derived cell model of the olfactory mucosa. The findings were published in Science of the Total Environment.
Particle emissions from road traffic have been regulated in the EU for decades, but emissions of ultrafine particles with a diameter less than 100 nanometres in size aren’t monitored or restricted yet.
The human olfactory mucosa is a tissue directly exposed to the environment and in direct contact with the brain.
“The olfactory system has been found to mediate the effects of environmental pollutants on the brain, thus contributing to the pathogenesis of brain diseases. However, the exact signalling pathways through which the effects are mediated remain unknown,” says first author, Doctoral Researcher Laura Mussalo of the Kanninen Lab at the University of Eastern Finland.
The study explored molecular-level changes occurring in human olfactory mucosa cells when exposed to different emissions derived from traffic. The researchers examined the effects of emissions on gene expression, i.e., what kind of alterations emissions cause, and what kind of mechanisms they activate. The researchers also examined whether fossil and renewable diesel fuels cause different effects, and how modern after-treatment devices, such as particulate filters, affect emissions.
The olfactory mucosa cells used in the study were obtained from voluntary donors, collected in collaboration with Kuopio University Hospital. The multidisciplinary study combined clinical medicine, gene research, molecular biology, environmental toxicology and aerosol physics.
Effects on inflammatory response and xenobiotic metabolism
The particle samples used in the exposure studies were collected by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, and they were analysed and characterised by VTT and Tampere University. The samples were collected from exhausts of a heavy-duty-engine vehicle run on paraffinic renewable diesel and on regular fossil diesel. The third sample was a combination of the same renewable diesel and cleaner engine technology complying with the Euro 6d-temp standard.

All emissions contained ultrafine particles. In addition, emissions from both renewable and fossil diesel contained a significant amount of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and reactive nitrogen compounds. However, renewable diesel combined with cleaner engine technology produced very little emissions.
Exposure to ultrafine particles altered human olfactory mucosa cell function, and different fuels and engines caused different adverse effects. Furthermore, molecular-level analysis revealed disturbance in countless systems that regulate cell function. Exposure to emissions from both renewable and fossil diesel significantly altered the expression of genes associated with inflammatory response, xenobiotic metabolism, olfactory signalling and olfactory mucosa integrity. However, renewable diesel caused less adverse effects than fossil diesel. Emissions from renewable diesel run on cleaner engine technology caused only negligible alterations in cell function, demonstrating the efficiency of engine after-treatment devices.
The findings back earlier studies suggesting that PAHs may disturb the inflammatory response and xenobiotic metabolism in human olfactory mucosa cells, and that ultrafine particles may mediate adverse effects to the brain via the olfactory pathway. The study offers important insight into the adverse effects of ultrafine particles in a human-derived cell model of the olfactory mucosa, providing a basis for possible measures to mitigate and prevent toxicological hazards.
The study constitutes part of TUBE project, which is funded by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union. The study has also received funding from the Kuopio Area Respiratory Foundation, the Finnish Brain Foundation, Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation, and Päivikki and Sakari Sohlberg Foundation.

Cancer stem cells cause the aging of macrophages in mice with healthy immune systems, creating conditions for the formation of tumors.
Cancerous tumors consist of a mixture of cells, the most important of which are cancer stem cells. These cells are capable of establishing new cancerous tumors by evading the immune response. Research has focused on identifying biomarkers for cancer stem cells and developing therapies that target these cells. Unfortunately, candidate drugs developed from these efforts have so far not been very effective in clinical trials.
A research team led by Associate Professor Haruka Wada at Hokkaido University’s Institute for Genetic Medicine examined the mechanisms by which cancer stem cells evade immune response in mice models. They showed that cancer stem cells induce senescence in macrophages — the immune cells which are responsible for the first step of the destruction of cancer cells. Their findings were published in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer.
“One of the biggest questions in the development of cancer is how cancer develops in individuals with a healthy immune system,” explains Wada. “The majority of studies on cancer stem cells have been carried out in vitro or in immunodeficient mice models, which do not account for a fully functioning immune response. The lack of effectiveness of cancer stem cell-targeting drugs indicates that the immune response or lack thereof is more important than previously considered.”
The team used two cell lines of glioblastoma tumor, one of which was capable of inducing tumor formation (cancer stem cell) and the other of which was not. In mice models, the cancer stem cells suppressed the proliferation of macrophages; further investigation showed that macrophages cultured with cancer stem cells exhibit senescence or cellular aging. Macrophages were not the only immune cells affected; while the proliferation of T cells was unchanged, their antitumor activity was suppressed due to the immunosuppressive factors produced by senescent macrophages. The team identified interleukin 6 (IL-6) produced by cancer stem cells as the molecule responsible for triggering these effects.
The team also demonstrated that supplementing the mice inoculated with cancer stem cells with a molecule called nicotinamide mononucleotide resulted in the proliferation of non-senescent macrophages and reduced the immunosuppressive factors produced by senescent macrophages, preventing tumor growth and leading to increased survival times in mice.
“Our results indicate that drugs targeting senescent macrophages could be a treatment for cancer — an unprecedented development,” concluded Wada. “We believe that these drugs could be part of a treatment that prevents the new onset of tumors, as well as a therapy that prevents recurrence after cancer treatment.” Future work will focus on two avenues: confirming that this discovery holds true for cancers other than glioblastomas, and confirming that the findings apply to cancers in humans.

A team at Weill Cornell Medicine has mapped the location and spatial features of blood-forming cells within human bone marrow. Their findings confirm hypotheses about the anatomy of this tissue and provide a powerful new means to study diseases, ranging from noncancerous conditions, such as sickle cell anemia, to malignant conditions, such as acute leukemia, that affect bone marrow.
For the research described Sept. 29 in Blood, the investigators retrieved deidentified archival bone marrow samples from 29 patients at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, generating a vast amount of data about the spatial relationships among their contents.
Creating images of bone marrow has been difficult historically, according to senior author Dr. Sanjay Patel, director of the Multiparametric In Situ Imaging (MISI) Laboratory in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and an assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. He and his colleagues overcame these challenges by devising a method for visualizing whole pieces of the tissue, then analyzing them with artificial intelligence (AI).
“We have been able to apply our approach to archival samples in a way that wasn’t possible before,” said Dr. Patel, who is also a hematopathologist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and a member of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine. He noted that they succeeded in identifying and determining the positions of about 1.5 million cells in all.
Visualizing the Elusive Birthplace of Blood
Our blood cells get their start in the bone marrow, where stem cells produce the progenitors that in turn generate red and white blood cells, as well as the wound-sealing fragments known as platelets. Errors in these processes can give rise to acquired diseases including cancers, such as leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma, and those, such as sickle cell anemia, present from birth.
Studying the birth of blood cells within their native environment in human tissues, however, has proven challenging. What’s more, when bone marrow samples are collected, the preservation technique can degrade some nucleic acids and proteins within the cells they contain. And, to avoid bias, researchers need to capture images of an entire piece of tissue, generating a daunting amount of data.

Dr. Patel’s team came up with a series of solutions. They started by gathering samples from the tissue archive within Weill Cornell Medicine’s Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. These one-to-two-centimeter-long pieces of tissue came from patients who had received biopsies, but who had turned out to be disease free. Researchers in the MISI lab tested a variety of immune proteins known as antibodies, selecting from a catalog of thoroughly-vetted markers used in routine clinical diagnostics, to see which most effectively tagged the contents of bone marrow to make them visible with their fluorescence-based imaging instrumentation.
Their collaborators at BostonGene Corporation, a medical bioinformatics company, then used AI to analyze the resulting images, picking out individual cells, such as stem cells and the platelet-producing megakaryocytes, as well as bone, fat and blood vessels. This technology allowed the team to wrangle an otherwise unmanageable amount of information into a sophisticated analysis, according to Dr. Patel.
A New Way to Investigate Diseases
Previous studies have suggested that, during normal blood cell development, stem and progenitor cells inhabit certain locations, near bone and blood vessels, where surrounding cells create environments critical for their normal function. More recently, some research has suggested that these cells also gather around megakaryocytes, large cells that give rise to platelets. The team’s analysis confirmed these patterns, including for megakaryocytes, in human samples. However, when they took patients’ age into account, they found the cells were no longer as closely associated with megakaryocytes, which also tended to be smaller in older patients.
While these findings contribute to scientists’ understanding of normal bone marrow, Dr. Patel sees the new method’s greatest potential in investigating diseases, particularly along the course of their evolution. For a few conditions, such as acute myeloid leukemia, researchers already have evidence that the spatial arrangement of stem and progenitor cells may be disrupted. This new method could open the door to studies that specifically explore such changes — and to those testing new treatments and evaluating existing ones, according to Dr. Patel.
“I hope our work unlocks the imagination of people who study diseases related to the bone marrow,” he said.

A University of Adelaide and Oxford University study has discovered asbestos exposure led to a higher incidence of asbestos-related lung cancers in British and Australian naval personnel than in other armed forces.
The data were collected from 30,085 United Kingdom and Australian personnel who served in the ’50s and ’60s, a time when asbestos-containing materials were present in British and Australian naval vessels.
Three of the four cohorts had previously been studied by the University of Adelaide and the UK Health Security Agency to identify the effects of radiation exposure from British nuclear testing; however, a raised incidence of mesothelioma, a cancer strongly linked to asbestos exposure, was seen in naval personnel in all cohorts.
The University of Adelaide’s Dr Richie Gun and Oxford University’s Dr Gerry Kendall were prompted by this finding to examine the dataset for the occurrence of lung cancers, which can also arise from asbestos exposure.
The fourth cohort was Australian veterans of the Korean War, which had been studied by the Australian Department of Veterans Affairs and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
“We found the lung cancer rate was higher overall in naval personnel than in the other armed services, and, while smoking remains the dominant cause of lung cancer, it is unlikely the excess could be explained by a higher smoking rate in the navy,” Dr Gun said.
“Although actual measurements of airborne asbestos levels were not available, and estimates are difficult, we have concluded that the higher lung cancer rate in sailors was most probably caused by onboard asbestos exposure.

“This conclusion was strengthened by the occurrence of deaths in sailors from asbestosis, a condition which is non-cancerous but is nevertheless disabling and potentially fatal.”
The researchers have estimated that the proportion of lung cancers related to onboard asbestos exposure were of the order of 27 per cent in Australian seamen and 12 per cent in British seamen.
While there is a ban on imports and strict regulatory control of asbestos-containing materials in Australia, they still pose a risk to workers and some householders. There were 142 cases of asbestosis and 111 asbestosis deaths in 2021-2022 reported in the New South Wales Dust Diseases Register.
Dr Gun said the effects of asbestos exposure are likely being underestimated unless lung cancer is considered alongside mesothelioma and asbestosis.
“Although it remains true that smoking causes most lung cancers, other agents such as asbestos can contribute to the incidence of cancer in an exposed population,” he said.
“Moreover, we know from other studies that the combination of smoking and asbestos exposure has an enhanced influence on lung cancer risk; this interactive effect would have contributed to the observed lung cancer excess.”
The discovery of a link between asbestos exposure and a higher incidence of lung cancer is a timely reminder of the need for protections against exposure to other harmful airborne dusts.
“Strict control measures are required to protect workers potentially exposed not only to asbestos but to other hazardous dusts, such as dust from engineered stone now installed in many kitchens,” said Dr Gun.

Scientists at Université de Montréal’s Department of Chemistry have developed a new fluorogenic probe that can be used to detect and study interactions between two families of biomolecules essential to life: sugars and proteins.
The findings by professor Samy Cecioni and his students, which open the door to a wide range of applications, were published in mid-October in the European journal Angewandte Chemie.
Found in all living cells
Sugar is omnipresent in our lives, present in almost all the foods we eat. But the importance of these simple carbohydrates extends far beyond tasty desserts. Sugars are vital to virtually all biological processes in living organisms and there is a vast diversity of naturally occurring sugar molecules.
“All of the cells that make up living organisms are covered in a layer of sugar-based molecules known as glycans,” said Cecioni. “Sugars are therefore on the front line of almost all physiological processes and play a fundamental role in maintaining health and preventing disease.”
“For a long time,” he added, “scientists believed that the complex sugars found on the surface of cells were simply decorative. But we now know that these sugars interact with many other types of molecules, in particular with lectins, a large family of proteins.”
Driving disease, from flu to cancer
Like sugars, lectins are found in all living organisms. These proteins have the unique ability to recognize and temporarily attach themselves to sugars. Such interactions occur in many biological processes, such as during the immune response triggered by an infection.

Lectins are attracting a lot of attention these days. This is because scientists have discovered that the phenomenon of lectins “sticking” to sugars plays a key role in the appearance of numerous diseases.
“The more we study the interactions between sugars and lectins, the more we realize how important they are in disease processes,” said Cecioni. “Studies have shown how such interactions are involved in bacteria colonizing our lungs, viruses invading our cells, even cancer cells tricking our immune system into thinking they’re healthy cells.”
Difficult to detect…until now
There are still many missing pieces in the puzzle of how interactions between sugars and lectins unfold because they are so difficult to study. This is because these interactions are transient and weak, making detection a real challenge.
Two of Cecioni’s students, master’s candidate Cécile Bousch and Ph.D. candidate Brandon Vreulz, had the idea of using light to detect these interactions. The three researchers set to work to create a sort of chemical probe capable of “freezing” the meeting between sugar and lectin and making it visible through fluorescence.
The interaction between sugar and lectin can be described using a “lock and key” relationship, where the “key” is the sugar and the “lock” is the lectin. Chemists have already created molecules capable of blocking this lock-and-key interaction, and can now to identify exactly what sugars are binding to lectins of high interest to human health.

“Our idea was to label sugar molecules with a chromophore, a chemical that gives a molecule its colour,” explained Cecioni. “The chromophore is actually fluorogenic, which means that it can become fluorescent if the binding of sugar with the lectin is efficiently captured. Scientists can then study the mechanisms underlying these interactions and the disturbances that can arise.”
Cecioni and his students are confident their technique can be used with other types of molecules. It may even be possible to control the colour of new fluorescently labelled probes that are created.
By making it possible to visualize interactions between molecules, this discovery is giving researchers a valuable new tool for studying biological interactions, many of which are critical to human health.

Back pain is extremely widespread. According to figures in the most recent 2023 Health Report, issued by the German health insurer DAK, around 18 percent of cases in which employees submit sick notes involve musculoskeletal ailments, above all back complaints. After topping the table of individual diagnoses in 2022, back pain still ranks high, just behind COVID-19 and respiratory ailments. It is pleasing to note that the latest report shows a slight decline in the percentage of back-related conditions in total reported absences, from 6.5% to 5.3%.
However: “Even young people are reporting back pain in increasing numbers. This trend didn’t just start with the Covid-19 lockdowns,” says Prof. Rainer Burgkart of TUM Klinikum rechts der Isar. In the Burden Disease Incidence Study, conducted in 2020 by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), with data from over 5,000 patients in Germany, it turned out that almost two thirds of the respondents (61.3%) had experienced back pain in the previous year. Lower back pain affected 55% of women and 48.6% of men, while one in three women (32.6%) and one in five men (22%) suffered from upper back pain. Some years ago the Institute for Health Economics and Management of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) estimated the economic impact of these ailments at around 50 billion euros. What can be done? “Physiotherapy and targeted muscle and coordination training are highly effective and are often prescribed in case of frequently diagnosed, non-specific back pain,” says Dr. Burgkart, an orthopedic specialist. “However, on completing targeted treatment, most patients slip back into their old patterns of behavior and their back muscles become weaker again.” An invention by TUM and Klinikum rechts der Isar — the GyroTrainer — is designed to promote long-term, tailor-made back exercises in the future.
GyroTrainer: Algorithm decides on intensity of training
Prof. Burgkart from Klinikum rechts der Isar, in cooperation with the Munich Institute of Robotic and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI) at TUM, the fitness equipment manufacturer Erhard Peuker GmbH, and the hardware and software specialist B&W Embedded Solutions GmbH, developed the GyroTrainer — a back muscle training device that can be adapted to the abilities of individual users. The work was carried out in a three-year research project. The GyroTrainer is based on a round platform 50 cm in diameters It can tilted to the front, back and sideways, and can also rotate. It resembles a gyroscope, which is designed to remain balanced in a wide range of configurations and positions.
Balance board as the starting point
A similar principle is used in the GyroTrainer. Users step onto the round platform and try to keep their balance. Sensors and electric motors located below the platform register the user’s movements and can tilt and rotate the disk. The device works like a balance board, with the difference that the stiffness can be varied. The challenge is for users to keep their balance. “Preparing the device correctly is not a simple matter of adjusting it for the individual user,” says researcher Elisabeth Jensen from MIRMI. “First we have to find the right stiffness for that person.” If the user can comfortably keep their balance at a given stiffness level for a certain period of time, a learning algorithm decides on the right initial setting for the platform so that it is neither too easy or too difficult for the person.
Gaming concept: strengthening the back by playing a game
Then the actual training can begin. “Our cooperation partners have developed a computer game where the control comes from the user’s movements,” explains TUM researcher Jensen. It is modelled on the Space Invaders game. The player’s spaceship automatically fires at the invaders at regular intervals while trying to evade incoming shots. “This takes skill and concentration,” explains Jensen. The less rigid the platform setting, the harder it is to maintain stability and steer the spaceship. “It is also possible to add disruption factors,” explains the orthopedics specialist Burgkart. The platform rotates suddenly to the left or right, which makes it even harder for the user to stay balanced. “At the start, the platform feels quite firm under the user’s feet, but gradually becomes more unstable. And finally, for users in very good condition, it starts giving extra pushes,” explains Burgkart. Using electromyography (EMG) sensors, the team confirmed that the system effectively activates the abdominal and back muscles that are important for spinal stability, and that the activity becomes even more challenging with the rotational movement. The less rigid the system becomes and the more frequent the sudden rotations occur, the greater the demands on the muscles. “Balancing movements are among the most effective methods,” says Burgkart. He believes that the new training device should be used mainly for preventive purposes, both for primary patients, who have “elevated risk,” and secondary patients, who have suffered from back pain in the past.
Next steps: from the concept to the product
After nearly three years of research, it is now clear: the GyroTrainer functions as intended and fulfils its medical purpose. “There are still a few steps to take before it can be used as a product,” says Prof. Burgkart. The most important requirement for the future: the researchers want the device — which for safety reasons still has to be operated by TUM researchers — to be suitable for use without a physiotherapist or trainer. They also want it to be capable of adjusting dynamically to the ability of the individual user. The GyroTrainer already determines the individual stiffness via approximations and can make adjustments at any time using the measured data. In the future, the artificial intelligence function of the device will work as an independent, secure logical system to set the initial rigidity and select the difficulty level of the corresponding game options. It will also be able to make adjustments based on how the user is feeling on the day, fatigue levels and personal training progress. A final important requirement for the new back trainer: it has to fit into any living room: Prof. Burgkart’s vision: “The machine has to be mobile so that people can train on a regular basis without having to go to a physiotherapist.”

An innovative approach to artificial intelligence (AI) enables reconstructing a broad field of data, such as overall ocean temperature, from a small number of field-deployable sensors using low-powered “edge” computing, with broad applications across industry, science and medicine.
“We developed a neural network that allows us to represent a large system in a very compact way,” said Javier Santos, a Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher who applies computational science to geophysical problems. “That compactness means it requires fewer computing resources compared to state-of-the-art convolutional neural network architectures, making it well-suited to field deployment on drones, sensor arrays and other edge-computing applications that put computation closer to its end use.”
Novel AI approach boosts computing efficiency
Santos is first author of a paper published by a team of Los Alamos researchers in Nature Machine Intelligence on the novel AI technique, which they dubbed Senseiver. The work, which builds on an AI model called Perceiver IO developed by Google, applies the techniques of natural-language models such as ChatGPT to the problem of reconstructing information about a broad area — such as the ocean — from relatively few measurements.
The team realized the model would have broad application because of its efficiency. “Using fewer parameters and less memory requires fewer central processing unit cycles on the computer, so it runs faster on smaller computers,” said Dan O’Malley, a coauthor of the paper and Los Alamos researcher who applies machine learning to geoscience problems.
In a first in the published literature, Santos and his Los Alamos colleagues validated the model by demonstrating its effectiveness on real-world sets of sparse data — meaning information taken from sensors that cover only a tiny portion of the field of interest — and on complex data sets of three-dimensional fluids.
In a demonstration of the real-world utility of the Senseiver, the team applied the model to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sea-surface-temperature dataset. The model was able to integrate a multitude of measurements taken over decades from satellites and sensors on ships. From these sparse point measurements, the model forecast temperatures across the entire body of the ocean, which provides information useful to global climate models.

Bringing AI to drones and sensor networks
The Senseiver is well-suited to a variety of projects and research areas of interest to Los Alamos.
“Los Alamos has a wide range of remote sensing capabilities, but it’s not easy to use AI because models are too big and don’t fit on devices in the field, which leads us to edge computing,” said Hari Viswanathan, Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow, environmental scientist and coauthor of the paper about the Senseiver. “Our work brings the benefits of AI to drones, networks of field-based sensors and other applications currently beyond the reach of cutting-edge AI technology.”
The AI model will be particularly useful in the Lab’s work identifying and characterizing orphaned wells. The Lab leads the Department of Energy-funded Consortium Advancing Technology for Assessment of Lost Oil & Gas Wells (CATALOG), a federal program tasked with locating and characterizing undocumented orphaned wells and measuring their methane emissions. Viswanathan is the lead scientist of CATALOG.
The approach offers improved capabilities for large, practical applications such as self-driving cars, remote modeling of assets in oil and gas, medical monitoring of patients, cloud gaming, content delivery and contaminant tracing.