“I think this will be a very practical solution to hair regeneration,” says Xudong Wang, a professor of materials science and engineering at UW-Madison.

Wang and colleagues published a description of the technology in the journal ACS Nano.

Based on devices that gather energy from a body’s day-to-day motion, the hair-growth technology stimulates the skin with gentle, low-frequency electric pulses, which coax dormant follicles to reactivate hair production.

The devices don’t cause hair follicles to sprout anew in smooth skin. Instead they reactivate hair-producing structures that have gone dormant. That means they could be used as an intervention for people in the early stages of pattern baldness, but they wouldn’t bestow cascading tresses to someone who has been as bald as a billiard ball for several years.

Because the devices are powered by the movement of the wearer, they don’t require a bulky battery pack or complicated electronics. In fact, they’re so low-profile that they could be discreetly worn underneath the crown of an everyday baseball cap.

Wang is a world expert in the design and creation of energy-harvesting devices. He has pioneered electric bandages that stimulate wound-healing and a weight-loss implant that uses gentle electricity to trick the stomach into feeling full.

The hair-growth technology is based on a similar premise: Small devices called nanogenerators passively gather energy from day-to-day movements and then transmit low-frequency pulses of electricity to the skin. That gentle electric stimulation causes dormant follicles to “wake up.”

“Electric stimulations can help many different body functions,” says Wang. “But before our work there was no really good solution for low-profile devices that provide gentle but effective stimulations.”

Because the electric pulses are incredibly gentle and don’t penetrate any deeper than the very outermost layers of the scalp, the devices don’t seem to cause any unpleasant side effects. That’s a marked advantage over other baldness treatments, like the medicine Propecia, which carries risks of sexual dysfunction, depression and anxiety.

What’s more, in side-by-side tests on hairless mice, the devices stimulated hair growth just as effectively as two different compounds found in baldness medicines.

“It’s a self-activated system, very simple and easy to use,” says Wang. “The energy is very low so it will cause minimal side effects.”

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The research aims to develop ways to identify compounds that can enhance the representation of health-promoting members of the gut microbial community. The goal is to identify sustainable, affordable dietary fiber sources for incorporation into next-generation, more nutritious food products.

“Fiber is understood to be beneficial. But fiber is actually a very complicated mixture of many different components,” says senior author Jeffrey Gordon, a microbiologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “Moreover, fibers from different plant sources that are processed in different ways during food manufacturing have different constituents. Unfortunately, we lack detailed knowledge of these differences and their biological significance. We do know that modern Western diets have low levels of fiber; this lack of fiber has been linked to loss of important members of the gut community and deleterious health effects.”

The researchers started by testing 34 food-grade fiber preparations, many purified from byproducts of food manufacturing such as peels from fruits and vegetables that are thrown out during production of processed foods and drinks. They used mice initially raised under sterile conditions and then colonized with human gut microbes. The animals were fed a high-fat, low-fiber diet representative of diets typically consumed in the United States, with or without different types of supplemental fibers. The goal was to identify those fibers that were best at boosting the levels of key fiber-degrading bacterial species and promoting the expression of beneficial metabolic enzymes in the microbiome.

Since the mice had been colonized with a defined collection of human gut bacteria with sequenced genomes, the researchers knew all the genes that were present in their model human gut microbial community. This allowed them to perform a comprehensive, high-resolution proteomics study of all bacterial proteins whose expression changed in response to the different fiber types they tested. Combining these results with genetic screens, they were able to identify particular fiber sources, their bioactive molecular components, and the bacterial genes that increased for different Bacteroides species when they encountered different fibers. They focused on Bacteroides because members of this group of bacterial species contain genes responsible for metabolizing dietary fiber that are not present in the human genome.

For the second phase of the study, the investigators wanted to determine how different members of the microbial community interact with each other as they dine on dietary fiber. First author Michael Patnode, a postdoctoral fellow in Gordon’s lab, developed fluorescently labeled artificial food particles with different types of bound carbohydrates from different fibers. Collections of these nutrient-containing particles were fed to mice colonized with defined microbial communities containing different combinations of Bacteroides species.

“We were excited to see how these ‘biosensors’ could be used to assess the processing of particular fiber components by particular bacterial species,” Patnode says. By feeding these particles to mice that either carried or did not carry a dominant fiber-consuming species, the authors found that subordinate species were waiting in line to step up and consume the fiber.

“We had suspected there might be competition going on among the different strains and that some would be stronger competitors than others,” Patnode says. Proteomics analyses and genetic screens confirmed that there was a hierarchy of fiber consumption among the species present in this model bacterial community.

Gordon explains that “it’s important to understand how the presence of a particular organism affects the dining behavior of other organisms — in this case, with regard to different fibers. If we are going to develop microbiota-directed foods aimed at providing benefits to human health, it’s important to find ways to determine which food staples will be the best source of nutrients and how the microbiota will respond.”

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“We were surprised that bacteria can produce so much alcohol,” says lead author Jing Yuan at Capital Institute of Pediatrics. “When the body is overloaded and can’t break down the alcohol produced by these bacteria, you can develop fatty liver disease even if you don’t drink.”

Yuan and her team discovered the link between gut bacteria and NAFLD when they encountered a patient with severe liver damage and a rare condition called auto-brewery syndrome (ABS). Patients with ABS would become drunk after eating alcohol-free and high-sugar food. The condition has been associated with yeast infection, which can produce alcohol in the gut and lead to intoxication.

“We initially thought it was because of the yeast, but the test result for this patient was negative,” Yuan says. “Anti-yeast medicine also didn’t work, so we suspected [his disease] might be caused by something else.”

By analyzing the patient’s feces, the team found he had several strains of the bacteria Klebsiella pneumonia in his gut that produced high levels of alcohol. K. pneumonia is a common type of commensal gut bacteria. Yet, the strains isolated from the patient’s gut can generate about four to six times more alcohol than strains found in healthy people.

Moreover, the team sampled the gut microbiota from 43 NAFLD patients and 48 healthy people. They found about 60% of NAFLD patients had high- and medium-alcohol-producing K. pneumonia in their gut, while only 6% of healthy controls carry these strains.

To investigate if K. pneumonia would cause fatty liver, researchers fed germ-free mice with high-alcohol-producing K. pneumonia isolated from the ABS patient for 3 months. These mice started to develop fatty liver after the first month. By 2 months, their livers showed signs of scarring, which means long-term liver damage had been made. The progression of liver disease in these mice was comparable to that of mice fed with alcohol. When the team gave bacteria-fed mice with an antibiotic that killed K. pneumonia, their condition was reversed.

“NAFLD is a heterogenous disease and may have many causes,” Yuan says. “Our study shows K. pneumonia is very likely to be one of them. These bacteria damage your liver just like alcohol, except you don’t have a choice.”

However, it remains unknown why some people have high-alcohol-producing K. pneumonia strain in their gut while others don’t.

“It’s likely that these particular bacteria enter people’s body via some carriers from the environment, like food,” says co-author Di Liu at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “But I don’t think the carriers are prevalent — otherwise we would expect much higher rate of NAFLD. Also, some people may have a gut environment that’s more suitable for the growth and colonization of K. pneumonia than others because of their genetics. We don’t understand what factors would make someone more susceptible to these particular K. pneumonia, and that’s what we want to find out next.”

This finding could also help diagnose and treat bacteria-related NAFLD, Yuan says. Because K. pneumonia produce alcohol using sugar, patients who carry these bacteria would have a detectable amount of alcohol in their blood after drinking a simple glucose solution. “In the early stages, fatty liver disease is reversible. If we can identify the cause sooner, we could treat and even prevent liver damage.”

“Having these bacteria in your gut means your body is exposed to alcohol constantly,” Liu says. “So does being a carrier mean you would have higher alcohol tolerance? I’m genuinely curious!”

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The pervasiveness of this old-meets-new technology, especially on college campuses, intrigued University at Buffalo computer scientist Zhanpeng Jin.

“We have so many students walking around with speakers in their ears. It led me to wonder what else we could do with them,” says Jin, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

That curiosity has led to EarEcho, a biometric tool a research team led by Jin is developing that uses modified wireless earbuds to authenticate smartphone users via the unique geometry of their ear canal.

A prototype of the system, described in this month’s Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, a journal published quarterly by the Association for Computing Machinery, proved roughly 95% effective.

UB’s Technology Transfer office has filed a provisional patent application for the technology.

How EarEcho works

The team built the prototype with off-the-shelf products, including a pair of in-ear earphones and a tiny microphone. Researchers developed acoustic signal processing techniques to limit noise interference, and models to share information between EarEcho’s components.

When a sound is played into someone’s ear, the sound propagates through and is reflected and absorbed by the ear canal — all of which produce a unique signature that can be recorded by the microphone.

“It doesn’t matter what the sound is, everyone’s ears are different and we can show that in the audio recording,” says Jin. “This uniqueness can lead to a new way of confirming the identity of the user, equivalent to fingerprinting.”

The information gathered by the microphone is sent by the earbuds’ Bluetooth connection to the smartphone where it is analyzed.

To test the device, 20 subjects listened to audio samples that included a variety of speech, music and other content. The team conducted tests in different environmental settings (on the street, in a shopping mall, etc.) and with the subjects in different positions (sitting, standing, head tilted, etc.).

EarEcho proved roughly 95 percent effective when given 1 second to authenticate the subjects. The score improved to 97.5 percent when it continued to monitor the subject in 3 second windows.

How EarEcho can be used

Theoretically, users could rely on EarEcho to unlock their smartphones, thereby reducing the need for passcodes, fingerprints, facial recognition and other biometrics.

But Jin sees its greatest potential use in continuously monitoring a smartphone user. EarEcho, which works when users are listening to their earbuds, is a passive system, meaning users need not take any action, such as submitting a fingerprint or voice command, for it to work, he says.

Such a system, he argues, is ideal for situations where users are required to verify their identity such as making mobile payments. It also could eliminate the need to re-enter passcodes or fingerprints when a phone locks up after not being used.

“Think about that,” says Jin, “just by wearing the earphones, which many people already do, you wouldn’t have to do anything to unlock your phone.”