In a paper published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness psychology researchers from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) worked with 54 participants to examine the effects of surveillance on an essential function of human sensory perception — the ability to detect another person’s gaze.

Lead author, Associate Professor of neuroscience and behaviour Kiley Seymour, said previous research has established the effects on conscious behaviour when people know they are being watched, but the new study provided the first direct evidence that being watched also has an involuntary response.

“We know CCTV changes our behaviour, and that’s the main driver for retailers and others wanting to deploy such technology to prevent unwanted behaviour,” Associate Professor Seymour said.

“However, we show it’s not only overt behaviour that changes — our brain changes the way it processes information.

“We found direct evidence that being conspicuously monitored via CCTV markedly impacts a hardwired and involuntary function of human sensory perception — the ability to consciously detect a face.

“It’s a mechanism that evolved for us to detect other agents and potential threats in our environment, such as predators and other humans, and it seems to be enhanced when we’re being watched on CCTV.

“Our surveilled participants became hyper aware of face stimuli almost a second faster than the control group. This perceptual enhancement also occurred without participants realising it.”

Associate Professor Seymour said that given the increasing level of surveillance in society and the ongoing debates around privacy reform, the study’s findings suggested the need for closer examination of the effects of surveillance on mental processes and on public health more broadly.

“We had a surprising yet unsettling finding that despite participants reporting little concern or preoccupation with being monitored, its effects on basic social processing were marked, highly significant and imperceptible to the participants.

“The ability to rapidly detect faces is of critical importance to human social interactions. Information conveyed in faces, such as gaze direction, enables us to construct models of other people’s minds and to use this information to predict behaviour.

“We see hyper-sensitivity to eye gaze in mental health conditions like psychosis and social anxiety disorder where individuals hold irrational beliefs or preoccupations with the idea of being watched.

“Whilst this investigation was specifically focussed on unconscious social processes, future investigations should explore effects on the limbic system more broadly, which would have more general implications for public mental health and the importance of privacy.”

Now, new research from NYU Tandon faculty including Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Davood Shahrjerdi; Herman F. Mark Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Elisa Riedo; and Giuseppe de Peppo, Industry Associate Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and who was previously at Mirimus, shows it’s possible to develop and build microchips that can not only identify multiple diseases from a single cough or air sample, but can also be produced at scale.

“This study opens new horizons in the field of biosensing. Microchips, the backbone of smartphones, computers, and other smart devices, have transformed the way people communicate, entertain, and work. Similarly, today, our technology will allow microchips to revolutionize healthcare, from medical diagnostics, to environmental health” says Riedo,

“The innovative technology demonstrated in this article uses field-effect transistors (FETs) — miniature electronic sensors that directly detect biological markers and convert them into digital signals — offering an alternative to traditional color-based chemical diagnostic tests like home pregnancy tests,” said Shahrjerdi. “This advanced approach enables faster results, testing for multiple diseases simultaneously, and immediate data transmission to healthcare providers” says Sharjerdi, who is also the Director of the NYU Nanofabrication Cleanroom, a state-of-the-art facility where some of the chips used in this study were fabricated. Riedo and Shahrjerdi are also the co-directors of the NYU NanoBioX initiative.

Field-effect transistors, a staple of modern electronics, are emerging as powerful tools in this quest for diagnostic instruments. These tiny devices can be adapted to function as biosensors, detecting specific pathogens or biomarkers in real time, without the need for chemical labels or lengthy lab procedures. By converting biological interactions into measurable electrical signals, FET-based biosensors offer a rapid and versatile platform for diagnostics.

Recent advancements have pushed the detection capabilities of FET biosensors to incredibly small levels — down to femtomolar concentrations, or one quadrillionth of a mole — by incorporating nanoscale materials such as nanowires, indium oxide, and graphene. Yet, despite their potential, FET-based sensors still face a significant challenge: they struggle to detect multiple pathogens or biomarkers simultaneously on the same chip. Current methods for customizing these sensors, such as drop-casting bioreceptors like antibodies onto the FET’s surface, lack the precision and scalability required for more complex diagnostic tasks.

To address this, these researchers are exploring new ways to modify FET surfaces, allowing each transistor on a chip to be tailored to detect a different biomarker. This would enable parallel detection of multiple pathogens.

Enter thermal scanning probe lithography (tSPL), a breakthrough technology that may hold the key to overcoming these barriers. This technique allows for the precise chemical patterning of a polymer-coated chip, enabling the functionalization of individual FETs with different bioreceptors, such as antibodies or aptamers, at resolutions as fine as 20 nanometers. This is on par with the tiny size of transistors in today’s advanced semiconductor chips. By allowing for highly selective modification of each transistor, this method opens the door to the development of FET-based sensors that can detect a wide variety of pathogens on a single chip, with unparalleled sensitivity.

Riedo, who was instrumental in the development and proliferation of tSPL technology, sees its use here to be further evidence of the groundbreaking way this nanofabrication technique can be used in practical applications. “tSPL, now a commercially available lithographic technology, has been key to functionalize each FET with different bio-receptors in order to achieve multiplexing,” she says.

In tests, FET sensors functionalized using tSPL have shown remarkable performance, detecting as few as 3 attomolar (aM) concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins and as little as 10 live virus particles per milliliter, while effectively distinguishing between different types of viruses, including influenza A. The ability to reliably detect such minute quantities of pathogens with high specificity is a critical step toward creating portable diagnostic devices that could one day be used in a variety of settings, from hospitals to homes.

The study, now published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in Nanoscale, was supported by Mirimus, a Brooklyn-based biotechnology company, and LendLease, a multinational construction and real estate company based in Australia. They are working with the NYU Tandon team to develop illness-detecting wearables and home devices, respectively.

“This research shows off the power of the collaboration between industry and academia, and how it can change the face of modern medicine,” says Prem Premsrirut, President and CEO of Mirimus. “NYU Tandon’s researchers are producing work that will play a large role in the future of disease detection.”

“Companies such as Lendlease and other developers involved in urban regeneration are searching for innovative solutions like this to sense biological threats in buildings.” says Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli of UC Berkeley, a collaborator on the Project. “Biodefense measures like this will be a new infrastructural layer for the buildings of the future”

As semiconductor manufacturing continues to advance, integrating billions of nanoscale FETs onto microchips, the potential for using these chips in biosensing applications is becoming increasingly feasible. A universal, scalable method for functionalizing FET surfaces at nanoscale precision would enable the creation of sophisticated diagnostic tools, capable of detecting multiple diseases in real time, with the kind of speed and accuracy that could transform modern medicine.

The international research, led by The University of Queensland’s Professor Peter Mumby, measured the success of a natural spawning event in March this year.

“In what came as a surprise, we saw that corals needed to be within 10 metres of one another, and preferably closer than that for fertilisation to take place,” Professor Mumby said.

“We knew corals couldn’t be too far apart, but we found they need to be closer than we’d expected.

“Climate change impacts like bleaching are killing and reducing the density of corals, so we’re concerned that individuals may end up too far apart to reproduce successfully.”

To quantify reproduction success, the team placed containers above 26 coral colonies on a reef in Palau, Micronesia during a time when the mostly hermaphroditic corals released eggs and sperm.

“The containers captured some of each corals’ eggs and drifted to the surface where they followed the tide,” Professor Mumby said.

“Although the eggs could not escape, sperm could enter the container and fertilise the eggs.

“After an hour of drifting, the proportion of fertilised eggs was noted for each type of coral along with the distance to similar established corals.”

Fertilisation averaged 30% when corals were very close, but it declined to less than 10% at a separation of 10 metres and was virtually zero by 20 metres.

Co-author Dr Christopher Doropoulos of the CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, said coral reproduction was fundamental to population resilience and evolution.

“In the future we may need to help corals continue this key part of their lives,” Dr Doropoulos said.

“Understanding the importance of local neighbourhoods provides tangible targets for interventions like coral restoration.

“Ideally, the density of corals would be monitored at important locations and restoration carried out to return the density back to the levels required for successful reproduction.”

Professor Mumby has been working on efforts to repair damaged coral reefs.

“Our work over the past 5 years on the Great Barrier Reef through the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program is also helping to define these critical thresholds to help restoration practitioners set targets for density to help maintain coral populations,” he said.

The study was funded by the McCusker Foundation and the Australian Government’s Reef Restoration & Adaptation Program.

The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS).

Cisplatin and carboplatin — which have been approved for more than 30 years — are widely used to treat a variety of cancers, including lung, head and neck, breast, bladder, ovarian, uterine, and testicular cancers. When the FDA announced a shortage of cisplatin in February 2023, followed by a shortage of carboplatin in April 2023, it drew attention to the ongoing challenge of generic drug shortages, and prompted major national oncology societies to recommend best practices for priority use and alternative medicines.

“At the time, national surveys showed that most cancer centers in the US were reporting shortages of these platinum chemotherapies, but it wasn’t clear how the shortages were actually affecting patients,” said lead author Jacob B. Reibel, MD, a third-year fellow in Hematology-Oncology. “When we looked at the data on prescribing practices over the shortage period, compared to the previous year, we found that although reporting of the shortages was widespread, it didn’t affect as many patients as we had feared.”

Reibel, senior author Ronac Mamtani, MD, section chief of Genitourinary Cancers, and colleagues, analyzed data from 11,797 adults across the U.S. with advanced solid cancers for which platinum chemotherapy is recommended as the first line of therapy and who began treatment during the one-year period before or during the platinum chemotherapy shortage. Because cisplatin and carboplatin were prioritized for patients with curable cancers during the shortage, the researchers expected that patients with advanced cancers would be most affected by drug availability.

From February 2023 through January 2024, there was a 2.7 percent decrease in platinum chemotherapy use compared to the previous year. This translates into 137 fewer patients in this advanced cancer cohort receiving platinum chemotherapy than expected, and the researchers estimate about 1,000 patients affected overall in the US, based on the rates observed in the study. At the peak of the shortage in June 2023, the decrease was 15.1 percent compared to the previous year. With a median follow-up time of 7.6 months after beginning treatment, there was no difference in mortality compared to the previous year.

Alternative therapies help mitigate the crisis, but are not first choice

The researchers hypothesized that the limited impact on mortality was likely due to the use of effective alternative medications recommended by medical societies, such as immune checkpoint inhibitors, targeted therapy or other forms of chemotherapy. The study did not assess the potential drawbacks of alternative medications, including the financial burden of more expensive non-generic alternatives and side effects of different drugs.

“We always want to prioritize the best treatments that we have for patients, and platinum chemotherapies just happen to also be very cost-effective because they’re generic and have been around for decades,” Mamtani said. “While the alternative options may be effective, we want to be able to provide the ‘standard-of-care’ medications to any patient in need. Even one hundred patients who can’t get the preferred chemotherapy for their cancer type due to supply chain issues is far too many.”

The FDA listed the cisplatin shortage as resolved at the end of June 2024 and carboplatin remains on the shortage list, though the research team found prescribing levels have returned to normal.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (T32CA009679).

The findings, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, show that a diet low in omega-6 and high in omega-3 fatty acids, combined with fish oil supplements, significantly reduced the growth rate of prostate cancer cells in men with early-stage disease.

“This is an important step toward understanding how diet can potentially influence prostate cancer outcomes,” said Dr. William Aronson, Professor of Urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and first author of the study. “Many men are interested in lifestyle changes, including diet, to help manage their cancer and prevent the progression of their disease. Our findings suggest that something as simple as adjusting your diet could potentially slow cancer growth and extend the time before more aggressive interventions are needed.”

Many men with low-risk prostate cancer choose active surveillance over immediate treatment, however, within five years, about 50% of these men eventually need to undergo therapy with either surgery or radiation. Because of this, patients are eager to find ways to delay the need for treatment, including through dietary changes or supplements. However, specific dietary guidelines in this area have yet to be established. While other clinical trials have looked at increasing vegetable intake and healthy diet patterns, none have found a significant impact on slowing cancer progression.

To determine whether diet or supplements can play a role in managing prostate cancer, the UCLA-led team conducted a prospective clinical trial, called CAPFISH-3, that included 100 men with low risk or favorable intermediate risk prostate cancer who chose active surveillance. Participants were randomly assigned to either continue their normal diet or follow a low omega-6, high omega-3 diet, supplemented with fish oil, for one year.

Participants in the intervention arm received dietary personalized counseling by a registered dietician nutritionist, either in-person, through telehealth or by phone. Patients were guided on healthier, lower fat alternatives for high fat/high calorie foods (such as using olive oil or lemon and vinegar for salad dressing), and on reducing consumption of foods with higher omega-6 content (such as, chips, cookies, mayonnaise and other fried or processed foods). The goal was to create a favorable balance of their intake of omega-6 and omega-3 fats and make participants feel empowered to control how they change their behavior. They were also given fish oil capsules for extra omega-3s. The control group did not get any dietary counseling or take fish oil capsules.

The researchers tracked changes in a biomarker called the Ki-67 index, which indicates how fast cancer cells are multiplying — a key predictor of cancer progression, metastasis and survival.

Same site biopsies were obtained at the start of the study and again after the one-year mark, using an image fusion device that helps track and locate the cancer sites.

Results showed that the low omega-6, omega-3 rich diet and fish oil group had a 15% decrease in the Ki-67 index, while the control group saw a 24% increase.

“This significant difference suggests that the dietary changes may help slow cancer growth, potentially delaying or even preventing the need for more aggressive treatments,” said Aronson, who is also the Chief of urologic oncology at the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Medical Center and member of the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.

While the results are promising, researchers did not find any differences in other cancer growth markers, such as Gleason grade, which are commonly used to track prostate cancer progression.

The investigators caution that further research is necessary to confirm the long-term benefits of omega-3 fatty acids and lowering omega-6 in managing prostate cancer. The findings support further, larger trials to explore the long-term impact of dietary changes on cancer progression, treatment outcomes and survival rates in men on active surveillance.

The study’s senior author is Dr. Susanne Henning, adjunct professor emerita and former director of the nutritional biomarker laboratory at the Center for Human Nutrition at UCLA. Other UCLA co-authors are Tristan Grogan, Dr. Pei Liang, Patricia Jardack, Amana Liddell, Claudia Perez, Dr. David Elashoff, Dr. Jonathan Said and Dr. Leonard Marks.

The study was funded in part by the National Cancer Institute, the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, Howard B. Klein and the Seafood Industry Research Fund.

In a study published in Nature Communications, Lewis Zhichang Shi, M.D., Ph.D., and University of Alabama at Birmingham colleagues show, for the first time, how HIF1α in T cells is key for induction of interferon gamma, or IFN-γ, in that hypoxic environment. The cytokine IFN-γ is known to be essential to induce the tumor-killing capacity of T cells. Additionally, an alternative metabolism called glycolysis, which is able to produce energy in human cells when no oxygen is present, is similarly known to be required for IFN-γ induction in T cells.

“Intriguingly, under normal oxygen levels in the body, called normoxia, IFN-g induction and glycolysis in T cells are not mediated by HIF1α, a primary regulator of glycolysis, but by its widely regarded downstream target LDHa, as reported in an early study by another group,” said Shi, a professor in the UAB Department of Radiation Oncology. “However, it has been unknown, under hypoxia, whether and how HIF1α regulates IFN-γ induction and glycolysis in T cells.”

The UAB researchers found that HIF1α-glycolysis is indispensable for IFN-γ induction in hypoxic T cells. HIF1α is a subunit of HIF, or hypoxia-inducible factor, that is known to play a crucial role in orchestrating cellular responses to hypoxia.

Shi and colleagues showed this key role for HIF1α in hypoxia by combining genetic mouse models, metabolic flux analysis using ¹³C-labeled glucose tracing assays and a Seahorse analyzer, as well as pharmacological approaches.

In both human and mouse T cells that were activated under hypoxia, they found that the deletion of HIF1α from the T cells prevented the metabolic reprogramming shift from catabolic metabolism to anabolic metabolism, of which anaerobic glycolysis is a major component; the deletion also suppressed the induction of IFN-γ. Additionally, pharmacologic inhibition of T cell glycolysis under hypoxia prevented induction of IFN-γ. Conversely, stabilization of HIF1α by knocking out a negative regulator of HIF1α increased IFN-γ under hypoxic conditions.

With regard to defense against cancer, the researchers found that hypoxic T cells deleted for HIF1α were less able to kill tumor cells in vitro. In vivo, tumor-bearing mice that had the HIF1α-deleted in T cells did not respond to ICB therapy.

The researchers then showed a way to overcome that resistance to ICB therapy. Elucidation of the mechanistic function of the HIF1α deletion showed that loss of HIF1α greatly diminished glycolytic activity in hypoxic T cells, resulting in depleted intracellular acetyl-CoA and attenuated activation-induced cell death, or AICD. Restoration of intracellular acetyl-CoA by supplementing growth media with acetate reengaged AICD and rescued IFN-γ production for hypoxic Hif1α-deletion T cells.

Shi and colleagues then demonstrated, in living mice, that acetate supplementation was an effective strategy to bypass ICB resistance in tumor-bearing mice with specific deletion of HIF1α in T cells. When Hif1α-deletion tumor-bearing mice were given acetate supplementation followed by combination ICB therapy, the mice had significant improvement in ICB therapy, as seen by potent suppression of tumor growth and greatly reduced tumor weights.

“TILs and tumor cells utilize the same metabolic pathways for their growth and function, and co-live in the metabolically harsh tumor-microenvironments characterized by hypoxia and poor nutrition, placing them in a fierce metabolic tug-of-war,” Shi said. “How to tilt this metabolic battle to favor TILs would be key, and we showed that acetate supplementation restored IFN-γ production in Hif1α-deletion-TILs and overcame ICB resistance derived from HIF1α loss in T cells.”

“Our study, together with an early report by others, compellingly shows that the impaired HIF1α function in T cells is a major T cell-intrinsic mechanism of therapeutic resistance to ICBs, like anti-CTLA-4 and anti-PD-1/L1,” Shi said.

Co-authors with Shi in the study, “HIF1α-regulated glycolysis promotes activation-induced cell death and IFN-γ induction in hypoxic T cells,” are Hongxing Shen, Oluwagbemiga A. Ojo, Haitao Ding, Chuan Xing, Abdelrahman Yassin, Vivian Y. Shi, Zach Lewis, Ewa Podgorska and James A. Bonner, UAB Department of Radiation Oncology; Logan J. Mullen, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, Alaska; M. Iqbal Hossain and Shaida A. Andrabi, UAB Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology; and Maciek R. Antoniewicz, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Support came from UAB; the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center at UAB; National Institutes of Health grants CA230475-01A1, CA25972101A1 and CA279849-01A1; V Foundation Scholar Award V2018-023; Department of Defense-Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs grant ME210108; and Cancer Research Institute CLIP Grant CRI4342.

At UAB Radiation Oncology and Pharmacology and Toxicology are departments in the Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine. Shi is a scientist in the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center and holds the Koikos-Petelos-Jones-Bragg ROAR Endowed Professorship for Cancer Research.

The study, which was published Dec. 13 in the print edition of the journal Patterns and featured on the journal’s cover, describes a computer program named PlacentaVision that can analyze a simple photograph of the placenta to detect abnormalities associated with infection and neonatal sepsis, a life-threatening condition that affects millions of newborns globally.

“Placenta is one of the most common specimens that we see in the lab,” said study co-author Dr. Jeffery Goldstein, director of perinatal pathology and an associate professor of pathology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “When the neonatal intensive care unit is treating a sick kid, even a few minutes can make a difference in medical decision making. With a diagnosis from these photographs, we can have an answer days earlier than we would in our normal process.”

Northwestern provided the largest set of images for the study, and Goldstein led the development and troubleshooting of the algorithms.

Alison D. Gernand, contact principal investigator on the project, conceived the original idea for this tool through her global health work, particularly with pregnancies where women deliver in their homes due to lack of health care resources.

“Discarding the placenta without examination is a common but often overlooked problem,” said Gernand, associate professor in the Penn State College of Health and Human Development (HHD) Department of Nutritional Sciences. “It is a missed opportunity to identify concerns and provide early intervention that can reduce complications and improve outcomes for both the mother and the baby.”

Why early examination of the placenta matters

The placenta plays a vital role in the health of both the pregnant individual and baby during pregnancy, yet it is often not thoroughly examined at birth, especially in areas with limited medical resources.

“This research could save lives and improve health outcomes,” said Yimu Pan, a doctoral candidate in the informatics program from the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) and lead author on the study. “It could make placental examination more accessible, benefitting research and care for future pregnancies, especially for mothers and babies at higher risk of complications.”

Early identification of placental infection through tools like PlacentaVision might enable clinicians to take prompt actions, such as administering antibiotics to the mother or baby and closely monitoring the newborn for signs of infection, the scientists said.

PlacentaVision is intended for use across a range of medical demographics, according to the researchers.

“In low-resource areas — places where hospitals don’t have pathology labs or specialists — this tool could help doctors quickly spot issues like infections from a placenta,” Pan said. “In well-equipped hospitals, the tool may eventually help doctors determine which placentas need further, detailed examination, making the process more efficient and ensuring the most important cases are prioritized.”

“Before such a tool can be deployed globally, core technical obstacles we faced were to make the model flexible enough to handle various diagnoses related to the placenta and to ensure that the tool can be robust enough to handle various delivery conditions, including variation in lighting conditions, imaging quality and clinical settings” said James Z. Wang, distinguished professor in the College of IST at Penn State and one of the principal investigators on the study. “Our AI tool needs to maintain accuracy even when many training images come from a well-equipped urban hospital. Ensuring that PlacentaVision can handle a wide range of real-world conditions was essential.”

How the tool learned how to analyze pictures of placentas

The researchers used cross-modal contrastive learning, an AI method for aligning and understanding relationship between different types of data — in this case, visual (images) and textual (pathological reports) — to teach a computer program how to analyze pictures of placentas. They gathered a large, diverse dataset of placental images and pathological reports spanning a 12-year period, studied how these images relate to health outcomes and built a model that could make predictions based on new images. The team also developed various image alteration strategies to simulate different photo-taking conditions so the model’s resilience can be evaluated properly.

The result was PlacentaCLIP+, a robust machine-learning model that can analyze photos of placentas to detect health risks with high accuracy. It was validated cross-nationally to confirm consistent performance across populations.

According to the researchers, PlacentaVision is designed to be easy to use, potentially working through a smartphone app or integrated into medical record software so doctors can get quick answers after delivery.

Next step: A user-friendly app for medical staff

“Our next steps include developing a user-friendly mobile app that can be used by medical professionals — with minimal training — in clinics or hospitals with low resources,” Pan said. “The user-friendly app would allow doctors and nurses to photograph placentas and get immediate feedback and improve care.”

The researchers plan to make the tool even smarter by including more types of placental features and adding clinical data to improve predictions while also contributing to research on long-term health. They’ll also test the tool in different hospitals to ensure it works in a variety of settings.

“This tool has the potential to transform how placentas are examined after birth, especially in parts of the world where these exams are rarely done,” Gernand said. “This innovation promises greater accessibility in both low- and high-resource settings. With further refinement, it has the potential to transform neonatal and maternal care by enabling early, personalized interventions that prevent severe health outcomes and improve the lives of mothers and infants worldwide.”

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (grant R01EB030130). The team used supercomputing resources from the National Science Foundation-funded Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program.