Performing a new task without prior training, on the sole basis of verbal or written instructions, is a unique human ability. What’s more, once we have learned the task, we are able to describe it so that another person can reproduce it. This dual capacity distinguishes us from other species which, to learn a new task, need numerous trials accompanied by positive or negative reinforcement signals, without being able to communicate it to their congeners.

A sub-field of artificial intelligence (AI) — Natural language processing — seeks to recreate this human faculty, with machines that understand and respond to vocal or textual data. This technique is based on artificial neural networks, inspired by our biological neurons and by the way they transmit electrical signals to each other in the brain. However, the neural calculations that would make it possible to achieve the cognitive feat described above are still poorly understood.

”Currently, conversational agents using AI are capable of integrating linguistic information to produce text or an image. But, as far as we know, they are not yet capable of translating a verbal or written instruction into a sensorimotor action, and even less explaining it to another artificial intelligence so that it can reproduce it,” explains Alexandre Pouget, full professor in the Department of Basic Neurosciences at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine.

A model brain

The researcher and his team have succeeded in developing an artificial neuronal model with this dual capacity, albeit with prior training. ”We started with an existing model of artificial neurons, S-Bert, which has 300 million neurons and is pre-trained to understand language. We ‘connected’ it to another, simpler network of a few thousand neurons,” explains Reidar Riveland, a PhD student in the Department of Basic Neurosciences at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, and first author of the study.

In the first stage of the experiment, the neuroscientists trained this network to simulate Wernicke’s area, the part of our brain that enables us to perceive and interpret language. In the second stage, the network was trained to reproduce Broca’s area, which, under the influence of Wernicke’s area, is responsible for producing and articulating words. The entire process was carried out on conventional laptop computers. Written instructions in English were then transmitted to the AI.

For example: pointing to the location — left or right — where a stimulus is perceived; responding in the opposite direction of a stimulus; or, more complex, between two visual stimuli with a slight difference in contrast, showing the brighter one. The scientists then evaluated the results of the model, which simulated the intention of moving, or in this case pointing. ”Once these tasks had been learned, the network was able to describe them to a second network — a copy of the first — so that it could reproduce them. To our knowledge, this is the first time that two AIs have been able to talk to each other in a purely linguistic way,” says Alexandre Pouget, who led the research.

For future humanoids

This model opens new horizons for understanding the interaction between language and behaviour. It is particularly promising for the robotics sector, where the development of technologies that enable machines to talk to each other is a key issue. ”The network we have developed is very small. Nothing now stands in the way of developing, on this basis, much more complex networks that would be integrated into humanoid robots capable of understanding us but also of understanding each other,” conclude the two researchers.

But University of Michigan scientists are looking at something a little more tangible: coral.

Examining samples from corals in the Great Barrier Reef, the researchers discovered between 1750 and present day, as the global climate warmed, wet-season rainfall in that part of the world increased by about 10%, and the rate of extreme rain events more than doubled. Their results are published in Nature, Communications Earth and Environment.

“Climate scientists often find themselves saying, ‘I knew it was going to get bad, but I didn’t think it was going to get this bad this fast.’ But we’re actually seeing it in this coral record,” said principal investigator Julia Cole, chair of the U-M Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.

“Studies of the future tend to use climate models and those models can give different results. Some may say more rainfall, some they say less rainfall. We’re showing that, at least in northeastern Queensland, there is definitely more rainfall, it’s definitely more variable and it’s definitely already happening.”

The study, led by U-M researcher Kelsey Dyez, analyzed core samples drilled from a coral colony situated at the mouth of a river in northern Queensland, Australia. During the summer rainy seasons, rainfall filtering into the river picks up nutrients, organic material and sediments, which are then carried to the river mouth and discharged into the ocean, washing over the coral colony.

As the corals are bathed in this freshwater outflow, they pick up geochemical signals from the river and record them into their carbonate skeletons. The core samples of the corals display faint bands of lighter and darker material. These bands reflect each rainy and dry season the coral lived through. The bands also hold information about the climate in each season, just as trees’ rings record climate patterns during the years it grows.

“We want to know, as we warm the earth, are we going to have more rainfall? Less rainfall? Maybe different parts of the Earth will respond differently?” Dyez said. “This project is especially important because we’re able to put that warming and changes into context. We are able to record rainfall from the period before we have instrumental records for this part of the world.”

To accurately determine how much rain fell each rainy season, and how many extreme rain events occurred during each season, the researchers compared instrumental rainfall records that began in the 1950s to the corresponding years in the coral. This gave the researchers a calibration period that they could use to determine the relationship between the coral characteristics and the amount of rainfall that fell each rainy season as long as the corals were alive, all the way back to 1750.

The coral core was taken from a remote region off northeastern Queensland by the Australian Institute of Marine Science. The land surrounding the river watershed is also in a protected area, meaning that nutrients and sediment flushed into the river by rains are unlikely to be generated by human activity.

“This is a region that has experienced pretty big swings in recent years between floods that have been devastating to communities, and then drier periods,” Cole said. “Because northeastern Australia is an agricultural region, how rainfall changes in a warmer world is of real tangible importance. People might not sense a few degrees Celsius of warming, but they really suffer if there’s a drought or a flood.”

To reconstruct rainfall, the researchers used four different measures. First, the researchers looked at the luminescence of the bands in the coral. When they shine a black light on the coral, organic compounds in the coral cause it to fluoresce. The brighter the band fluoresces, the more organic compounds came down the river and were deposited onto the coral, reflecting a season of heavy rainfall.

The researchers also measured how much of the element barium is contained in each of the bands. The coral skeleton is composed of calcium, but when barium is deposited onto the skeleton, it can replace calcium. The more barium detected in the band, the more river discharge was flowing over the coral.

The researchers then looked at stable carbon isotopes (carbon-12 and carbon-13) within the coral. The more the ratio of these two isotopes favors carbon-12, the more water must have been coming down the river from greater rainfall.

Finally, the researchers examined stable oxygen isotopes (oxygen-16 and oxygen-18). When the ratio of these two isotopes favors oxygen-16, it is a signature of additional precipitation and freshwater coming down the river.

Because the coral record is located off northeastern Australia, the researchers wanted to understand if the whole of Australia experienced similar rainfall. Looking at instrumental rainfall records across Australia, the researchers found that the increased rainfall patterns did not occur evenly across Australia.

“It’s not actually that well correlated to western Australia. That’s too far away. But for most of eastern Australia, there is a significant correlation. And that’s where many people live,” Dyez said. “It’s especially strong across Queensland, which is where a lot of these rainfall extremes are happening right now.”

However, if the aim is simply to store data in a physical object, then holography can be done quite easily, as has now been demonstrated at TU Wien: A 3D printer can be used to produce a panel from normal plastic in which a QR code can be stored, for example. The message is read using terahertz rays — electromagnetic radiation that is invisible to the human eye.

The hologram as a data storage device

A hologram is completely different from an ordinary image. In an ordinary image, each pixel has a clearly defined position. If you tear off a piece of the picture, a part of the content is lost.

In a hologram, however, the image is formed by contributions from all areas of the hologram simultaneously. If you take away a piece of the hologram, the rest can still create the complete image (albeit perhaps a blurrier version). With the hologram, the information is not stored pixel by pixel, but rather, all of the information is spread out over the whole hologram.

“We have applied this principle to terahertz beams,” says Evan Constable from the Institute of Solid State Physics at TU Wien. “These are electromagnetic rays in the range of around one hundred to several thousand gigahertz, comparable to the radiation of a cell phone or a microwave oven — but with a significantly higher frequency.”

This terahertz radiation is sent to a thin plastic plate. This plate is almost transparent to the terahertz rays, but it has a higher refractive index than the surrounding air, so at each point of the plate, it changes the incident wave a little. “A wave then emanates from each point of the plate, and all these waves interfere with each other,” says Evan Constable. “If you have adjusted the thickness of the plate in just the right way, point by point, then the superposition of all these waves produces exactly the desired image.”

It is similar to throwing lots of little stones into a pond in a precisely calculated way so that the water waves from all these stones add up to a very specific overall wave pattern.

A piece of cheap plastic as a high-tech storage unit for valuable items

In this way, it was possible to encode a Bitcoin wallet address (consisting of 256 bits) in a piece of plastic. By shining terahertz rays of the correct wavelength through this plastic plate, a terahertz ray image is created that produces exactly the desired code. “In this way, you can securely store a value of tens of thousands of euros in an object that only costs a few cents,” says Evan Constable.

In order for the plate to generate the correct code, one first has to calculate how thick the plate has to be at each point, so that it changes the terahertz wave in exactly the right way. Evan Constable and his collaborators made the code for obtaining this thickness profile available for free on Github. “Once you have this thickness profile, all you need is an ordinary 3D printer to print the plate and you have the desired information stored holographically,” explains Constable. The aim of the research work was not only to make holography with terahertz waves possible, but also to demonstrate how well the technology for working with these waves has progressed and how precisely this still rather unusual range of electromagnetic radiation can already be used today.

Instead, techniques often used to address stress — deep breathing, mindfulness, meditation, yoga or even counting to 10 — have been shown to be more effective at decreasing anger and aggression.

Researchers analyzed over 150 studies involving more than 10,000 participants and found that what really works to reduce anger is lowering physiological arousal — in other words, turning down the heat. Activities that increased arousal overall had no effect on anger, and some activities made it worse — particularly jogging.

“I think it’s really important to bust the myth that if you’re angry you should blow off steam — get it off your chest,” said senior author Brad Bushman, professor of communication at The Ohio State University. “Venting anger might sound like a good idea, but there’s not a shred of scientific evidence to support catharsis theory.

“To reduce anger, it is better to engage in activities that decrease arousal levels,” Bushman said. “Despite what popular wisdom may suggest, even going for a run is not an effective strategy because it increases arousal levels and ends up being counterproductive.”

The study was led by first author Sophie Kjærvik, who completed the review for her Ohio State dissertation. It was published online March 11 in the journal Clinical Psychology Review.

Kjærvik, now a postdoctoral fellow at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the work was inspired in part by the rising popularity of rage rooms that promote smashing things (such as glass, plates and electronics) to work through angry feelings.

“I wanted to debunk the whole theory of expressing anger as a way of coping with it,” she said. “We wanted to show that reducing arousal, and actually the physiological aspect of it, is really important.”

The meta-analytic review was based on 154 studies involving 10,189 participants of different genders, races, ages and cultures. The study selection and analysis were guided by the Schachter-Singer two-factor theory, which assumes that all emotions, including anger, consist of physiological arousal and mental meanings. To get rid of anger, you can work on either of those.

Several previous meta-analytic reviews have focused on changing mental meanings using cognitive behavioral therapy, which works. However, Kjærvik and Bushman said a meta-analytic review on the role of arousal would fill an important gap in understanding how to resolve anger. Their analysis focused on examining both arousal-increasing activities (e.g., hitting a bag, jogging, cycling, swimming) and arousal-decreasing activities (e.g., deep breathing, mindfulness, meditation, yoga).

Results showed that arousal-decreasing activities were effective at fending off the fury in labs and field settings, using digital platforms or in-person instruction, and in group and individual sessions across multiple populations: college students and non-students, people with and without a criminal history, and individuals with and without intellectual disabilities.

Arousal-decreasing activities that were effective at lowering anger across the board included deep breathing, relaxation, mindfulness, meditation, slow flow yoga, progressive muscle relaxation, diaphragmic breathing and taking a timeout.

“It was really interesting to see that progressive muscle relaxation and just relaxation in general might be as effective as approaches such as mindfulness and meditation,” Kjærvik said. “And yoga, which can be more arousing than meditation and mindfulness, is still a way of calming and focusing on your breath that has the similar effect in reducing anger.

“Obviously in today’s society, we’re all dealing with a lot of stress, and we need ways of coping with that, too. Showing that the same strategies that work for stress actually also work for anger is beneficial.”

In contrast, activities that increased arousal were generally ineffective, but also produced a complex range of outcomes. Jogging was the most likely to increase anger, while physical education classes and playing ball sports had an arousal-decreasing effect — suggesting to the researchers that introducing an element of play into physical activity may at least increase positive emotions or counteract negative feelings.

Finding that increasing arousal was not the answer to anger corresponded with previous work led by Bushman that linked venting anger with continued aggression.

“Certain physical activities that increase arousal may be good for your heart, but they’re definitely not the best way to reduce anger,” Bushman said. “It’s really a battle because angry people want to vent, but our research shows that any good feeling we get from venting actually reinforces aggression.”

That being the case, the authors noted that many arousal-decreasing interventions shown to lower the heat of anger are free or inexpensive and easy to access.

“You don’t need to necessarily book an appointment with a cognitive behavioral therapist to deal with anger. You can download an app for free on your phone, or you can find a YouTube video if you need guidance,” Kjærvik said.

A team of UCLA engineers has invented a soft, thin, stretchy device measuring just over 1 square inch that can be attached to the skin outside the throat to help people with dysfunctional vocal cords regain their voice function. Their advance is detailed this week in the journal Nature Communications.

The new bioelectric system, developed by Jun Chen, an assistant professor of bioengineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, and his colleagues, is able to detect movement in a person’s larynx muscles and translate those signals into audible speech with the assistance of machine-learning technology — with nearly 95% accuracy.

The breakthrough is the latest in Chen’s efforts to help those with disabilities. His team previously developed a wearable glove capable of translating American Sign Language into English speech in real time to help users of ASL communicate with those who don’t know how to sign.

The tiny new patch-like device is made up of two components. One, a self-powered sensing component, detects and converts signals generated by muscle movements into high-fidelity, analyzable electrical signals; these electrical signals are then translated into speech signals using a machine-learning algorithm. The other, an actuation component, turns those speech signals into the desired voice expression.

The two components each contain two layers: a layer of biocompatible silicone compound polydimethylsiloxane, or PDMS, with elastic properties, and a magnetic induction layer made of copper induction coils. Sandwiched between the two components is a fifth layer containing PDMS mixed with micromagnets, which generates a magnetic field.

Utilizing a soft magnetoelastic sensing mechanism developed by Chen’s team in 2021, the device is capable of detecting changes in the magnetic field when it is altered as a result of mechanical forces — in this case, the movement of laryngeal muscles. The embedded serpentine induction coils in the magnetoelastic layers help generate high-fidelity electrical signals for sensing purposes.

Measuring 1.2 inches on each side, the device weighs about 7 grams and is just 0.06 inch thick. With double-sided biocompatible tape, it can easily adhere to an individual’s throat near the location of the vocal cords and can be reused by reapplying tape as needed.

Voice disorders are prevalent across all ages and demographic groups; research has shown that nearly 30% of people will experience at least one such disorder in their lifetime. Yet with therapeutic approaches, such as surgical interventions and voice therapy, voice recovery can stretch from three months to a year, with some invasive techniques requiring a significant period of mandatory postoperative voice rest.

“Existing solutions such as handheld electro-larynx devices and tracheoesophageal- puncture procedures can be inconvenient, invasive or uncomfortable,” said Chen who leads the Wearable Bioelectronics Research Group at UCLA, and has been named one the world’s most highly cited researchers five years in a row. “This new device presents a wearable, non-invasive option capable of assisting patients in communicating during the period before treatment and during the post-treatment recovery period for voice disorders.”

How machine learning enables the wearable tech

In their experiments, the researchers tested the wearable technology on eight healthy adults. They collected data on laryngeal muscle movement and used a machine-learning algorithm to correlate the resulting signals to certain words. They then selected a corresponding output voice signal through the device’s actuation component.

The research team demonstrated the system’s accuracy by having the participants pronounce five sentences — both aloud and voicelessly — including “Hi, Rachel, how are you doing today?” and “I love you!”

The overall prediction accuracy of the model was 94.68%, with the participants’ voice signal amplified by the actuation component, demonstrating that the sensing mechanism recognized their laryngeal movement signal and matched the corresponding sentence the participants wished to say.

Going forward, the research team plans to continue enlarging the vocabulary of the device through machine learning and to test it in people with speech disorders.

Other authors of the paper are UCLA Samueli graduate students Ziyuan Che, Chrystal Duan, Xiao Wan, Jing Xu and Tianqi Zheng — all members of Chen’s lab.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the American Heart Association, Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute, and the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering.

But exactly how much water is held in snowpacks, and for how long?

That information, critical to water managers around the globe, has taken on new clarity thanks to a new, more holistic calculation technique developed by researchers in the Oregon State University College of Engineering.

“Water managers tend to consider a portfolio of infrastructure options — surface water reservoirs, groundwater recharge programs, etc. — to match supply to demand,” OSU’s David Hill said. “Increased understanding of how much water is in snow should allow them to make long-term planning decisions for how to adjust that portfolio.”

The study by Hill, a professor of civil engineering, and doctoral student Christina Aragon looked at nearly four decades of snowpack data. Through their new metric, which they call snow water storage, they identified a 22% drop in how much water is held annually in the mountain snowpacks of the lower 48 states.

“Unlike other widely used metrics that capture snow variables at a single point in time, like maximum snow water equivalent, or describe snow characteristics in terms of time, such as length of snow season, snow water storage is applicable at numerous time and space scales,” Hill said. “It’s really just a cumulative sum, not a maximum value; it’s like adding up the number of miles you drive in a given year, rather than just thinking about the 500 you did on one day for your road trip.”

In addition to introducing a better tool for gauging how much water is in snowpacks over periods of time, the findings are important because of what the new metric revealed about mountain snowpacks, which play an outsized role in the nation’s water storage.

Hill and Aragon note that of all the water stored in the form of snow in the lower 48, 72% of it is in the mountains, though mountains cover just 16% of the total area.

“There are many ways to describe or quantify our snow resources, but some of the traditional measures, such as the April 1st snowpack, increasingly do not tell the full story,” Hill said. “We present a new way of describing snow’s water storage ability that adds deeper understanding and has more applicability in cases where our snowfall is increasingly intermittent or, regrettably, turning to rain.”

The researchers’ work, presented in a paper published in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, builds on a commonly used measurement known as snow water equivalent; as its name implies, it’s how much water is left in a container after the snow that was placed in it melts.

“By considering the amount of water held in the snowpack and the amount of time the water is stored as snow, we are able to quantify water storage in different types of snowpacks,” Aragon said. “This includes persistent snowpacks, like we typically have at high elevations in the mountains; transient snowpacks, which are typically found at lower elevations; and snowpacks that are transitioning from persistent to transient due to climate warming.”

Aragon adds that because the snow water storage metric can be applied to multiple types of snowpacks, it may become increasingly valuable for monitoring and predicting water resources “amidst a future of increased climate variability.”

Hill points out that the past several years in the lower 48 have seen a “feast or famine cycle of extremes when it has come to the where and the when of our snow and rain.” And in general snowpacks have considerably declined over the past 10 to 20 years.

“That particularly matters in places like Oregon, where 15% of the state’s total annual precipitation falls as snow, and our snowpack functions like a reservoir,” he said. “It holds back winter precipitation and slowly releases it in spring and early summer. This is useful because, at those times, our rainfall has tapered off for the year, but demand for water is on the rise.”

As the climate warms and snowpacks become more and more variable — the winter of 2023-24 is a good example, Hill said — a metric like the new one developed at OSU helps to more objectively quantify the reservoir storage aspect of the globe’s snowpacks.

From local to regional scales, he notes, municipal and agricultural users of water need to balance demand with supply, and snow storage dramatically influences the timing of the supply side.

“As we move forward, and as we have moved from the past to the present, the relatively good news is that annual precipitation amounts tend to not change that dramatically,” he said. “However, changing temperatures greatly influence snow storage and therefore the timing of water availability.”

Funding for the work came from the OSU Graduate School Oregon Lottery Award for Academic Excellence and from the Oregon State Water Resources Graduate Program Alumni Award.

The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans is a favorite among neuroscientists because its 302 neurons are completely mapped. This gives a fantastic opportunity to reveal their neural mechanism at a systems level. Thus far, scientists have been making progress in revealing the different states and patterns of each neuron and the assemblies they form. However, how these states and patterns are generated has been a less explored frontier.

First, the team of scientists measured the neural activity of each cell that makes up a primitive brain in the roundworms’ head area. To achieve this, the worms were placed in a microfluidic chip, a tiny device designed for worms to be able to “wiggle” backward and forward while keeping them within the field of view of the objective lens. Then, using a confocal microscope, the scientists filmed how the neurons reacted to changes in salt concentrations.

“Although we were able to extract neural “motifs” common among individuals,” Iino says, “we were surprised to find large individual differences in neural activity. Information from sensory neurons is transmitted to “command” neurons through multiple paths to control behavior. Since the neural circuits of C. elegans are thought to be relatively well conserved among individuals, we had assumed that there would be little variation in these paths among individuals. But remarkably, we found the opposite.”

The data derived from these “films” of roundworm brains were then used to create computer simulations of roundworm brains. However, the first simulations that contained only deterministic elements generated decaying “neural” activity. By adding “noise” to the models, the team achieved an accurate representation of the roundworms’ whole-brain activity. The scientists were not only able to estimate the strength of connectivity between neurons but also demonstrated that “noise” is essential to brain activity. This mathematical model could even potentially be applied to analyze neuronal activity in cases where complete connectome data is not yet available.

With such possibilities, the number of exciting, new questions seems infinite. But choose a scientist must.

“We originally designed this study to investigate the neural mechanisms involved when roundworms are attracted to salt,” Iino explains. “However, to measure whole-brain activity, we needed to keep the roundworms in a narrow channel so that they would not move away. We would like to improve the microscope so that we can track freely moving roundworms and analyze whole-brain activity while they are being attracted to salt.”

The preclinical study, published in Science Immunology on Mar. 15, showed that bacteria abundant in the guts of newborns produce serotonin, which promotes the development of immune cells called T-regulatory cells or Tregs. These cells suppress inappropriate immune responses to help prevent autoimmune diseases and dangerous allergic reactions to harmless food items or beneficial gut microbes.

“The gut is now known as the second human brain as it makes over 90 percent of the neurotransmitters in the human body. While neurotransmitters such as serotonin are best known for their roles in brain health, receptors for neurotransmitters are located throughout the human body,” explained the study’s senior author, Dr. Melody Zeng, an assistant professor of immunology in the Gale and Ira Drukier Institute for Children’s Research and the Department of Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine.

Gut Bacteria in Babies Provide a Helping Hand

The researchers observed that the neonatal mouse gut had much higher levels of neurotransmitters, including serotonin, than the adult gut. “So far, almost all studies of gut neurotransmitters were conducted in adult animals or human subjects, where a specific gut cell type called enterochromaffin cells produce neurotransmitters,” said Dr. Zeng. “However, we discovered that this isn’t the case in the newborn gut where most of the serotonin is made by bacteria that are more abundant in the neonatal gut.”

This was also confirmed in babies through a human infant stool biobank that the Zeng lab has established in collaboration with the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in the NewYork-Presbyterian Alexandra Cohen Hospital for Women and Newborns. These samples were obtained with parental consent and deidentified.

The study results suggest that before the neonatal gut is mature enough to make its own neurotransmitters, unique gut bacteria may supply neurotransmitters that are needed for critical biological functions during early development.

“We found that gut bacteria in young mice not only directly produce serotonin but also decrease an enzyme called monoamine oxidase that normally breaks down serotonin, thus keeping gut serotonin levels high,” said the study’s lead author Dr. Katherine Sanidad, postdoctoral associate in pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine.

The high serotonin levels shift the balance of immune cells by increasing the number of Tregs, which helps prevent the immune system from overreacting and attacking gut bacteria or food antigens. “The neonatal gut needs these serotonin-producing bacteria to keep the immune system in check,” Dr. Sanidad added.

Healthy Immune System Helps Later in Life

Dr. Zeng noted that this work underscores the importance of having the right types of beneficial bacteria soon after birth. Babies in developed countries have better access to antibiotics, less exposure to diverse microbes in their clean environments and potentially unhealthy diets that may significantly impact the abundance of serotonin-producing bacteria in their intestines.

As a result, these babies may have fewer Tregs and develop immune reactions to their own gut bacteria, or allergies to food. This may be one reason food allergies have become increasingly common in children, particularly in developed countries. “If educated properly, the immune system in babies would recognize that things like peanuts and eggs are okay, and it doesn’t have to attack them,” she said. This may also have an impact on developing autoimmune diseases — when the immune system attacks the body’s own healthy cells — later in life.

The team next plans to look at bacteria in human infant stool samples to measure their production of serotonin, other neurotransmitters and molecules that may help train the immune system to prevent future immune-related diseases, such as allergies, infections and cancer.

“It’s essential to understand how the immune system is trained during early life, but this is understudied in newborns and children. Further studies of these developmental periods may hopefully lead us to mitigation approaches to reduce the risk of inflammatory diseases like food allergies and inflammatory bowel disease later in life,” Dr. Sanidad said.

Dr. Melody Zeng’s lab is supported in part by the National Institutes of Health grants R01HD110118, R01HL169989, R21CA270998, and K01DK114376; The Starr Cancer Consortium; the Hartwell Foundation; and the Jill Roberts Center for Inflammatory Bowel Disease, the Children’s Health Council, and the Drukier Institute for Children’s Health at Weill Cornell Medicine.