For the study, which is published in PLOS ONE, Matthew Leming, PhD, a research fellow at MGH’s Center for Systems Biology and an investigator at the Massachusetts Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, and his colleagues used deep learning — a type of machine learning and artificial intelligence that uses large amounts of data and complex algorithms to train models.

In this case, the scientists developed a model for Alzheimer’s disease detection based on data from brain magnetic resonance images (MRIs) collected from patients with and without Alzheimer’s disease who were seen at MGH before 2019.

Next, the group tested the model across five datasets — MGH post-2019, Brigham and Women’s Hospital pre- and post-2019, and outside systems pre- and post-2019 — to see if it could accurately detect Alzheimer’s disease based on real-world clinical data, regardless of hospital and time.

Overall, the research involved 11,103 images from 2,348 patients at risk for Alzheimer’s disease and 26,892 images from 8,456 patients without Alzheimer’s disease. Across all five datasets, the model detected Alzheimer’s disease risk with 90.2% accuracy.

Among the main innovations of the work were its ability to detect Alzheimer’s disease regardless of other variables, such as age. “Alzheimer’s disease typically occurs in older adults, and so deep learning models often have difficulty in detecting the rarer early-onset cases,” says Leming. “We addressed this by making the deep learning model ‘blind’ to features of the brain that it finds to be overly associated with the patient’s listed age.”

Leming notes that another common challenge in disease detection, especially in real-world settings, is dealing with data that are very different from the training set. For instance, a deep learning model trained on MRIs from a scanner manufactured by General Electric may fail to recognize MRIs collected on a scanner manufactured by Siemens.

The model used an uncertainty metric to determine whether patient data were too different from what it had been trained on for it to be able to make a successful prediction.

“This is one of the only studies that used routinely collected brain MRIs to attempt to detect dementia. While a large number of deep learning studies for Alzheimer’s detection from brain MRIs have been conducted, this study made substantial steps towards actually performing this in real-world clinical settings as opposed to perfect laboratory settings,” said Leming. “Our results — with cross-site, cross-time, and cross-population generalizability — make a strong case for clinical use of this diagnostic technology.”

Additional co-authors include Sudeshna Das, PhD and, Hyungsoon Im, PhD.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health and by the Technology Innovation Program funded by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, Republic of Korea, managed through a subcontract to MGH.

Nearly half a gigaton of carbon (or 1.76 billion tons of CO₂) was released from burning boreal forests in North America and Eurasia in 2021, 150 percent higher than annual mean CO₂ emissions between 2000 and 2020, the scientists reported in a paper in Science.

“According to our measurements, boreal fires in 2021 shattered previous records,” said senior co-author Steven Davis, UCI professor of Earth system science. “These fires are two decades of rapid warming and extreme drought in Northern Canada and Siberia coming to roost, and unfortunately even this new record may not stand for long.”

The researchers said that the worsening fires are part of a climate-fire feedback in which carbon dioxide emissions warm the planet, creating conditions that lead to more fires and more emissions.

“The escalation of wildfires in the boreal region is anticipated to accelerate the release of the large carbon storage in the permafrost soil layer, as well as contribute to the northward expansion of shrubs,” said co-author Yang Chen, a UCI research scientist in Earth system science. “These factors could potentially lead to further warming and create a more favorable climate for the occurrence of wildfires.”

Davis added, “Boreal fires released nearly twice as much CO₂ as global aviation in 2021. If this scale of emissions from unmanaged lands becomes a new normal, stabilizing Earth’s climate will be even more challenging than we thought.”

Analyzing the amount of carbon dioxide released during wildfires is difficult for Earth system scientists for a variety of reasons. Rugged, smoke-enshrouded terrain hampers satellite observations during a combustion event, and space-based measurements are not at a sufficiently fine resolution to reveal details of CO₂ emissions. Models used to simulate fuel load, fuel consumption and fire efficiency work well under ordinary circumstances but are not robust enough to represent extreme wildfires, according to the researchers.

And there is another roadblock of our own creation. “Earth’s atmosphere already contains large amounts of carbon dioxide from human fossil fuel burning, and the existing greenhouse gas is difficult to distinguish from that produced by forest fires,” said Chen.

The team found a way around these hurdles by studying carbon monoxide expelled into the atmosphere during blazes. Combining CO readings from MOPITT — the Measurements Of Pollution In The Troposphere satellite instrument — with existing fire emissions and wind speed datasets, the team reconstructed changes in global fire CO₂ emissions from 2000-2021. Carbon monoxide has a shorter lifespan in the atmosphere than CO₂, so if scientists detect an anomalous abundance of CO, that provides evidence of fires.

The researchers independently confirmed the occurrence of extreme fires in 2021 with data sets provided by NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer aboard the Terra and Aqua satellites.

“The inversion approach employed in this study is a complementary method to the conventional bottom-up approach, which is based on estimating the burned area, fuel load, and combustion completeness,” Chen said. “Combining these approaches can result in a more comprehensive understanding of wildfire patterns and their impacts.”

The researchers said their data analysis revealed links between extensive boreal fires and climate drivers, especially increased annual mean temperatures and short-lived heat waves. They found that higher northern latitudes and areas with larger tree cover fractions were especially vulnerable.

“Wildfire carbon emissions globally were relatively stable at about 2 gigatons per year for the first two decades of the 21st century, but 2021 was the year when emissions really took off,” David said. “About 80 percent of these CO₂ emissions will be recovered through vegetation regrowth, but 20 percent are lost to the atmosphere in an almost irreversible way, so humans are going to have to find some way to remove that carbon from the air or substantially cut our own production of atmospheric carbon dioxide.”

It’s long been thought that these determinedly lazy insects likely evolved their queenly characteristics one by one, through a series of mutations, in an isolated setting. Now scientists in the Laboratory of Social Evolution and Behavior at The Rockefeller University, together with their collaborators at Harvard University, have a new theory. As they report in Current Biology, they’ve discovered queen-like mutants — parasitic ants that spontaneously appeared in colonies of clonal raider ants, which are typically queenless.

“This mutant is like the precursor to other parasitic species,” says Waring Trible, lead author of the study. “It’s a new way of understanding how ants evolve to become socially parasitic.”

Delving into the genetics of these unique ants could be a way to better understand the molecular mechanisms behind caste differentiation, or how an ant develops into a worker or a queen, which remain unknown. It could also help illuminate biological development in organisms in general.

Hiding in plain sight

Among the more than 15,000 identified ant species are hundreds that qualify as social parasites. Born inside a host colony, a parasitic ant will leave the colony, use a sex pheromone to attract a male from another colony to mate with, and once pregnant, will infiltrate the original colony or find another nearby. She’ll often use subterfuge to sneak past colony guards. The shampoo ant, for example, will snatch a few ants just outside a nest entrance, lick them to acquire the colony’s signature chemical scent, and then lick herself all over to transfer it to her own body. Chemically cloaked, she then can slip inside to live out her life and reproduce both new queens and males who mate outside the colony. The males die, and the queens begin the cycle again.

Because of their uniqueness, they’ve been studied extensively by biologists since Charles Darwin, still there’s been a sticking point in a prevailing theory of their evolution, says Daniel Kronauer, the Stanley S. and Sydney R. Shuman Associate Professor at Rockefeller University, and head of the lab. They’re closely related to their hosts, but if they had to acquire these parasitic traits over time, they would need to be isolated during reproduction, otherwise interbreeding with their hosts would wash out their unique traits. But no one has found intermediately evolved ants — ones with some social parasite traits but not others — in the wild, says Kronauer.

When queen-like ants suddenly appeared among the clonal raider ants in Kronauer’s lab in 2015, Trible — who was looking to investigate genetic mechanisms behind caste differentiation — took notice. Because clonal raider ants typically have no queens and reproduce asexually, the queen-like mutants stood out: they were born with wings, larger eyes and ovaries, and as adults showed a general indifference towards labor.

But it turned out they were nothing new — they’d had been hiding for years in dense colonies whose numbers obscured their presence. Genetic analysis revealed that they had mutated into existence inside the colony in which they were first detected — a community of otherwise normal ants that Kronauer had collected in Okinawa, Japan, in 2008, and that still lived in the lab. It was a clue that the typical story of parasite ant invasion might need rethinking.

The researchers then ran a series of experiments and genetic analyses. One of the first experiments was to isolate them to see whether the phenotype was heritable. Because clonal raider ants reproduce asexually, they didn’t have to worry about interbreeding with other ants.

The queen-like mutants lay eggs that developed into copies of themselves. “We knew we had something cool,” Kronauer says.

They also tested behavior. Foraging parties composed entirely of queen-like mutants were half the size of those of worker ants, and they were far less likely to try to enlist other ants to track down food. These behaviors were a sort of intermediary between the diligence of worker ants and the dependence of queens, and allowed the mutant ants to avoid the dangers inherent to leaving the safety of the colony.

Despite laying twice as many eggs as their hosts, the ants self-regulate their head count. As long as their numbers stay below about 25 percent of the host population, they do well. More than that and they run into trouble. Queens need help from workers to free their wings as they emerge from the pupae, and if there are too many queens for the workers to look after, they’ll die entangled in their pupal skin.

“They seem to have the ability to regulate their own reproduction so that they don’t drive their host colony extinct, which is a very smart thing for a parasite to do,” says Trible, a former member of Kronauer’s lab who now runs his own lab at Harvard studying these and other mutants. “This provides these mutants the capacity to survive for long periods of time.”

The influence of hormones

Whole-genome sequencing revealed that the parasitic queens have a mutation in chromosome 13, which is structurally similar to chromosomes that regulate colony social structure in other ants. This mutant chromosome seems to contain a “supergene,” a set of genes that work together to create a phenotype. In this case, the supergene contains more than 200 individual genes, a disproportionate number of which assist in the metabolism of hormones. These include genes that code for cytochrome p450 enzymes, which are required to synthesize hormones in both ants and humans, and may play a role in the creation of these highly unusual mutants. (This enzyme family may be familiar to anyone who has been warned to not drink grapefruit juice while taking certain medications because the juice inhibits the enzymes from detoxifying the drugs.)

It appears that with this single mutation, “their form, the higher egg production, the behavior — it can all shift in a single mutational step,” Kronauer says.

And if that’s the case, Trible says, “it would be a way that it’s actually possible to go from a normal ant to a parasite within a single species.”

That idea — that two very different forms of an animal can arise in a single species — gets at the heart of the mystery of ant castes. Because workerless social parasites arise from a very specific type of mutation affecting ant caste development, studying the queen-like mutants has the potential to reveal insights into the still-unknown molecular mechanisms that allow ant larvae to develop distinct caste morphologies. “It provides a very comprehensive framework in which to study their evolution,” says Kronauer.

Size matters

The findings could also lead to further research on an important process of development known as allometric scaling that happens in all animals, including humans, Trible says. Allometric scaling keeps the tissues of an organism proportional to its body size as it grows.

Its mechanisms are unknown, but understanding them likely has relevance to many aspects of human biology, including disease, says Trible. Perhaps queen-like mutants can provide a new avenue of investigation. “We don’t have good examples of mutations in fruit flies or mice or human genetic disorders that break allometric scaling in such a dramatic way,” he says. “We think this queen-like mutant will be a powerful tool for understanding caste development, and caste development is in turn an ideal model to investigate these larger questions about how allometric scaling works.”

Who can do well in math? How you answer that question may depend on where you live. Whereas people in East Asian countries tend to believe that hard work can lead anyone to succeed at math, people in the United States are more likely to believe that people need natural talent in the subject to succeed. This perception means that students in the U.S. may be particularly susceptible to racial and gender stereotypes about who is and is not “good at math.”

“Americans don’t realize what strange stereotypes we have about math,” says Shifrer. “It really sets kids up for failure here.”

The fact that some high school students are more likely to give up on math than others has important implications for their individual futures and for the lack of diversity in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers.

“U.S. STEM spaces are not a meritocracy,” says Shifrer. “The cultural biases that we have around people’s identities, status characteristics like race and gender, and our cultural stereotypes about math and science and who belongs there play a key role in who enters these fields and does well in them. The more that educators and students are aware of that and take action to counteract it, the more it could really shift access and representation.”

In the study, Shifrer and colleagues sought to determine if teachers could counteract cultural biases and help students develop a positive “math identity” — the sense of seeing themselves as ‘a math person’ or as a person who can succeed in math. In particular, they hypothesized that ninth graders who perceived their math teacher as being more equitable — treating everyone in the class fairly and providing clear resources for success — would have stronger math identities.

To test this hypothesis, the team used data from surveys of nearly 30,000 ninth graders from across the United States collected in 2009 by the National Center for Education Statistics. These surveys assessed how equitable students thought their math teachers were by having them rate their agreement with statements like, “my math teacher treats every student fairly” and “my math teacher thinks all students can be successful.”

In their analysis, the researchers grouped students by their race and gender and by the racial composition of their school’s student body — that is, whether they attended a racially diverse school, a school where they were racially distinct or a school where most of their peers shared their race. They also controlled for factors that might be alternate explanations for a seeming relationship between perceived teacher equity and math identity, such as prior achievement in math, type of school, social advantages and teacher’s preparation to teach math.

The results showed that students who perceived their math teachers as being more equitable had stronger math identities than those who saw their math teachers as less equitable.

“If teachers are teaching in a way that the kids perceive as equitable and efficacious, then it really makes a big difference in how the students feel about math,” says Shifrer.

The researchers also found that this positive effect of equitable teaching on students’ attitudes toward math was strongest in racially diverse schools.

“It seemed like teachers mattered more in those schools maybe because race is more evident in those schools,” says Shifrer. “Kids are looking around and noticing that there are differences in students’ race and maybe they’re thinking more about whether they’re the kind of student that’s good at math. The teachers really had a space to make a difference in schools like that.”

While the relationship between teacher equity and math identity was evident across races, there was an interesting exception. Black students, in general, had strong math identities, regardless of their teacher’s actions.

“There’s some kind of resiliency where these students persist and strive against racist stereotypes,” says Shifrer. “They discount these dominant narratives and think, ‘I belong here; I’m good at this.'”

Shifrer says similar findings have been found in other studies looking at the educational attitudes of Black students.

“[Black students] are often more positive towards school and towards what education can do for them,” she says. “But there’s not been a lot of work fleshing out the details.”

One limitation of this study is that the researchers can’t say definitively that the teacher’s behavior came before the student’s feelings about math.

“It could be that kids who identify more with math perceive their teachers more positively,” says Shifrer. ‘But it makes sense that teachers who are behaving more equitably are going to improve the way kids are feeling in the classroom.”

Learning about the factors that affect student math identity is important because a student’s attitude towards the subject influences the courses that they take as well as their future career selections. This study suggests that teachers may have a larger role to play in helping students develop a positive math identity than previously recognized.

In a small, preliminary study published on March 2 in American Journal of Human Biology, 38% of children sampled from a rural Mississippi Delta community were found to have either parasitic worms or protist infections — a single-cell parasitic organisms that can negatively impact intestinal health.

Parasitic infections are a neglected health issue in low-resource communities, according to Theresa Gildner, study co-author and assistant professor of biological anthropology in Arts & Sciences at WashU. School-age children are especially at risk for these infections due to increased exposure through play, poor hand hygiene and their still-developing immune systems.

Left untreated, the infections can lead to nutritional deficiencies and lifelong health consequences. Gildner said many of the community members they worked with during this project expressed frustration with state and federal governments that do not listen to their concerns related to these issues.

“This is a failure of all levels of government to provide basic services to vulnerable citizens. Health conditions — including parasitic and intestinal infections — linked with poor sanitation will likely worsen in coming years as climate change and associated extreme weather events further strain already weak infrastructure systems,” said Gildner, an expert on parasitic disease and health disparities.

According to Gildner, President Biden’s infrastructure bill is a step in the right direction, but more work is needed in the near future to invest in crumbling infrastructure.

“I do not know if President Biden’s infrastructure bill will directly help the communities where we have worked — we haven’t heard anything from our community partners — but I think there could be indirect benefits. For instance, drawing more attention to the immediate need for investment in failing infrastructure may lead to more localized projects that benefit these communities,” she said.

But any efforts to address these infrastructure needs should start with direct and respectful community engagement by locally elected officials. After all, she said, “Individuals living in these communities have the best sense of what the issues are through their lived experiences and may have ideas for what is most needed to improve conditions in their specific community.”

This is a failure of all levels of government to provide basic services to vulnerable citizens. Health conditions — including parasitic and intestinal infections — linked with poor sanitation will likely worsen in coming years as climate change and associated extreme weather events further strain already weak infrastructure systems.

About the research

Understanding U.S. infection patterns — including the current extent of parasitic infections and key sources of exposure — is critical to improving health outcomes, Gildner said. Previous studies in the U.S. have been case-based or focused exclusively on immigrant populations. Very few surveys have been conducted in regions with the most risk factors for exposure.

In the summer of 2019, members of the Rural Embodiment and Community Health (REACH) research team — led by Gildner and Tara J. Cepon-Robins, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS), and including WashU biologist Elizabeth K. Mallott and former UCCS undergraduate student Isabella C. Recca — traveled to the rural Mississippi Delta to conduct preliminary research in the community.

They chose to direct their focus on a small, predominantly Black, rural community that is frequently affected by flooding and sewage backups due to community-reported infrastructural neglect.

In total, 24 children — including 12 boys and 12 girls ranging in age from infant to 14 years old — from 12 households participated in the study. Altogether, 38% of the children were found to have one or both types of parasitic infections.

Contrary to expectations, they found no significant differences in infection status based on age, sex or household size, although Gildner acknowledges that could be due to the relatively small sample size. She hopes ongoing research with a larger dataset will allow the team to better test these patterns in the near future.

Last summer, the team collected additional samples from adults and in the same Mississippi community, as well as in East St. Louis in a community facing similar issues related to failing infrastructure, persistent flooding and sewage backups, Gildner said. The team also is analyzing soil samples collected from various shared community spaces during the 2022 trip to better examine these patterns. And plans are underway to collect additional data in other Mississippi Delta communities this summer.

Education is key

Lack of education is one of the reasons why parasitic infections often go undetected.

“One interesting thing that we noticed during our 2019 visit to Mississippi is that some of the grandparents we spoke to were aware of the threat posed by parasite infections locally because they had heard of these issues as children,” Gildner said. “One grandparent told us they remembered public health educational programs that discussed the risks posed by hookworm infection and encouraged community members to wear shoes outdoors to prevent infection.

“However, that messaging stopped after their early childhood and they had always wondered why no one talked about these infections anymore. This kind of messaging could be relatively straightforward to implement, although basic information on key parasite infections would have to be provided since many people are no longer aware of these diseases.”

Even health care providers often assume that parasitic infection risk is greatest for Americans traveling abroad. Educating health care providers about the threat posed by parasitic infections in the U.S., how to recognize symptoms and test appropriately is key.

“Without this basic medical knowledge, diagnoses may be missed and treatment delayed,” Gildner said. “For instance, one participant this past summer had been diagnosed with Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium we have recently started studying that can cause stomach ulcers and certain gastric cancers in severe cases. However, she told us it took months and visits to multiple doctors before she was properly tested and diagnosed, in large part due to the assumption that symptomatic cases of this bacterial infection aren’t a significant concern in the U.S.”

Although it is an option for regions suffering from heavy parasitic infection rates, preventative mass drug administration is not a practical first step to addressing the problem, Gildner explained. There’s not enough public awareness of the conditions and the safe effective drugs used to treat common parasite infections are incredibly expensive in the U.S., she said.

However, Gildner would like to see more government investment in research at other locations across the U.S. to help clarify the current extent of parasite infections and identify key sources of exposure that could be targeted to improve health outcomes.

Researchers at UBC Okanagan are looking at ways to improve cell phone connectivity and localization abilities by examining “smart” surfaces that can bounce signals from a tower to customers to improve the link. A smart surface involves installing reflective elements on windows or panels on buildings in dense urban environments.

The goal, says Dr. Anas Chaaban, is to improve wireless services for millions of Canadians. Currently, he says, there are more than 12,000 wireless antenna towers. And yet, a lack of cell service is a common problem.

“The increasing use of mobile technologies across the world is necessitating research that unlocks potential new approaches within our existing infrastructure,” says Dr. Chaaban, an Assistant Professor at UBC Okanagan’s School of Engineering. “Even though cellphone towers line the rooftops of major cities, and handle the data and phone traffic of millions of Canadians each day, there are still gaps in service.”

Dr. Chaaban and his team at UBCO’s Communication Theory Lab have developed transmission schemes that would incorporate reconfigurable intelligent surfaces — smart surfaces — throughout urban centres to serve as reflectors within existing wireless networks.

A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a panel of many individual reflective elements, each of which can modify an incoming signal and reflect it. This modification can be controlled with an electrical signal, which enables the RIS to improve the connection or generate signals that are useful for locating users in the network.

The researchers developed a new localization system where an RIS can work as a satellite to improve accuracy. By making a surface smart, it can bounce signals to cell phones which in turn can use these signals to generate an accurate estimate of location, he says. An accurate location estimate is not only useful for location services but also to improve transmission from the tower to the phone using optimized location-aware transmission schemes that also leverage the RIS.

“Users never expect to have a call drop, and they also expect lightning-fast data speeds,” he says. “But to accomplish this, the networks require constant updating.”

The researchers tested their theory using multiple modulated RISs that allow for the simultaneous localization of multiple users with low complexity for each RIS. They also developed and tested RIS-enabled transmission schemes that outperform existing schemes.

“We simulated the proposed localization protocol and demonstrated its effectiveness in an urban micro-cell street canyon scenario as an example,” he explains. “And the protocol works for multiple users simultaneously. Even in areas with intermittent service, data can be shared and users can be located and enjoy a reliable connection.”

Of the more than 350 former National Football League (NFL) players who were studied an average of 29 years after their playing career ended, those who reported experiencing concussion symptoms during their careers scored worse on assessments of episodic memory, sustained attention, processing speed and vocabulary. However, the number of concussions diagnosed by a medical professional or length of playing career had no observed effect on cognition.

A follow-up analysis compared the former players to more than 5,000 male volunteers in the general population who did not play professional football, which found that cognitive performance was generally worse for former players than nonplayers. While younger former players outperformed nonplayers on some tests, older retired players more likely to perform worse than controls on cognitive tasks.

The researchers who led the study said that their results underline the importance of tracking concussion symptoms as opposed to diagnosed concussions in research. This work also adds evidence to the impact a professional football career can have on accelerating cognitive aging.

“It is well-established that in the hours and days after a concussion, people experience some cognitive impairment. However, when you look decades out, the data on the long-term impact have been mixed,” said study senior author Laura Germine, PhD, director of the Laboratory for Brain and Cognitive Health Technology at McLean Hospital and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “These new findings from the largest study of its kind show that professional football players can still experience cognitive difficulties associated with head injuries decades after they have retired from the sport.”

Concussion Symptoms Linked to Cognitive Performance

For the study, 353 retired NFL players completed hour-long neuropsychological tests through an online platform called TestMyBrain, which is supported by McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Players were fully remote and completed tests on a laptop or desktop that included assessments that measured processing speed, visual-spatial and working memory, and aspects of short- and long-term memory and vocabulary.

Recollected concussion symptoms were measured by asking the players the number of times they experienced any one of the following symptoms following a blow to the head during play or practice: headaches, nausea, dizziness, loss of consciousness, memory problems, disorientation, confusion, seizure, visual problems or feeling unsteady on their feet. They were also asked whether they lost consciousness during their careers, and whether they were ever diagnosed with a concussion by a medical professional.

The results showed that the former players’ cognitive performance (for example, on memory tasks) was associated with recalled football concussion symptoms. For example, differences observed in visual memory scores between former players with the highest and lowest reported concussion symptoms were equivalent to the differences in cognitive performance between a typical 35-year-old and 60-year-old.

However, poor cognitive performance was not associated with diagnosed concussions, years of professional play or age of first football exposure. The researchers noted that many head injuries or sub-concussive blows may not have been diagnosed as concussions due to a lack of awareness at the time or underreporting of symptoms by players.

When comparing the retired players to a group of 5,086 men who did not play football, cognitive performance was generally worse for former players. On two tests of processing speed, age-related differences in cognitive performance were larger among the former player group than the nonplayer group, with older players performing worse.

These comparison data suggest that football exposure might accelerate age-related cognitive declines and produce greater disadvantages at older ages, according to the researchers, who added that more studies are needed to track cognitive performance in former players as they age. Another possibility is that improved awareness and management of head injuries may have spared younger retired players more than older ones. The researchers also noted that this comparative finding is limited by a lack of data on cognition prior to head injuries, and that more research is needed that closely matches former players and nonplayers and measures their cognitive performances across their lifetimes.

“For both former players and researchers, we can glean some important takeaways from this study,” said principal investigator of the Football Players Health Study, Ross Zafonte, DO. “Former players can support their cognitive health as they age by taking proactive steps, and continuing to consult with their providers and educate themselves on symptoms of head injury. For researchers and providers, these findings support efforts to develop ways to enhance diagnosis and define long-term sequalae of concussion.” Zafonte is president of Spaulding Rehabilitation Network, a Mass General Brigham sports medicine physician, and the Earle P. and Ida S. Charlton Professor and Chair of the Harvard Medical School Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.

“The Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) approach taken in this study is where this field is heading,” said Germine. “We are grateful to the players and how much they have taught us. It would not have been possible to do a study like this without engaging and deeply involving their community.”

Research Driven by Input from Former NFL Players

The Football Players Health Study at Harvard University, launched in 2014, is a comprehensive research program dedicated to examining the multifactorial causes that impact the health of former NFL players. The research has been informed by the players themselves, who have provided input on the health concerns and conditions they face after a career in football. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Harvard University and Harvard Medical School and its affiliated teaching hospitals, including those in the Mass General Brigham system, conduct research from neurology, cardiology, sports medicine, rehabilitation medicine, chronic pain and public health. While concussion and head injury are of paramount concern, the study examines all aspects of player health across the life span. Former players can find important resources to support their health in this section of the study’s website.

“This could shift the design strategy of mechanical systems away from the traditional approach of developing new and superior materials to developing surfaces that can actively adapt to reduce the damage,” says Professor Motoyuki Murashima.

The work was a collaboration between Murashima at Tohoku University’s Department of Mechanical Systems Engineering and colleagues at Nagoya University and the Korea Photonics Technology Institute in South Korea.

The research is focused on the potential of innovative materials possessing ‘morphing surfaces’, which can be changed depending on the environment they operate in. These materials are being developed by several research groups to mimic a common flexibility found in living systems, such as leaf surfaces that change in response to variations in humidity. One example in engineering, previously developed by Murashima and colleagues, is a surface composed of a diaphragm supported by hard substrate, with changes in stress pressure altering the surface morphologies.

The team developed an artificial intelligence procedure in which sensors analyse the friction between two surfaces. Having detected where damage is occurring, the procedure can then use the ‘morphing’ capacity of the surface to minimize the frictional contact with damaged regions.

“This is the first research in the world to use artificial intelligence to control the shape of morphing surfaces and successfully detect the position of damage on interacting surfaces,” says Murashima.

As the analysis and adjustment proceeded in simulated test cases, the researchers were able to achieve a steady reduction in the fluctuated friction caused by contact between affected parts of the material under investigation.

The proof-of-concept system used discs spinning within a cylinder. The crucial next step will be to move closer to situations in which the procedure could be applied to real engineering challenges, such as industrial machinery. The ultimate aim is to allow a wide range of machinery to operate with less routine wear and damage, achieving longer useful lifespans and cost savings due to less frequent part replacements.

“An important next step is to develop more sophisticated learning and control algorithms that will reduce the time needed to learn the characteristics of the analysed surfaces and therefore achieve more refined and speedier control that prevents damage,” says Murashima.