UPFs are ready-to-eat-or-heat industrial formulations that are made with ingredients extracted from foods or synthesized in laboratories, with little or no whole foods in their composition. These have gradually been replacing traditional foods and meals made from fresh and minimally processed ingredients.

Lead investigator of the study Eduardo Augusto Fernandes Nilson, DSc, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), Brazil, says, “UPFs affect health beyond the individual impact of high content of critical nutrients (sodium, trans fats, and sugar) because of the changes in the foods during industrial processing and the use of artificial ingredients, including colorants, artificial flavors and sweeteners, emulsifiers, and many other additives and processing aids, so assessing deaths from all-causes associated with UPF consumption allows an overall estimate of the effect of industrial food processing on health.”

While previous studies focused on specific dietary risk factors instead of food patterns, the current study modeled data from nationally representative dietary surveys and mortality data from eight countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, United Kingdom, and United States) to link dietary patterns, considering the extent and purpose of industrial food processing, to deaths from all causes.

Dr. Nilson explains, “We first estimated a linear association between the dietary share of UPFs and all-cause mortality, so that each 10% increase in the participation of UPFs in the diet increases the risk of death from all causes by 3%. Then, using the relative risks and the food consumption data for all countries (ranging from 15% of the total energy intake in Colombia, to over 50% of the calories in the United States), we built a model that estimated that the percentage of all-cause premature preventable deaths due to the consumption of UPFs can vary from 4% in countries with lower UPF consumption to almost 14% in countries with the highest UPF consumption. For example, in 2018, 124,000 premature deaths were attributable to the consumption of UPFs in the United States.”

High consumption of UPFs has been associated with 32 different diseases, including cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, some types of cancer, and depression. For the first time, this study has estimated the burden of UPF intake on premature deaths from all-causes in different countries, showing that the attributable mortality is significant in all settings and that addressing UPF consumption should be a global public nutrition priority.

Dr. Nilson notes, “It is concerning that, while in high-income countries UPF consumption is already high but relatively stable for over a decade, in low- and middle-income countries the consumption has continuously increased, meaning that while the attributable burden in high-income countries is currently higher, it is growing in the other countries. This shows that policies that disincentivize the consumption of UPFs are urgently needed globally, promoting traditional dietary patterns based on local fresh and minimally processed foods.”

The vast ball of hydrogen, long invisible to scientists, was revealed by looking for its main constituent — molecular hydrogen. The finding marks the first time a molecular cloud has been detected with light emitted in the far-ultraviolet realm of the electromagnetic spectrum and opens the way to further explorations using the approach.

The scientists have named the molecular hydrogen cloud “Eos,” after the Greek goddess of mythology who is the personification of dawn. Their discovery is outlined in a study published in Nature Astronomy.

“This opens up new possibilities for studying the molecular universe,” said Blakesley Burkhart, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences who led the team and is an author on the study. Burkhart is also a research scientist at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York.

Molecular clouds are composed of gas and dust — with the most common molecule being hydrogen, the fundamental building block of stars and planets and essential for life. They also contain other molecules such as carbon monoxide. Molecular clouds are often detected using conventional methods such as radio and infrared observations that easily pick up the chemical signature for carbon monoxide.

For this work, the scientists employed a different approach.

“This is the first-ever molecular cloud discovered by looking for far ultraviolet emission of molecular hydrogen directly,” Burkhart said. “The data showed glowing hydrogen molecules detected via fluorescence in the far ultraviolet. This cloud is literally glowing in the dark.”

Eos poses no danger to Earth and the solar system. Because of its proximity, the gas cloud presents a unique opportunity to study the properties of a structure within the interstellar medium, scientists said.

The interstellar medium, made of gas and dust that fills the space between stars within a galaxy, serves as raw material for new star formation.

“When we look through our telescopes, we catch whole solar systems in the act of forming, but we don’t know in detail how that happens,” Burkhart said. “Our discovery of Eos is exciting because we can now directly measure how molecular clouds are forming and dissociating, and how a galaxy begins to transform interstellar gas and dust into stars and planets.”

The crescent-shaped gas cloud is located about 300 light years away from Earth. It sits on the edge of the Local Bubble, a large gas-filled cavity in space that encompasses the solar system. Scientists estimate that Eos is vast in projection on the sky, measuring about 40 moons across the sky, with a mass about 3,400 times that of the sun. The team used models to show it is expected to evaporate in 6 million years.

“The use of the far ultraviolet fluorescence emission technique could rewrite our understanding of the interstellar medium, uncovering hidden clouds across the galaxy and even out to the furthest detectable limits of cosmic dawn,” said Thavisha Dharmawardena, a NASA Hubble Fellow at New York University and a shared first author of the study.

Eos was revealed to the team in data collected by a far-ultraviolet spectrograph called FIMS-SPEAR (an acronym for fluorescent imaging spectrograph) that operated as an instrument on the Korean satellite STSAT-1. A far-ultraviolet spectrograph breaks down far-ultraviolet light emitted by a material into its component wavelengths, just as a prism does with visible light, creating a spectrum that scientists can analyze.

The data had just been released publicly in 2023 when Burkhart came across it.

“It was kind of like just waiting to be explored,” she said.

The findings highlight the importance of innovative observational techniques in advancing the understanding of the cosmos, Burkhart said. She noted that Eos is dominated by molecular hydrogen gas but is mostly “CO-dark,” meaning it doesn’t contain much of the material and doesn’t emit the characteristic signature detected by conventional approaches. That explains how Eos eluded being identified for so long, researchers said.

“The story of the cosmos is a story of the rearrangement of atoms over billions of years,” Burkhart said. “The hydrogen that is currently in the Eos cloud existed at the time of the Big Bang and eventually fell onto our galaxy and coalesced nearby the sun. So, it’s been a long journey of 13.6 billion years for these hydrogen atoms.”

The discovery presented itself as something of a surprise.

“When I was in graduate school, we were told that you can’t easily directly observe molecular hydrogen,” said Dharmawardena of NYU. “It’s kind of wild that we can see this cloud in data that we didn’t think we would see.”

Eos also is named after a proposed NASA space mission that Burkhart and other members of the team are supporting. The mission aims to broaden the approach of detecting molecular hydrogen to greater swaths of the Galaxy, investigating the origins of stars by studying the evolution of molecular clouds.

The team is scouring data for molecular hydrogen clouds near and far. A study published as a preprint on arXiv by Burkhart and others using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reports tentatively finding the most distant molecular gas yet.

“Using JWST, we may have found the very furthest hydrogen molecules from the sun,” Burkhart said. “So, we have found both some of the closest and farthest using far-ultraviolet emission.”

Other members of the scientific team included researchers from: Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel; Queen Mary University of London and University College London, both of London; University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa; Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, University of Science and Technology, and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, all of Daejeon, South Korea; Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany; University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas; University of Arizona, Tucson, Ariz.; University of California, Berkeley; Université Paris Cité, Gif-sur-Yvette, France; Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore; University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; Columbia University, New York; and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.

“The German name Waldelefant (forest elephant) originates from the assumption that this species primarily lived in the wooded regions of Europe. However, fossil evidence shows that P. antiquus often inhabited open or semi-open habitats with mosaic-like vegetation, similar to modern elephants,” explains Prof. Dr. Manuel Steinbauer, Chair of Sport Ecology at the University of Bayreuth.

To reconstruct the way of life of P. antiquus and, in particular, its actual habitat — known as the realised niche — the research team examined scientific literature and palaeontological databases for fossil finds of P. antiquus that could be assigned to specific Marine Isotope Stages. Marine Isotope Stages are periods in the earth’s history that reflect climate history, representing warm and cold stages. The Bayreuth research team assigned fossil finds from across Europe to either a warm or cold stage and used climate models from these periods to reconstruct the realised niche of the straight-tusked elephant. A comparison with modern climate data suggests that straight-tusked elephants would still be able to live in Europe today. The climate in Western and Central Europe would be particularly suitable, except for mountainous regions such as the Alps and the Caucasus.

“In the past, megafauna like the straight-tusked elephant and their regulatory mechanisms — such as grazing — were omnipresent. Many European species, particularly plants that thrive in open habitats, likely established in their diversity in Europe because they benefited from these ecological influences. Traditional conservation strategies in Europe primarily aim to protect biodiversity by shielding habitats from human activities. However, this strategy alone is unlikely to restore the lost ecological functions of megafauna,” says Franka Gaiser, a doctoral student in the Sport Ecology research team and lead author of the study.

Modern conservation projects actively reintroduce large herbivores to Europe. However, this comes with challenges, as the ecological processes that have shaped modern ecosystems are not yet fully understood. Additionally, today’s large herbivores cannot entirely replace the role of extinct megafauna, as both the animals themselves and the landscape structures, as well as species interactions, have changed significantly.

Growing food more sustainably: what’s the best way to do this? It is one of the big challenges: producing enough food without compromising the soil. After all, healthy soil has many functions — called multifunctionality — and for sustainable agriculture these must be preserved.

‘A multifunctional soil is essential for sustainable food production, because plants get their food from it,’ state the researchers from NIOO and Wageningen University & Research (the Netherlands), and the Universität Tübingen (Germany). ‘Soil also has indispensable roles in water storage, coping with climate change and disease suppression.’

Organic vs conventional

Research on farms across the Netherlands now shows that it is mainly the intensity of tillage that determines whether the soil can retain all its functions. Interestingly, the difference between conventional and organic farming has less of an influence. In both types of agricultural systems, a lot of variation is found in soil tillage and management.

‘The good news is that in conventional agriculture, which is the vast majority, there is a lot to gain,’ states soil ecologist and NIOO professor Wim van der Putten. ‘On all farms, including organic ones, it is important at this point not to cultivate the soil too intensively. For example: ploughing less. Inverting the soil during ploughing is a very big disruption for soil life.’

More than ploughing less

Not only less frequent ploughing but also making more use of mixtures of grasses and plants from the bean family, such as clovers, contributes to multifunctional healthy soil. You can alternate these with growing cereals such as wheat, barley, spelt and rye.

The research team took samples and carried out measurements at more than 50 Dutch agricultural farms on both clay and sandy soils. This was always done in pairs: a farm with conventional agriculture plus an organic neighbouring farm. The soil type and other conditions were then very similar. ‘That way, we could compare them like twins,’ clarifies Guusje Koorneef. Together with Sophie van Rijssel, she conducted her PhD research on this topic.

Sustainable and productive

A wide array of soil properties was measured and farmers shared what farming practices they applied. The organic carbon present in the soil proved to be the best predictor of soil multifunctionality, and for biological indicators this was the bacterial biomass. Koorneef adds: ‘We looked at both sandy and marine clay soils. These are two very different soil types in the Netherlands. And we see the same picture in both soil types.’

‘The popular term of sustainable intensification is contradictory to our results,’ argues contributing researcher Kyle Mason-Jones, now working at the Universität Tübingen. ‘More intensive soil management leads to reduction of soil functions and is thus less sustainable.’ Therefore, the researchers propose a new, appropriate goal. ‘Productive de-intensification. If it is successful, you will get more functions from a less intensively cultivated soil while retaining the crop yield as much as possible.’

Vital soil

These findings are the final result of the Vital Soils project. The project was subsidised by NWO Groen, coordinated by NIOO and carried out together with Wageningen University & Research. Besides the scientific partners, there were also several social partners involved: Eurofins-Agro, BO Akkerbouw, Open Teelten (formerly PPO-AGV) and LTO-Noord.

Previous research using satellite imagery, within the same project, measured the ‘greenness’ of crops in the field. This gives us an estimate of production levels. It showed that the degree of greenness (the crop yield) did not suffer from a decrease in management intensity. Interestingly, organic farming could return to being as productive as conventional farming about 17 years after the transition.

Back to the current research. ‘You don’t necessarily have to have gone through the entire transition to organic farming to still have a positive impact on soil health,’ says Koorneef. ‘I find it really promising that in both conventional and organic farms you can strengthen the functioning of the soil by working it less intensively.’

New findings may explain why: Not all senescent skin cells are the same.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University have identified three subtypes of senescent skin cells with distinct shapes, biomarkers, and functions — an advance that could equip scientists with the ability to target and kill the harmful types while leaving the helpful ones intact.

The findings were published today in the journal Science Advances.

“We’ve known that senescent skin cells are different from senescent immune cells or senescent muscle cells. But within a cell type, senescent cells are often considered the same — in essence, skin cells are either senescent or not, for example,” said Jude Phillip, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University. “But we’re finding that when a skin cell goes into senescence, or a zombie-like state, the cell could go down one of three different paths, each leading to a slightly different subtype.”

Leveraging new advances in machine learning and imaging technology, the researchers compared skin cell samples from 50 healthy donors between the ages of 20 and 90 who participated in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study, an NIH-funded project that is the longest ongoing study of aging in the United States.

Researchers extracted fibroblasts — cells that produce the scaffolding to give tissues their structure — associated with skin tissue and pushed them toward senescence by damaging their DNA, something that happens with aging. Because senescent cells build up naturally as people grow older, the aged samples contained a mix of healthy/nonsenescent and senescent fibroblasts.

Using specialized dyes, the researchers were able to capture images of the cells’ shapes and stained elements that are known to indicate senescent cells. Algorithms developed for this study analyzed the images, measured 87 different physical characteristics for each cell, and sorted the fibroblasts into groups.

Fibroblasts come in 11 different shapes and sizes, three of which are distinct to senescent skin cells, the researchers found. Only one subtype of senescent fibroblast, which the researchers named C10, was more prevalent in older donors.

In the petri dishes, each subtype responded differently when exposed to existing drug regimens designed to target and kill zombie cells. Dasatinib + Quercetin, a drug being tested in clinical trials, for example, most effectively killed C7 senescent fibroblasts but was limited in killing the age-associated C10 senescent fibroblasts.

Though further research is needed to verify which fibroblast subtype is harmful and which is helpful, the findings show that drugs can target one subtype and not the others.

“With our new findings, we have the tools ready to develop new drugs or therapies that preferentially target the senescence subtype that drives inflammation and disease as soon as it is identified,” Phillip said.

More precise targeting of senescence could benefit cancer treatments, the researchers said.

Certain therapies are being designed to trigger senescence in cancer cells, converting uncontrollably replicating cancer cells into dead-in-the-water zombie cells. While these therapies could stop tumor growth, they leave senescent cells in their wake. Conventional chemotherapies also push cells like fibroblasts toward senescence as a side effect. The buildup of senescent cells during treatment can be problematic as those cells may promote inflammation at a time when a patient’s immune system is at its most vulnerable.

Patients may benefit from a drug administered after chemotherapy that can sweep up the mess, removing harmful senescent cells while leaving behind the helpful senescent cells. These types of drugs are called senotherapies.

Next, the researchers plan to look at senescence subtypes in tissue samples, not just in flasks and petri dishes, to see how those subtypes might be associated with various skin diseases and age-associated diseases.

“We hope, with some more development, our technology will be used to help predict which drugs might work well for targeting senescent cells that contribute to specific diseases,” Phillip said. “Eventually, the dream is to be able to provide more information in a clinical setting to help with individual diagnoses and boost health outcomes.”

In their study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the researchers found that when simple but strategic digital features, such as colour-coded nutritional quality signals and a healthier alternative prompt, were added to an online grocery shopping platform, the nutritional quality of shoppers’ carts improved significantly.

The team’s findings verified the effectiveness of deploying front-of-package (FOP) labels — which only marginally improve diet quality when used alone — alongside other interventions.

In a randomised trial conducted on NUSMart, an online grocery store designed by the Duke-NUS team, study participants were randomly divided into two groups and asked to make a total of three orders over a period of three to six weeks. While those assigned to the control group used a standard version of the store, those assigned to the experimental group used a version of the store with additional digital features, including:

Signalling nutritional quality with a traffic light: FOP labels resembling traffic light signals alerted shoppers to food products’ nutritional quality using three colour bands — green (best), amber and red with an “X” mark — for easy identification of foods to avoid.

Items were sorted into the colour bands based on their Nutri-Score (NS)[1] points, which were assigned according to energy, sugar, sodium, saturated fat, fruit/vegetable, protein, and dietary fibre levels per 100g/ml. The points were then converted into grades on a five-letter grading system, with A being the healthiest and E being the least healthy.

Sorting groceries by nutritional value: Using food products’ NS points, the researchers presented the items by order of nutritional value, with the healthiest options appearing first. Items in the control version of NUSMart appeared in alphabetical order.

Showing real-time cart feedback: Participants could track the nutritional quality of their grocery carts via a pie chart that indicated the proportion of items in each colour band. They could also compare their carts with a reference cart for health grocery shopping, which the researchers had curated using past data.

Suggesting healthier options: Shoppers could also view up to four healthier alternatives with similar prices and characteristics to each selected food product and replace their chosen product with the healthier alternative at the click of a button.

With these interventions, the nutritional quality of participants’ grocery carts improved from NS grade C to NS grade B, which was more significant than results from previous studies involving standalone FOP labels. The interventions also reduced the amount of calories (12.86 kcal), total fat (1.21g), saturated fat (0.85g), sugar (0.82g) and sodium (156.64mg) purchased.

Notably, the researchers found that shopping with the four digital features led to healthier food choices across all three orders.

Assistant Professor Soye Shin from Duke-NUS’ Health Services and Systems Research Programme, the study’s first author, said of the findings: “As online grocery shopping is rapidly gaining ground, we wanted to see if we could design low cost, scalable online tools that could be used to nudge consumers toward healthier choices at the point of purchase. These results show the potential of these tools to improve diet and health outcomes.”

These findings underscore the advantages of introducing diet quality labels, such as Singapore’s Nutri-Grade labelling initiative, which currently only includes beverages but is planned to expand to other food categories.

Senior author Professor Eric Finkelstein, from Duke-NUS’ Health Services and Systems Research Programme, said: “These results are encouraging but the next step is to work with retailers to incorporate these features into existing online stores. Only then will the full value of this approach be realised.”

Next, the researchers will expand the study to include consumers of low socio-economic status and little nutritional knowledge. They will also investigate if the multi-pronged intervention strategy has the potential to positively impact consumers’ health in the long term.

Professor Patrick Tan, Senior Vice-Dean for Research at Duke-NUS, commented on the study’s impact: “This study reflects how smart, evidence-based interventions — when applied at the right moment — can empower people to make better everyday choices for their health. It also shows how research can lead to practical tools that improve not just individual choices, but population health outcomes.”

Duke-NUS is at the forefront of biomedical research and translational innovations. This new study is part of the School’s ongoing efforts to improve global health through systems research and scientific breakthroughs.

While organisms use energy for a very wide variety of processes — from growth to cognition — one activity is a major drain for many animals: movement. For highly mobile animals, movement is as such a powerful lens through which to estimate energy usage.

Strong methods do exist for measuring animal movement in the context of energy expenditure, but these are limited by the physical size of the equipment used. Now, in a paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, researchers from the Marine Biophysics Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), in collaboration with Professor Amatzia Genin from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, describe an innovative method for measuring energy usage during movement with video and 3D-tracking via deep learning. “The best method without space limitations has until now been ruled out in the study of about half of the world’s species, due to the reliance on wearable equipment,” says Dr. Kota Ishikawa, first author of the study. “With video, we now have a more inclusive method for studying energy usage in the context of animal behavior and ecology.”

Dynamic Body Acceleration (DBA) has long been the state-of-the-art method for estimating energy usage during movement. In essence, DBA involves measuring the oxygen consumption of a given species performing a given behavior in the lab, by simply measuring the amount of oxygen consumed through the activity. Oxygen is a good indicator of energy, as it is consumed as part of aerobic respiration to produce ATP — the ‘fuel’ providing energy for most bodily processes, including muscle contraction. The acceleration of the animal is measured simultaneously with an accelerometer, and in most cases, because the correlation between acceleration and oxygen consumption during the behavior is very strong, DBA provides a reliable estimate of energy consumption.

With the standard set in the lab, DBA is then measured in the wild, where reliably measuring oxygen consumption is impossible, through a wearable accelerometer. However, relying on physical equipment presents a major barrier. “To ensure accurate measurements without influencing the behavior during observation, researchers have used equipment that weighs at least ten times less than the animal. Given that the accelerometer and battery pack weigh 10-20 grams, this rules out the study of any animals below 100 grams — about half the world’s vertebrate species. It can also affect movement, especially when it depends on drag efficiency, such as swimming or flight,” says Dr. Ishikawa.

Their solution to this problem is elegantly simple. Instead of using a physical accelerometer to measure the movements, two cameras capture video footage of the behavior — in this case, a damselfish swimming in a fishtank — from multiple angles to reconstruct the behavior in 3D space. A few frames of the videos are then used to train a deep learning neural network to track the position of body features such as eyes, which allows researchers to subsequently measure the movement-related acceleration.

Both in the field and in the lab, once cameras are set up to capture animal movements, energy consumption can be estimated. For example, video-based DBA can be used in the context of collective behavior: “Energy expenditure during schooling of small fish has long remained mysterious,” explains Dr. Ishikawa. “For example, do the leading fish use more energy, and is schooling an energy-efficient form of movement? And what can that tell us about the ecology and evolution of fish schooling?”

With video-based DBA, the accurate measurement of energy usage during free-ranging animal behavior has been opened to the smaller half of the world’s vertebrate species, potentially enabling many new research avenues into the breadth of life on our planet.