Specifically, electronic and mobile health interventions can help people achieve:

• 1329 more steps / day
• 55 minutes more moderate-to-vigorous exercise / week
• 45 minutes more overall physical activity / week
• 7 hours less sedentary behaviour / week
• 103 fewer calories consumed / day
• 20% more fruits and vegetables consumed / day
• 5.5 grams less saturated fat consumed / day
• 1.9 kilograms of weight loss over 12 weeks
• Improved sleep quality
• Less severe insomnia.

With the global economic burden of chronic diseases estimated to exceed US $47 trillion by 2023, effective interventions are in high demand. According to the World Health Organization, one in eight people are now living with obesity; 422 million people have diabetes; and cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide.

Lead researcher, UniSA’s Dr Ben Singh, says people’s health behaviours must change if we are to reduce the incidence of chronic disease.

“With the rise of preventable chronic diseases like obesity, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes, finding mechanisms that can help reduce people’s risk is important,” Dr Singh says.

“Our study found that digital and mobile health interventions can have a positive effect on people’s health and wellbeing, not only helping them to increase their physical activity and reduce sedentary behaviour, but also improving their diet and quality of sleep.

“Given the wide accessibility and popularity of health apps, their capability to tailor information and deliver timely reminders and prompts, and scalability to diverse populations, they could be a very effective intervention to promote better health.

“Making positive changes to your health and wellbeing can be a challenge — it’s always easier to add kilos to your waistline, than it is to reduce them — but by incorporating digital tools into your everyday life, you’re more likely to achieve positive outcomes.”

The research identified consistent findings across different age groups, health behaviours, interventions, and health populations, indicating that digital health apps could help underpin broader public health campaigns. While researchers recommend further investigation to better understand impacts among specific groups of people, at top line, digital health apps appear to be a win-win for all.

The team published their findings today (August 13) in the journal BMJ Open.

“One lesson we Americans can learn about life expectancy from looking at comparable countries is where the frontier of best performance lies,” said Jessica Ho, associate professor of sociology and demography at Penn State and senior author on the paper. “Yes, we’re doing badly, but this study shows what can we aim for. We know these gains in life expectancy are actually achievable because other large countries have already done it.”

The researchers compared life expectancy in the United States, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand using data from the Human Mortality Database and the World Health Organization Mortality Database between 1990 and 2019. They analyzed the data by sex, age and 18 individual and comprehensive cause of death categories, including cancers, drug- and alcohol-related deaths, firearms and motor vehicle collisions.

They also examined life expectancy within each country to identify geographical inequalities in life expectancy by region.

The researchers found that Australians had the longest life expectancy at birth over the study period, with women living nearly 4 more years and men 5 more years than their American counterparts. The Irish showed the largest gains in life expectancy, with men’s lifespans increasing by approximately 8 years and women’s lifespans by more than 6.5 years. Americans had the shortest life expectancy at birth, with women living an average of almost 81.5 years and men an average of nearly 76.5 years in 2019.

The United States also showed some of the largest geographical inequalities in life expectancy compared to the other countries, according to the researchers. Women and men in California and Hawaii had some of the highest life expectancies at birth, with women averaging 83 to 83.9 years and men averaging 77.5 to 78.4 years. States in the American Southeast saw some of the lowest life expectancies at birth of all subnational regions studied, with women averaging 72.6 to 79.9 years and men averaging 69.3 to 74.4 years.

“One of the main drivers of why American longevity is so much shorter than in other high-income countries is our younger people die at higher rates from largely preventable causes of death, like drug overdose, car accidents and homicide,” said Ho, who is also an associate of Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute.

In midlife — the 45 to 64 age range — some of these causes continue, like high death rates from drug- and alcohol-related mortality, Ho explained, adding that Americans also see higher rates of cardiovascular disease mortality.

“Some of the latter could be related to sedentary lifestyle, high rates of obesity, unhealthy diet, stress and a history of smoking,” she said. “It’s likely that these patterns of unhealthy behaviors put Americans at a disadvantage in terms of their health and vitality.”

Australia offers the U.S. a model for improving its life expectancy, Ho added. Like the U.S., Australia is large in terms of land area and has a comparable history of personal vehicle ownership. The two countries have some cultural similarities, including historically greater use of firearms. However, Australia implemented a number of policies in recent decades including gun law reforms that helped vault them to the top of the life expectancy rankings.

“What the study shows is that a peer country like Australia far outperforms the U.S. and was able to get its young adult mortality under control,” Ho said. “It has really low levels of gun deaths and homicides, lower levels of drug and alcohol use and better performance on chronic diseases, the latter of which points to lifestyle factors, health behaviors and health care performance.”

Ho said policies like investing in public transit infrastructure, adding more roundabouts and having fewer large cars on the road could decrease traffic deaths in the United States. More support for programs designed to reduce drug dependence and reducing barriers to treatment and prevention of drug overdose could help lower drug-related mortality, she said. And having a strong combination of public health effort, health care access and community interventions to encourage healthier lifestyles and the use of preventive medicine could reduce cardiovascular disease mortality, she added.

“Australia is a model for how Americans can do better and achieve not only a higher life expectancy but also lower geographic inequality in life expectancy,” Ho said.

Rachel Wilkie, a doctoral student at the University of Southern California, also contributed to this research. The National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health supported this work.

This discovery, recently published in the journal Theriogenology, is significant because of the time and money that horse owners often invest in assisted reproduction.

Just like humans, horses sometimes need help from science in order to reproduce. When they do, special steps are needed for a successful pregnancy because of the unique properties of equine sex cells.

“In horses, the process of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) is more complex than it is in humans,” said Dr. Luisa Ramirez-Agamez, a Ph.D. candidate in the VMBS’ Department of Large Animal Clinical Sciences (VLCS) studying equine reproduction. “First, a mare’s oocytes need approximately 30 hours to mature in the laboratory once they have been collected before they can be fertilized. Then, we have to inject the eggs with sperm to induce fertilization, a process known as Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI).

“We discovered that phenylbutazone, commonly known as bute, can affect both the ability of a mare’s eggs to mature correctly when cultured and whether the fertilized eggs will develop into a viable embryo,” she explained. “In either of those cases, the eggs affected by bute cannot be used in assisted reproduction.”

The Value Of Equine Assisted Reproduction

Assisted reproduction is an important resource for many horse owners, especially those who make a living from their herds. Many horse owners also care deeply about producing offspring from their favorite horses in order to carry on their legacies.

In some cases, mares who are chronically lame and unable to support a pregnancy themselves may become egg donors, with their eggs fertilized in a laboratory and carried to term by a surrogate.

“This is one of the specific situations impacted by our discovery,” Ramirez said. “Mares who are chronically lame are likely going to be on bute because it helps with pain management — especially in the musculoskeletal system — which, according to our results, will hinder their ability to participate in assisted reproduction programs.

“In a future study, we hope to determine an alternative to bute that supplies the same level of pain management but does not interfere with reproduction,” she said.

The good news is that bute’s effect on equine oocytes appears to wear off within a few weeks.

“We collected the eggs at three days post treatment, then 33 days, and then 77 days,” she said. “We found that eggs collected three days after administration of bute were not able to produce embryos, but those collected at 33 days were successful. We hope to find a more exact answer in terms of how bute affects egg cell quality in a future study.”

Implications For Human Medicine

Looking to the future, Ramirez is interested in collaborating with researchers in human medicine because of the possible implications of her discovery for IVF in women.

“NSAIDs are often given to women during IVF to slow down their ovulation cycle, which is the ovaries’ release of an egg each month,” she explained. “Under normal circumstances, most women only produce one egg cell each month, but IVF is expensive and time-consuming, so women are given hormones that cause them to produce more than one egg each cycle. This way, there is more than one egg to collect. NSAIDs help prevent women from ovulating early so they don’t lose those eggs.”

But after her recent discovery about NSAIDs and horse reproduction, Ramirez wonders if NSAIDs could also have unknown negative effects on IVF.

“NSAIDs are generally thought to have a positive impact on IVF in women, but our results suggest that these drugs are not as benign for reproduction in horses,” Ramirez said. “Some NSAIDs, like Banamine, actually cause anovulatory follicles in horses — follicles in the ovaries that don’t release egg cells during ovulation as they are supposed to.

“This is not the case in women, and so NSAIDs are thought to be safe. But now we know that bute can actually keep fertilized eggs from becoming embryos, and it’s possible that some NSAIDs could have a similar effect in women,” she said. “This is something I want to find out.”

Fingerprints are one of the best-recognised examples of pattern formation by epithelial cells. The primary cells in the epithelium are the keratinocytes, and they are known to form patterns at the microscopic and macroscopic levels. While factors affecting this pattern formation have been reported, the exact mechanisms underlying the process are still not fully understood.

A team of researchers, led by Associate Professor Ken Natsuga at the Faculty of Medicine, Hokkaido University, have revealed that cell-cell adhesion governs pattern formation in keratinocytes. Their findings were published in the journal Life Science Alliance.

“In this study, we used an immortalized keratinocyte cell line, called HaCaT, which retains all the properties of normal keratinocytes,” Natsuga explained. “In order to ensure that our findings were accurate, we established single-cell cultures from this cell line.”

The team observed pattern formation in both the original heterogeneous cell line, as well as in single-cell-derived cultures. During culturing, the keratinocytes moved randomly and spontaneously formed high- and low-density regions, leading to pattern formation.

The pattern formation was markedly influenced by starvation. When the culture medium was renewed, patterns were obscured, but reappeared as the nutrients in the culture medium were consumed by the keratinocytes.

The team then examined the gene expression in the keratinocytes, which revealed that cell adhesion proteins and keratinocyte differentiation proteins were upregulated in high-density regions. “As cell adhesion is necessary for the development of high-cell-density regions, we specifically investigated the expression of adherens junction (AJ) molecules such as E-cadherin and actin,” Natsuga elaborated. “We found that these molecules were localized at the intercellular junctions of high-density regions.”

The authors then used a mathematical model to confirm that, under spatially uniform density and stress, strong cell adhesion leads to the formation of density patterns. They were also able to demonstrate that the keratinocyte patterns influenced cell proliferation and differentiation, and that serum starvation influences epidermal stratification (a type of differentiation) in skin cells from mice.

“Our study presents a novel and robust model of cell-cell adhesion-induced patterning (CAIP),” concludes Natsuga. “We have deepened our mechanistic insight into cellular organization and its consequences for cell fate decisions and epithelial stratification.” The team demonstrated that epithelial cell-cell adhesion is essential and sufficient for patterning. Future work will focus on adding more variables to the model to understand other processes that occur concurrently during development.

The work, led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, published today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Regulations put into effect in 2020 by the International Maritime Organization required a roughly 80 percent reduction in the sulfur content of shipping fuel used globally. That reduction meant fewer sulfur aerosols flowed into Earth’s atmosphere.

When ships burn fuel, sulfur dioxide flows into the atmosphere. Energized by sunlight, chemical intermingling in the atmosphere can spur the formation of sulfur aerosols. Sulfur emissions, a form of pollution, can cause acid rain. The change was made to improve air quality around ports.

In addition, water likes to condense on these tiny sulfate particles, ultimately forming linear clouds known as ship tracks, which tend to concentrate along maritime shipping routes. Sulfate can also contribute to forming other clouds after a ship has passed. Because of their brightness, these clouds are uniquely capable of cooling Earth’s surface by reflecting sunlight.

The authors used a machine learning approach to scan over a million satellite images and quantify the declining count of ship tracks, estimating a 25 to 50 percent reduction in visible tracks. Where the cloud count was down, the degree of warming was generally up.

Further work by the authors simulated the effects of the ship aerosols in three climate models and compared the cloud changes to observed cloud and temperature changes since 2020. Roughly half of the potential warming from the shipping emission changes materialized in just four years, according to the new work. In the near future, more warming is likely to follow as the climate response continues unfolding.

Many factors — from oscillating climate patterns to greenhouse gas concentrations — determine global temperature change. The authors note that changes in sulfur emissions aren’t the sole contributor to the record warming of 2023. The magnitude of warming is too significant to be attributed to the emissions change alone, according to their findings.

Due to their cooling properties, some aerosols mask a portion of the warming brought by greenhouse gas emissions. Though aerosols can travel great distances and impose a strong effect on Earth’s climate, they are much shorter-lived than greenhouse gasses.

When atmospheric aerosol concentrations suddenly dwindle, warming can spike. It’s difficult, however, to estimate just how much warming may come as a result. Aerosols are one of the most significant sources of uncertainty in climate projections.

“Cleaning up air quality faster than limiting greenhouse gas emissions may be accelerating climate change,” said Earth scientist Andrew Gettelman, who led the new work.

“As the world rapidly decarbonizes and dials down all anthropogenic emissions, sulfur included, it will become increasingly important to understand just what the magnitude of the climate response could be. Some changes could come quite quickly.”

The work also illustrates that real-world changes in temperature may result from changing ocean clouds, either incidentally with sulfur associated with ship exhaust, or with a deliberate climate intervention by adding aerosols back over the ocean. But lots of uncertainties remain. Better access to ship position and detailed emissions data, along with modeling that better captures potential feedback from the ocean, could help strengthen our understanding.

In addition to Gettelman, Earth scientist Matthew Christensen is also a PNNL author of the work. This work was funded in part by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The research team’s findings show that when decision makers quickly come to a conclusion, the decision is more influenced by their initial bias, or a tendency to err on the side of one of the choices presented. If decision makers wait to gather more information, the slower decision will be less biased. The work was published today in Physical Review E.

“The basic result might seem sort of intuitive, but the mathematics we had to employ to prove this was really non-trivial,” said co-author Bhargav Karamched, an assistant professor in the FSU Department of Mathematics and the Institute of Molecular Biophysics. “We saw that for the first decider in a group, the trajectory of their belief is almost a straight line. The last decider hovers around, going back and forth for a while before making a decision. Even though the underlying equation for each agent’s belief is the same except for their initial bias, the statistics and behavior of each individual is very different.”

The researchers built a mathematical model that represented a group of agents required to decide between two conclusions, one which was correct and one which was incorrect. The model assumed each actor within a group was acting rationally, that is, deciding based off their initial bias and the information they are presented, rather than being swayed by the decisions of individuals around them.

Even with evidence and assuming perfect rationality, bias toward a particular decision caused the earliest deciders in the model to make the wrong conclusion 50% of the time. The more information actors gathered, the more likely they were to behave as if they weren’t biased and to arrive at a correct conclusion.

Of course, in the real world, people are swayed by all sorts of inputs, such as their emotions, the decisions their friends made and other variables. This research offers a metric showing how individuals within a group should make decisions if they are acting rationally. Future research could compare real-world data against this metric to see where people are diverting from optimally rational choices and consider what might have caused their divergence.

The researchers’ model is known as a drift diffusion model, so called because it combines two concepts: individual actor’s tendency to “drift,” or move toward an outcome based on evidence, and the random “diffusion,” or variability of the information presented.

The work could be used, for example, to understand when people are being unduly swayed by early decisions or falling victim to groupthink. It even helps describe other complex scenarios with many individual actors, such as the immune system or the behavior of neurons.

“There is still a lot of work to do to understand decision making in more complicated situations, such as cases where more than two alternatives are presented as choices, but this is a good starting point,” Karamched said.

This research was a multi-institution collaboration involving doctoral candidate Samantha Linn and Associate Professor Sean D. Lawley of the University of Utah, Associate Professor Zachary P. Kilpatrick of the University of Colorado, and Professor Krešimir Josic of the University of Houston.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.