It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, May 11, 2026
Good vibrations for quantum communications
First demonstration of atomic spin qubit interaction with a single-quantum sound wave
Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have demonstrated, for the first time, a single quantum of vibrational energy interacting with a single atomic spin, seeding a pathway to quantum technologies that use sound as an information carrier, instead of light or electricity. The results are published in Nature.
Led by Marko Lončar, the Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering, the researchers engineered a nanometer-scale mechanical resonator around a single color-center spin qubit in diamond. These color centers, atomic defects in the diamond’s crystal structure, act as quantum memory capable of storing quantum information. The researchers’ new system can host sufficiently strong spin-phonon interactions for quantum information storage – a key challenge thus far in the field.
“At the heart of the experiment is a phonon — the smallest possible unit of sound,” Lončar said. “When we listen to music, it takes countless phonons working together to move our eardrums and maybe even get us spinning on the dance floor. But qubits are far more sensitive: a single phonon can be enough to change their quantum state — to excite them, or, as in our experiment, to help them relax.”
Mechanical vibrations, like those of a guitar string, can “ring” for a long time while occupying a volume far smaller than a comparative electromagnetic cavity of the same frequency. That combination of long lifetime and compact size makes phonons especially promising as quantum information carriers, or interconnects that link compact quantum memories, processors, and sensors on future quantum chips.
“Many quantum systems, including superconducting qubits, quantum dots, or solid-state defects are known to interact strongly with phonons,” explained Graham Joe, first author and former Harvard graduate student. “So quantum acoustics holds a lot of promise as a sort of ‘universal quantum bus’ which could connect up disparate sorts of quantum systems into hybrid systems.”
When one phonon can change the atomic qubit’s state, the spin also acts as an exquisitely sensitive probe of its mechanical environment. The spin could be used to measure very small forces, stresses, or temperature changes by “listening” to the quantum noise of the device. This could lead to precision sensing and other applications.
The results point to new control over quantum defects in solids, bringing spin-mechanical interactions closer to the threshold of full quantum coherence, or the ability of an otherwise fragile quantum system to remain stable.
“This experiment was both a compelling demonstration of new tools for sensing the environment of a single atom, and a meaningful step towards practical quantum acoustic devices,” Joe said.
“Purcell-enhanced spin-phonon coupling with a single color-center” was co-authored by Michael Haas, Kazuhiro Kuruma, Chang Jin, Dongyeon Daniel Kang, Sophie W. Ding, Cleaven Chia, Hana Warner, Benjamin Pingault, Bartholomeus Machielse, and Srujuan Meesala.
U.S. federal support for the research came from the National Science Foundation under grant No. DMR-1231319; the Army Research Office/Department of the Army under award No. W911NF1810432; and the NSF under award No. EEC-1941583.
The Harvard Office of Technology Development is actively pursuing patent protection and commercialization opportunities for the innovations arising from this research.
In this nationwide cohort study conducted in Sweden, bidirectional associations were found between premenstrual disorders and psychiatric disorders and conditions, highlighting the need for sex- and menstrual cycle–informed care in psychiatry. Further research is needed to understand the underlying mechanisms shared between premenstrual disorders and psychiatric disorders.
Corresponding Authors: To contact the corresponding authors, email Jing Zhou, MD, MSc (jing.zhou@ki.se) and Donghao Lu, MD, PhD (donghao.lu@ki.se).
Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.
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About JAMA Network Open:JAMA Network Open is an online-only open access general medical journal from the JAMA Network. On weekdays, the journal publishes peer-reviewed clinical research and commentary in more than 40 medical and health subject areas. Every article is free online from the day of publication.
Journal
JAMA Network Open
Causes of excess deaths in the US compared with other high-income countries
JAMA Network Open
About The Study:
In this repeated cross-sectional study of cross-national mortality, the U.S. had substantially higher death rates than other high-income countries between 1999 and 2022, despite having similar access to advanced medical technology. Many of these excess U.S. deaths could likely be avoided by adopting health and social policies that have benefited other high-income countries. These descriptive findings should be interpreted in light of uncertainty arising from differences in death coding, data completeness, and other aspects of data comparability across countries.
Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Jacob Bor, PhD, email jbor@bu.edu.
Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.
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Embed this link to provide your readers free access to the full-text article
About JAMA Network Open: JAMA Network Open is an online-only open access general medical journal from the JAMA Network. On weekdays, the journal publishes peer-reviewed clinical research and commentary in more than 40 medical and health subject areas. Every article is free online from the day of publication.
Journal
JAMA Network Open
Cardiovascular and metabolic diseases are primary drivers of excess US deaths compared to other high-income countries
Between 1999 and 2022, the US had substantially higher death rates than other wealthy nations, largely due to cardiovascular disease, metabolic diseases, Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, and drug and alcohol complications
Boston University School of Public Health
Between 1999 and 2022, the US had substantially higher death rates than other wealthy nations, largely due to cardiovascular disease, metabolic diseases (including diabetes), Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, and drug and alcohol complications. Policies are needed to address the underlying health, social, and economic conditions that increase Americans’ risk of developing these diseases.
Despite having similar access to advanced medical technology, the United States has substantially higher death rates than other high-income countries (HICs), and the gap has been growing for decades. Cardiovascular diseases were the leading cause of excess US deaths, according to a new study led by researchers at Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH).
Published in JAMA Network Open, the study found that between 1999-2022, the annual number of excess US deaths—deaths that would not have occurred had the mortality rate in the US been the same as in other HICs—increased steadily through 2019 and then rose rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic. By 2022, all-cause mortality rates in the US were 38 percent higher than in other HICs. An estimated 12.7 million US deaths could have been averted during this period if US mortality rates mirrored those of its peers. The authors refer to these excess US deaths as “missing Americans.”
The study investigated the causes of these excess US deaths, and found that cardiovascular diseases, including heart disease, hypertension, and stroke, were the leading cause of excess mortality nearly every year of this period. Together, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases accounted for over half of all excess US deaths in 2022. Drug poisonings, alcohol-related diseases, and suicides emerged as another major cause of excess mortality during this period, particularly among men and people under 45 years old. Homicide and HIV/AIDS also had mortality rates many times higher in the US than in other HICs; however, these causes were responsible for only a small share of excess US deaths.
The study builds upon previous findings by the researchers which showed that excess US deaths have increased since 1980 and continued to increase even after the COVID-19 pandemic. The new analysis is the first study to identify all leading causes responsible for these excess US deaths—what the authors refer to as a “population autopsy.” Quantifying causes of the US mortality disadvantage can reveal opportunities for intervention, including policies to prevent these fatal conditions from occurring in the first place.
“In public health, we know that death certificates only list the most proximate cause of death and not the full causal chain. Differences in social factors between the US and other HICs can lead to differences in behavioral risk factors, which in turn can lead to higher risks of specific causes of death,” says study lead and corresponding author Dr. Jacob Bor, associate professor of global health and epidemiology at BUSPH. “These findings pinpoint the issues that we should be focusing on if we want to address the US mortality disadvantage relative to peer countries.”
For the study, Dr. Bor and colleagues from BUSPH, Harvard Medical School, and Hunter College at the City University of New York analyzed US excess deaths by sex, age, and year. They utilized cause-of-death data from the World Health Organization Mortality Database for all deaths occurring from 1999-20222 in the US and 17 other HICs, including Australia, Canada, France, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The team compared excess mortality among the countries used three metrics: excess deaths, which is the difference between reported deaths and deaths that would have occurred if the US had the mortality rate of other HICs; years of life lost, which is the years of potential life lost due to premature deaths; and mortality rate ratios, which compare the risk of different causes of death between the US and other countries.
Among more than 63.5 million total deaths that occurred during this period, the US experienced an estimated 12,675,646 more excess deaths than would have occurred if their death rates were equal to other HICs. Despite declining between 1999-2009, cardiovascular diseases remained the leading cause of excess deaths during the entire study period, except for 2010, before rising sharply and continuously through 2022. Diabetes, kidney, and metabolic conditions also rose sharply from 2010-2022, following no significant increases from 1999-2009. In 2022, mental health and nervous system disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias were the leading cause of excess death among people 85 and older. Respiratory illnesses, transportation accidents, and homicides were also major causes of US excess deaths. COVID-19 was a leading cause of US excess deaths from 2020-2022, representing 1 in 5 US excess deaths in 2020 and 2021, and also coinciding with sharp increases in other diseases.
Importantly, the study findings revealed stark differences in the burden of these causes of deaths, depending on whether they were viewed in absolute or relative terms. For example, in 2022, excess deaths from drug poisonings were 7.48 times higher in the US than in other countries, but only accounted for 10 percent of US excess deaths, while cardiovascular diseases were 1.63 times as high in the US than in other countries, but accounted for 40 percent of US excess deaths.
“In US population health research, examining the stagnation in US life expectancy that began in 2010 usually focuses on drug overdoses, alcohol-related deaths, and suicide, known as ‘deaths of despair,’” say study senior author Dr. Andrew Stokes, associate professor of global health at BUSPH. ”One dramatic finding from this study is that on an absolute scale, cardiometabolic diseases are key contributors to the increase in US death rates. If there was one thing we could address on a population scale, tackling cardiometabolic diseases would substantially reduce the US mortality gap with other wealthy nations.”
Drug poisonings are still a critical component of the US excess death conversation, the researchers note, particularly in terms of years of life lost, as this measure focuses on premature deaths and captures the societal burden of losing young people. These deaths represented the fastest increase in excess US deaths, rising from a near-equivalent level with peer countries in 1999 to more than 130,000 excess deaths in 2022, with a particular rise in 2013 after fentanyl entered the US drug supply. These causes also contributed to excess deaths among people ages 45-65.
The US did outperform peer countries in a couple of categories, comprising fewer excess deaths in 2022 for cancers (excluding lung cancer) and influenza, which Dr. Stokes attributes partly to advancements within the US healthcare system. “We’ve come a long way with medical innovations to screen and treat cancers,” he says.
The team says that more research is needed to understand the sharp rise in excess deaths after 2010, but that federal policy changes that address the root causes of these excess deaths with evidence-based interventions will help alleviate the current national mortality burden.
“While new therapeutics such as GLP-1s could make a major dent in cardiometabolic mortality, our findings suggest that other policies should be considered too,” says Dr. Bor. “Countries that have the same, or even worse, access to advanced medical technology perform far better on these metrics than the US. We need to identify the policies that other countries have implemented, and think about how we can emulate those policies in the US.”
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About Boston University School of Public Health
Founded in 1976, Boston University School of Public Health is one of the top ten ranked schools of public health in the world. It offers master's- and doctoral-level education in public health. The faculty in six departments conduct policy-changing public health research around the world, with the mission of improving the health of populations—especially the disadvantaged, underserved, and vulnerable—locally and globally.
The race to build “digital twins”—computational models of people’s biological and physiological systems—has accelerated. The promise is huge: predict disease, personalize care, and test treatments without risk. This essay points out that the ethics of the technology isn’t keeping pace.
Fleur O'Hare, Lauren N. Ayton, David Foran, Camille Paynter, Michelle Gallaher, Kelly Schulz, Myra B. McGuinness, Lauren Barina, Steven Y. C. Tong, Tessa Saunders
The four-foot-tall Emperor penguin of Antarctica may be the most iconic member of this unique family of birds, but 17 other species of penguins populate the Southern Hemisphere, many of them confined to isolated islands that make them hard to study.
That’s likely why an entirely new species of gentoo penguin has been overlooked on the Kerguelen Islands — or, as the French refer to them, the Desolation Islands — located nearly 2,000 miles from any permanently inhabited landmass. An international team of penguin experts led by Chilean and University of California, Berkeley biologists announced the discovery — the first new penguin species named in more than 100 years — in a paper published last month in the journal Communications Biology.
The scientists provided genetic evidence that what was once thought to be one widely dispersed species is actually four separate species of gentoo penguin. One of these was previously unrecognized because, except for slight differences in size and vocalization, it looks like every other gentoo: a white underside and black back, which are optimal for escaping predation while enabling prey capture in an ocean environment. Yet it is clearly genetically different — what scientists refer to as a cryptic species.
The researchers also concluded that three previously recognized subspecies of gentoo penguins are genetically distinct and should be elevated to full-fledged species status.
The fate of the newly recognized species — the southeastern gentoo penguin, Pygoscelis kerguelensis — and two others are uncertain as global warming affects the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic regions they occupy. Only the southern gentoo, now called Pygoscelis ellsworthi and the only species to reside in Antarctica, is predicted to be minimally affected or possibly even advantaged because of an expanded distributional range.
“In Antarctica, of course, other species, not the gentoo, are threatened by climate change,” said Juliana Vianna, one of the paper’s senior authors and a professor of ecosystems and environment at Andrés Bello National University in Santiago, Chile. “But the gentoo is of most concern in the sub-Antarctic region,” an area of widely separated islands north of Antarctica governed by numerous countries, including Chile, South Africa, France, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand,
“It's very important that conservation institutions in all the different countries involved recognize and take appropriate action to save these three gentoo penguin species,” she added.
Biologists reach a consensus
Vianna and co-senior authors Rauri Bowie, a professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley, and Elie Poulin, a professor at the University of Chile in Santiago, corralled penguin experts from around the world to collaborate on a new genomic analysis of gentoo penguin populations. Several of the authors had previously described subspecies of the gentoo — as many as six — though not all of them were in agreement. The paper represents a consensus, based on new whole genome sequences of 64 individuals from 10 breeding colonies, for the first time spanning nearly the entire geographical range of the gentoo penguin. The study also includes comparisons of physical characteristics, ranging from coloration and vocalizations to the timing of breeding, diet and feeding behaviors.
“There's probably no species of penguin where the taxonomy has been more debated than the gentoo penguin,” said Bowie, a curator in UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. “For over 100 years it's been controversial as to how many species or how many subspecies there are. What this paper does is try to address that question using cutting-edge integrative approaches.”
Bowie and Vianna have worked together for nearly 10 years to understand the origins and diversity of penguins. In 2019, they published a landmark paper showing that penguins first arose around Australia and New Zealand about 22 million years ago, with Emperor and King penguins splitting off and occupying Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic, respectively. About 12 million years ago, with the rise of the circumpolar current, other penguins were carried throughout the sub-Antarctic, occupying many small islands and archipelagoes and spreading as far north as the African and South American continents.
Gentoos differ from most other penguin species in having a generalized diet, eating essentially anything they can chase down in the water. Today, with plunging krill populations, this generalized strategy is a survival advantage. Penguins that eat more specific food items, like Emperors and Adélies, are declining in numbers, while the gentoos that coexist with them on the Antarctic peninsula are increasing in population size.
The gentoos’ generalized diet indirectly led to the evolution of the new species, the researchers argue. Because the birds are content to eat what’s in front of them — including fish, krill, squid and cuttlefish — they don’t travel far from their breeding colony and nest in the same place year after year. As a result, the populations on isolated islands developed behavioral and ecological adaptations to their specific region that over time have been reinforced through selection across the genome. This led to speciation during the past 300,000 to 500,000 years, aided by the isolation of these remote islands and by the Antarctic Polar Front, a temperature and salinity barrier in the Southern Ocean that also is a barrier to animal movement.
North of the Polar Front, where the water is warmer and saltier, there’s now the eastern lineage — Pygoscelis taeniata — on the Crozet, Marion and Macquarie Islands, and the northern lineage — Pygoscelis papua — which is restricted to the Falkland/Malvinas and Martillo Islands in South America.
Right on the Polar Front lies the newly described, though low-population, southeastern lineage — Pygoscelis kerguelensis — which evolved on Kerguelen Island and likely nearby Heard Island. Below the Polar Front is found the southern and most populous lineage —Pygoscelis ellsworthi — which thrives on the Antarctic Peninsula, coastal Antarctica and South Georgia Island.
Genomes reveal genetic adaptations
The genomic analysis, which was led by the paper’s lead author, University of Chile graduate student Daly Noll, incorporated a more representative sample of genes across the entire genome than previous studies. It also involved thousands of genetic variations called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The analysis showed how these species evolved to adapt to their environments. For example, the southern gentoo that is thriving in Antarctica shows genetic changes associated with adaptation to extreme polar environments, with a larger number of genes related to heat generation, fat and lipid storage and light perception. The latter likely reflects adaptations to seasonal daylight variation and ice reflectivity.
In contrast, the eastern gentoo has an increased number of genes linked to energy-efficient carbohydrate metabolism and enhanced diving capacity. These genes, which are associated with oxygen transport and use, blood vessel formation, mitochondrial activity and lung development, likely support prolonged underwater activity in low-productivity oceans.
The northern gentoo of South America, however, showed gene enrichment for digestion-related processes and pathways involved in cardiac contraction and muscle excitation. The researchers suggest that these patterns reflect metabolic and physiological adaptations that support sustained foraging activity in the water.
To assess how the gentoo penguins will adapt to climate change, the researchers used climate prediction models to see where the animals’ preferred habitat will be in 2050. Under a moderate climate change scenario, all of the island-inhabiting sub-Antarctic species will find their current islands uninhabitable, with few or no nearby suitable islands to which they can move. The Antarctic species, however, is likely to expand deeper into the continent as other Antarctic species — Emperor, Adélie and chinstrap penguins — decline because of the disappearance of sea ice and the krill that grow under the ice.
Vianna noted that many other non-Antarctic penguins are expected to suffer from habitat loss because of climate change and the increasing impacts of warming oceans, habitat destruction, predation by rats and dogs, competition from commercial fisheries and entrapment in nets.
“In terms of climate change, island species that have really low population sizes could be compared with the sub-Antarctic gentoo penguins,” she said. “Galapagos and other island penguin species, because they’re endemic to these islands, will find no place to go after a change in their environment. Those islands are very isolated, and these penguins cannot adapt easily to colonize any other region.”
The amount and variety of data acquired for the study is unprecedented and will have other uses, Bowie said. Vianna is already searching through penguin genomes to find the genetic changes associated with survival from avian influenza, which is now ravaging penguin, bird and mammal populations worldwide. Such studies could help identify populations most at risk from the disease.
“Whole genome sequencing has transformed our ability to not only look at adaptation from a perspective of how things diversify, but it has really important conservation value,” Bowie said.
Co-authors with Bowie and Vianna include biologists from Australia, Spain, Venezuela, South Africa, the United Kingdom, France, Argentina, Monaco and Brazil. Daly Noll of the University of Chile in Santiago is first author of the paper.
A gentoo penguin with chick.
Credit
Claudia Ulloa
Gentoo penguins engaged in a swimming technique known as porpoising.
NEW YORK, May 8, 2026 — As climate change drives more frequent extreme heat and worsening air pollution, researchers are seeking better ways to understand how these exposures affect health in real time. A new pilot study led by researchers at The City University of New York demonstrates the feasibility of combining wearable devices, smartphone location data, and real-time surveys to capture individuals’ environmental exposures and their immediate physical and emotional effects.
“People move through many different environments each day, and this approach lets us capture that in real time,” said Ramjan, a doctoral student in the CUNY Graduate Center Psychology program. “We were struck by how quickly the data revealed patterns — changes in heart rate variability, shifts in mood — that lined up with where participants had been and what they were exposed to.”
For the study, participants wore Fitbit smartwatches for roughly a month while completing short mood surveys known as ecological momentary assessments several times a day. Researchers combined these data with smartphone location tracking to estimate exposure to heat and air pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide based on where participants spent time throughout the day.
The findings suggest that this integrated approach is not only feasible but also revealing. On days with higher exposure to heat and nitrogen dioxide, participants showed changes in heart rate variability, a marker of the body’s ability to recover from stress. Higher exposure to sulfur dioxide was associated with increased feelings of nervousness and hopelessness. Interestingly, higher heat exposure was linked to lower self-reported sadness, a counterintuitive finding that may reflect seasonal patterns in outdoor activity and social engagement during warmer weather, underscoring the need for larger studies to disentangle these effects.
“Even in a small pilot, we could see that the relationship between environmental conditions and people’s physiological and emotional responses is more complex than traditional methods can capture,” said Blum, a medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “By combining wearable sensors, GPS data, and real-time surveys, we’re able to build individualized exposure profiles that move with people throughout their day. That’s a real shift from relying on stationary monitors or home addresses.”
“To our knowledge, this is the first study to combine wearable devices, ecological momentary assessment, and continuous GPS tracking to measure environmental exposures and their immediate health impacts,” said senior author Nomura, a distinguished professor of Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center and Queens College with an appointment at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “It’s a small pilot, but it demonstrates an integration between consumer technology and environmental epidemiology that could open the door to personalized approaches for preventive medicine.”
The pilot study also identified areas for improvement, including simplifying the system and increasing participant adherence — lessons that have already been incorporated into the next phase of the research. Building on these findings, Nomura’s team is now applying the refined system to a larger, National Institutes of Health (NIH)-supported study examining how prenatal and current environmental exposures affect brain development and mental health in adolescents.
The work comes at a critical moment. Exposure to extreme heat and air pollution is increasing, with disproportionate impacts on vulnerable populations, including children, pregnant individuals, people experiencing homelessness, and those with lower socioeconomic status. Children are particularly at risk because environmental exposures can have lasting effects on brain development and behavior.
Beyond research, the approach could have clinical applications. Real-time environmental exposure monitoring could one day help clinicians make more informed decisions about patient care, particularly for individuals with conditions sensitive to heat or air quality.
“This is still early-stage work, and we’re cautious about reading too much into a small sample,” Nomura said. “But improving how we measure exposure is a critical step toward protecting public health, and these results give us confidence that the approach can scale.”
The study was supported by a Professional Staff Congress–City University of New York (PSC-CUNY) research grant. For further information about the study, contact Yoko Nomura (yoko.nomura@qc.cuny.edu) or Melissa Blum (Melissa.blum@icahn.mssm.edu).
About the Graduate Center of The City University of New York The CUNY Graduate Center is a leader in public graduate education devoted to enhancing the public good through pioneering research, serious learning, and reasoned debate. The Graduate Center offers ambitious students nearly 50 doctoral and master’s programs of the highest caliber, taught by top faculty from throughout CUNY — the nation’s largest urban public university. Through its nearly 40 centers, institutes, initiatives, and the Advanced Science Research Center, the Graduate Center influences public policy and discourse and shapes innovation. The Graduate Center’s extensive public programs make it a home for culture and conversation.
