Data augmentation plays a key role in modern machine learning pipelines.

Virtually every aspect of your health can be traced back to your microbiome. But some tests are better than others. Some of the recipes look tasty. I admit it: I'm a sucker for metrics. Fitness trackers that keep tabs on my steps and sleep? A DEXA scan to give me too much information about my body composition?

Imposing order on the world is seductive, but it flattens out the diversity and rich messiness of human life. Oddly, playing by the rules may help us fight back, argues C. Thi Nguyen in The Score THIS time last year, I wrote an article for New Scientist about the perfect way to cook the classic pasta dish cacio e pepe, according to physicists. The meal's smooth, glossy emulsion of black pepper, pecorino cheese and water is hard to make lump-free. Ivan Di Terlizzi at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany and his colleagues cooked cacio e pepe hundreds of times until they produced an exacting and foolproof method. The story proved popular with readers.

Environment Animals Pets Dogs Pet dogs can help teens' mental health Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It's old news that having a dog provides a lot of benefits. Playing with a pooch can help our brains concentrate and relax, a family dog can help prevent food allergies in children, and even fulfill our primal need to nurture. They also may have some sway over some of the tiniest organisms around--the microbes that live in our bodies. A study published December 3 in the journal found that the family dog prompts changes in our gut microbiome that result in better mental health.

Aging is a highly complex and heterogeneous process that progresses at different rates across individuals, making biological age (BA) a more accurate indicator of physiological decline than chronological age. While previous studies have built aging clocks using single-omics data, they often fail to capture the full molecular complexity of human aging. In this work, we leveraged the Human Phenotype Project, a large-scale cohort of 10,000 adults aged 40-70 years, with extensive longitudinal profiling that includes clinical, behavioral, environmental, and multi-omics datasets spanning transcriptomics, lipidomics, metabolomics, and the microbiome. By employing advanced machine learning frameworks capable of modeling nonlinear biological dynamics, we developed and rigorously validated a multi-omics aging clock that robustly predicts diverse health outcomes and future disease risk. Unsupervised clustering of the integrated molecular profiles from multi-omics uncovered distinct biological subtypes of aging, revealing striking heterogeneity in aging trajectories and pinpointing pathway-specific alterations associated with different aging patterns. These findings demonstrate the power of multi-omics integration to decode the molecular landscape of aging and lay the groundwork for personalized healthspan monitoring and precision strategies to prevent age-related diseases.

I'm really glad I took this mail-order medical-grade microbiome shotgun test to look for warning signs of health conditions. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Medical-grade shotgun test is the gold standard. "Show the work," so you can see which studies it's referencing. Results can be confusing or conflicting. Need a doctor to understand some of the results. We hear a lot about the microbiome, also known as the zoo of different bacteria living in your digestive system. We know some are good and some are bad.

For patients with inflammatory bowel disease, antibiotics can be a double-edged sword. The broad-spectrum drugs often prescribed for gut flare-ups can kill helpful microbes alongside harmful ones, sometimes worsening symptoms over time. When fighting gut inflammation, you don't always want to bring a sledgehammer to a knife fight. Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and McMaster University have identified a new compound that takes a more targeted approach. The molecule, called enterololin, suppresses a group of bacteria linked to Crohn's disease flare-ups while leaving the rest of the microbiome largely intact.

The gut contents act like a microscopic time machine into pre-Hispanic Mexico. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Underneath the remains of an ancient young adult man and his preserved feces lies a microscopic world. These microorganisms beneath the cloth hold clues to what the world may have looked like hundreds of years ago. Now, a new look at a 1,000-year-old mummy called the Zimapán man could tell us what ancient Mesoamericans ate, where they lived, and show us how much our world has changed since.

Detecting anomalies in irregularly sampled multi-variate time-series is challenging, especially in data-scarce settings. Here we introduce an anomaly detection framework for irregularly sampled time-series that leverages neural jump ordinary differential equations (NJODEs). The method infers conditional mean and variance trajectories in a fully path dependent way and computes anomaly scores. On synthetic data containing jump, drift, diffusion, and noise anomalies, the framework accurately identifies diverse deviations. Applied to infant gut microbiome trajectories, it delineates the magnitude and persistence of antibiotic-induced disruptions: revealing prolonged anomalies after second antibiotic courses, extended duration treatments, and exposures during the second year of life. We further demonstrate the predictive capabilities of the inferred anomaly scores in accurately predicting antibiotic events and outperforming diversity-based baselines. Our approach accommodates unevenly spaced longitudinal observations, adjusts for static and dynamic covariates, and provides a foundation for inferring microbial anomalies induced by perturbations, offering a translational opportunity to optimize intervention regimens by minimizing microbial disruptions.

Tech millionaire turned longevity pioneer Bryan Johnson devotes more than 6 hours a day to trialling different methods to turn back the clock. Can the rest of us learn anything from his radical approach? Bryan Johnson is finishing his 6.5-hour morning routine when I sign on to Zoom for my allotted 15-minute call with him (a constraint of what a member of his team describes as his "crazy" schedule). The tech millionaire turned longevity pioneer is standing in front of a cement wall in his California home, the coldness of which is relieved by green bursts of tropical houseplants. Wearing a helmet-like headset, a few wires trailing out and down past the screen, together with a black T-shirt bearing the words "Don't Die", the effect is somewhere between a luxury Balinese villa and a VR store designed by Apple.