Publications related to Light and chronobiology: Implications for health and disease

The role of spatial epidemiology to support public health policies : case studies applied to health promotion, noncommunicable and infectious diseases in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland

In a context of escalating public health challenges, including the rise of chronic diseases, the impact of climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic, certain populations bear a disproportionate burden. As a result, there is an urgent need to develop public ...

EPFL2024

What is NExT? A new conceptual model for comfort, satisfaction, health, and well-being in buildings

Dusan Licina

Buildings are designed to respond to functional and regulatory needs, providing comfortable conditions to occupants, offering satisfactory environmental settings, minimising health risks, and enhancing individual and collective quality of life. Although th ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Soft Robotics: A Route to Equality, Diversity, and Inclusivity in Robotics

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes

Robotics is entering our daily lives. The discipline is increasingly crucial in fields such as agriculture, medicine, and rescue operations, impacting our food, health, and planet. At the same time, it is becoming evident that robotic research must embrace ...

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc2024

Mice with humanized livers reveal the role of hepatocyte clocks in rhythmic behavior

Cédric Gobet, Sylviane Métairon, Frédéric Bruno Martin Gachon, Benjamin Dieter Weger

The synchronization of circadian clock depends on a central pacemaker located in the suprachiasmatic nuclei. However, the potential feedback of peripheral signals on the central clock remains poorly characterized. To explore whether peripheral organ circad ...

AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE2023

Statistical physics of periodic biological processes

Lorenzo Talamanca

Earth rotation around its axis imposes a 24-hour rhythmicity to all life on the planet. Rather than passively responding to these periodic changes, nature has given us an internal timekeeper, the circadian clock, to anticipate to our advantage the fluctuat ...

EPFL2023

Uncovering personalized glucose responses and circadian rhythms from multiple wearable biosensors with Bayesian dynamical modeling

Felix Naef, Nicholas Edward Phillips

Wearable biosensors and smartphone applications can measure physiological variables over multiple days in free-living conditions. We measure food and drink ingestion, glucose dynamics, physical activity, heart rate (HR), and heart rate variability (HRV) in ...

CELL PRESS2023

The circadian clock time tunes axonal regeneration

Thomas Haynes Hutson

Nerve injuries cause permanent neurological disability due to limited axonal regeneration. Injury-dependent and-independent mechanisms have provided important insight into neuronal regeneration, however, common denominators underpinning regeneration remain ...

Cell Press2023

Designing self-tracking experiences: A qualitative study of the perceptions of barriers and facilitators to adopting digital health technology for automatic urine analysis at home

Nicolas Henchoz, Delphine Ribes Lemay, Emily Clare Groves, Andrea Regula Schneider, Margherita Motta

Self-tracking technologies open new doors to previously unimaginable scenarios. The diagnosis of diseases years in advance, or supporting the health of astronauts on missions to Mars are just some of many example applications. During the COVID-19 pandemic, ...

2023

Real world multimodal assessment of physical behavior change in health and disease

Gaëlle Prigent

Sedentary lifestyle is currently considered a global pandemic, associated with major health problems such as cardiovascular disease and premature death. Regular physical activity (PA) is one way to address this problem, as it brings a variety of health ben ...

EPFL2023

Sex-dimorphic and age-dependent organization of 24-hour gene expression rhythms in humans

Felix Naef, Cédric Gobet, Lorenzo Talamanca

The circadian clock modulates human physiology. However, the organization of tissue-specific gene expression rhythms and how these depend on age and sex is not defined in humans. We combined data from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project with an a ...

American Association for the Advancement of Science2023

Housing, street and health: a new systemic research framework

Stéphane Joost, Paola Viganò, Catarina Wall Gago, Anna Pagani, Derek Pierre Christie, Dusan Licina, Valentin Daniel Maurice Bourdon, Idris Guessous, Mathias Lerch

As the world’s population grows in cities, urban dwellers spend a large amount of time inside their home, making housing health ever more important. Critical for residents’ health, the interactions between indoor residential environments and outdoor enviro ...

2023

Novel quantitative bioengineered tools to track human bone marrow niche cellular constituents in health and disease

Rita Sarkis

Acute leukemia has a high mortality rate of approximately 50%, and current methods are not effective in predicting disease progression and relapse. To improve our understanding of hematopoiesis and develop new markers for predicting disease relapse in dead ...

EPFL2023

Reduced order models for coupled systems

Niccolo' Discacciati

Efficient numerical simulations of coupled multi-component systems can be particularly challenging. This is mostly due to the complexity of their solutions, as mutual interactions may cause emergent behaviors, including synchronization and instabilities. V ...

EPFL2023

An experimental and analytical study of wind turbine wakes under pressure gradient

Fernando Porté Agel, Arslan Salim Dar, Abraham Starbuck Gertler

This work is dedicated to the systematic investigation of wind turbine wakes under the effect of pressure gradients. Wind tunnel experiments are carried out with a wind turbine positioned on straight ramps of increasing angle such that it experiences an ap ...

2023

Predictive performance of multi-model ensemble forecasts of COVID-19 across European nations

Nicola Parolini, Ntorina Thanou, David Kraus, Andrea Kraus, Daniel Lopez, Markus Scholz, Benjamin Bejar Haro, Daniel Rodrigo Lopez, Ekaterina Krymova, Tao Sun

Background:Short-term forecasts of infectious disease burden can contribute to situational awareness and aid capacity planning. Based on best practice in other fields and recent insights in infectious disease epidemiology, one can maximise the predictive p ...

eLIFE SCIENCES PUBL LTD2023

Combining accelerometry with allometry for estimating daily energy expenditure in joules when in-lab calibration is unavailable

Kamiar Aminian, Pritish Chakravarty

Background All behaviour requires energy, and measuring energy expenditure in standard units (joules) is key to linking behaviour to ecological processes. Animal-borne accelerometers are commonly used to infer proxies of energy expenditure, termed 'dynamic ...

BMC2023

Blunted Glucocorticoid Responsiveness to Stress Causes Behavioral and Biological Alterations That Lead to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Vulnerability

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Olivia Zanoletti, Jocelin Grosse, Sophie Elizabeth Walker, Marie-Isabelle Guillot de Suduiraut, Simone Astori, Silvia Monari

Background: Understanding why only a subset of trauma-exposed individuals develop posttraumatic stress disorder is critical for advancing clinical strategies. A few behavioral (deficits in fear extinction) and biological (blunted glucocorticoid levels, sma ...

2023

Perceptual Learning: Policy Insights From Basic Research to Real-World Applications

Michael Herzog

Perceptual learning is the process by which experience alters how incoming sensory information is processed by the brain to give rise to behavior-it is critical for how humans educate children, train experts, treat diseases, and promote health and well-bei ...

Sage Publications Inc2023

Characterization of wind turbine flow through nacelle-mounted lidars: a review

Fernando Porté Agel, Peter Andreas Brugger

This article provides a comprehensive review of the most recent advances in the planning, execution, and analysis of inflow and wake measurements from nacelle-mounted wind Doppler lidars. Lidars installed on top of wind turbines provide a holistic view of ...

2023

Robust tunable acoustic impedance control on electroacoustic resonators for aircraft noise reduction

Maxime Volery

Air traffic noise emissions are responsible for a significant part of the overall environmental noise, especially in the vicinity of airports. Exposure to environmental noise is known to negatively impact health and to be associated with cardiovascular dis ...

EPFL2023