A new noninvasive skin cancer detection device that uses technology pioneered at BU could reportedly cut the number of missed skin cancers by half. The DermaSensor directs pulses of light at tissue, tracking the colors that bounce back—malignant and benign lesions scatter light differently—to help clinicians decide whether to refer a patient to a specialist. Around one in five Americans will have skin cancer at some point in their lives, according to the American Academy of Dermatology. The sensing technology was developed and refined by BU engineer Irving J. Bigio. In January, the Food and Drug Administration cleared the DermaSensor for US markets; in October, Time named it one of its inventions of the year.

BU’s urban Charles River campus—with trolley trains rattling on one side, highway traffic rushing past on the other—is an unlikely place to find ancient Egyptian treasure. But when Egyptologist Kathryn Bard retired from the University in 2022, she gifted a colleague a long-forgotten cardboard box of samples collected in the 1980s from two predynastic Nile Valley settlements. Among them were chunks of 5,000-year-old wood charcoal. Not exactly a stockpile of gem-studded jewels, but a true treasure to student researcher Ranran (Angela) Zhang (CAS’24). Zhang studied the ancient charcoal to learn about early Egyptians’ interaction with their surrounding environment, like whether they made homes for the short or long term. “I like that you’re looking at common people and what these common people ate and used,” said Zhang. “And we’re able to reconstruct the daily activities of commoners like me.”

A multidisciplinary team of BU engineers, neurobiologists, and computer and data scientists created a machine learning model that can predict whether someone with mild cognitive impairment is likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease. The artificial intelligence program, which analyzes speech, had an accuracy rate of 78.5 percent. 

“We hope, as everyone does, that there will be more and more Alzheimer’s treatments made available,” said Ioannis (Yannis) Paschalidis, director of the BU Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering. “If you can predict what will happen, you have more of an opportunity and time window to intervene with drugs, and at least try to maintain the stability of the condition and prevent the transition to more severe forms of dementia.”

It was a finding so weird, so against scientific convention, that the researchers who made it didn’t believe it at first. Studying million-year-old rocks thousands of feet below the Pacific Ocean’s surface, they discovered mineral concretions, rocks known as polymetallic nodules, were producing oxygen. That’s surprising because—just like you learned in middle school—most oxygen is generated by plants and plankton drinking in sunlight and carbon dioxide. But at 12,000 feet down, it’s pretty dark. And rocks are, well, rocks. The researchers, including BU biologist Jeffery Marlow, concluded the rocks created the oxygen with a process called “seawater electrolysis.”

“For the most part, we think of the deep sea as a place where decaying material falls down and animals eat the remnants. But this finding is recalibrating that dynamic,” said Marlow. “It helps us to see the deep ocean as a place of production, similar to what we have found with methane seeps and hydrothermal vents that create oases for marine animals and microbes. I think it’s a fun inversion of how we tend to think about the deep sea.”

If you’ve ever had a dark bank of cloud chill what had seemed an ideal beach day, spare a thought for our early human ancestors. About two million years ago, our solar system encountered a dense interstellar cloud that likely compressed the sun’s protective plasma shield, known as the heliosphere, robbing Earth of its protection. According to BU-led research, that likely left the planet exposed to radioactive particles and probably sent temperatures falling. “This paper is the first to quantitatively show there was an encounter between the sun and something outside of the solar system that would have affected Earth’s climate,” said BU space physicist Merav Opher, lead author on the research.

For the second year in a row, college student mental health has improved, according to a study coled by BU public health researcher Sarah K. Lipson. The Healthy Minds Study of 100,000-plus US college students found symptoms of depression, anxiety, and thoughts of suicide had declined, and that more young people were connecting with mental health care and support. But the team’s survey also highlighted many areas of concern, including a high prevalence of mental illness among college students and a large proportion of students reporting feelings of isolation. “While I very much hope that we will continue to see improvements,” said Lipson, “we will need a few more years of data showing changes in the intended direction before we feel confident pointing to a definitive trend.”

After studying the remains of enslaved people who died on the remote Atlantic island of Saint Helena, BU bioarchaeologist Andreana Cunningham was able to paint a more complex picture of their lives and where they came from than was previously known. She found a greater influence of southeastern African populations among existing African diaspora populations along the Atlantic. Much of our existing knowledge of where people were captured from is based on the (sometimes obscured) records of enslavers. Cunningham’s goal is to restore the agency and stories of people who were enslaved through a combination of bioarchaeology, African diaspora studies, and archival research.

“The skeletons of the past can actually tell us a lot about the history of the individual they belong to,” Cunningham said. “The experiences that you go through can be marked on your body, literally. Things like stress, daily habits, nutrition, the places you come from—these are all things that can be recorded, to some extent, on your skeletal remains.”