Researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) have found that how quickly an older adult can execute a voluntary step—especially when distracted (concurrently performed cognitive task)—may serve as a valuable clinical predictor of survival. The explorative study suggests that dynamic balance assessments capture an integration of neuromuscular vitality and central cognitive processing, offering a window into an individual's long-term functional health.

A new review shows that AI, teledermatology, and mobile follow-up tools can help family doctors in China manage chronic skin diseases and related mental health and metabolic issues—shifting care from one-off visits to continuous, whole-life support.

Lineage tracing is a powerful tool to study development, tissue homeostasis, aging, and disease progression. Over the past decades, lineage tracing techniques have progressed substantially by employing new genetic engineering tools. However, due to their invasive nature, these approaches are difficult to apply to humans. Although endogenous DNA mutations can be used for in vivo lineage tracing in humans, their extremely low mutation rate presents substantial technical challenges. Mitochondrial DNA mutations are an alternative, but their inheritance may suffer from neutral drift or undergo both positive and negative selection, and their analysis is plagued by excessive data noise. Thus, developing non-invasive, high-resolution lineage tracing methods for human tissues is crucial.

Over the past decades, lineage tracing has been fundamental to unraveling how diverse cell types arise during development and how tumors evolve through clonal expansion. Traditional approaches largely depend on exogenous DNA barcodes, fluorescent proteins, or CRISPR-based recorders engineered into model organisms. However, these synthetic strategies require genetic manipulation, making them difficult to apply to native human clinical samples. Thus, developing versatile, non-invasive methods that can reconstruct the genealogical history of individual cells directly from patient tissues is crucial. The ideal approach should leverage endogenous, heritable markers that accumulate naturally within cells.