As zoonotic diseases like avian flu and COVID-19 continue to threaten both human and wildlife populations, a new study introduces an innovative framework for disease detection—using wild animals themselves as sentinels. By equipping wildlife with biologging devices that track movement and behavior in near-real-time, researchers can detect early signs of illness, monitor disease spread, and inform public health interventions before outbreaks reach crisis levels. The study outlines six key applications of this approach and calls for global collaboration across health, conservation, and environmental sectors to make biologging-based surveillance a central tool in the fight against future pandemics.

Researchers at the Salk Institute, UC San Diego, and Washington University have gathered novel details on undernourished children’s gut microbe populations in the largest study of its kind to-date, identifying dozens of new microbes to form an unprecedented database. They found that gut microbiome diversity and genome stability may be a powerful marker for whether children thrive or suffer. Their findings pave the way for diagnostic and preventative solutions for undernourished children around the globe, while also opening the opportunity for innovations across other public health crises from obesity to malaria to COVID-19.

Despite vaccines and treatments, SARS-CoV-2—the virus that causes COVID-19—continues to pose a global health threat, driven by new variants and its ability to hijack human cells in ways that still aren’t fully understood. Now, scientists at Scripps Research have pinpointed dozens of human proteins that SARS-CoV-2 needs to complete its full life cycle, from entering a cell to replicating and releasing new viral particles.