Influenza spreads faster in a crowded barracks or prison. Ebola proliferates when hospital beds run short. For decades, researchers have documented how social inequality shapes disease spread. In parallel, mathematical models have emerged for forecasting epidemics and weighing different public health interventions. But rarely have the two subfields of epidemiology joined forces.

A new paper in Biology Letters, led by SFI Resident Professor Brandon Ogbunu with SFI External Professor Sam Scarpino (Northeastern University) and collaborators, introduces a metric called "structural causal influence" that quantifies how factors like crowded housing, limited vaccine access, and financial barriers shape the way disease spreads, and whether public health interventions will actually work.

In the last few centuries, animals have been going extinct at least 100 times faster than they did before humans arrived on the scene. So who will be next? Which species are most likely to survive and which will die out? A study of extinction patterns among 210 species of tropical forest mammals worldwide shows that, when deciding which species need protecting, extinction risk factors of the past can be powerful — but they’re not perfect.

Researchers at Nagoya University in Japan in collaboration with FUJIFILM have developed a novel way of delivering circular RNA (cirRNA) into cells, paving way for longer-lasting mRNA-based therapeutics including cancer vaccines and GLP-1 obesity treatments.