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Craig Cutler

During surgery, Brent Bauer eases his pain by playing a virtual reality game called SnowWorld. He participated in a study that suggests VR could decrease the need for general anesthesia, reducing the risks and cost.

Two hours northwest of Manaus, Brazil, a 131-foot steel tower rises from a pristine area of the rainforest. Built in 1979, the tower had long been used to track the exchange of carbon dioxide between the trees and the atmosphere, but more recently it has been used for pioneering entomology research.

Cristina Iossa sings to her prematurely born son, Alessandro, at the neonatal intensive care unit of University Hospital in Modena, Italy. In some NICUs, parents are encouraged to have a more frequent presence. Scientists theorize that exposure to a mother’s voice stimulates a newborn’s brain to develop optimally to interpret sounds and understand language.

A mother talks to her premature baby during a painful heel prick procedure to take blood in Aosta, Italy. Manuela Filippa, a researcher at the University of Geneva, has shown that preemies that hear their mother's voice during a painful medical procedure increased the release of the hormone oxytocin which provides strong neuro protection against the short-and long-term effects of pain.

Babies born prematurely are placed in an incubator to provide the environmental conditions needed to thrive —or so researchers thought. Recent studies have shown that immediate skin-to-skin contact with the mother or other caregiver, and even the mother’s voice, can provide a benefit to the preemie’s health and reduce pain.

During surgery at UW Medicine’s Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, patient Brent Bauer eases his pain during orthopedic surgery by playing a virtual reality (VR) game called SnowWorld. Bauer, who broke several bones in a three-story fall, had one stabilizing pin removed from his pelvis without VR. “That got very intense,” he said. The other was removed while he was engrossed in the VR game. “It was a very pleasant distraction,” he noted, “and the pain was a lot less.”

Scientists are still trying to track down the origins of SARS-CoV-2, and the greater horseshoe bat, pictured here, has been mentioned as a possible host. This preserved sample of Rhinolophus ferrumequinum, in the collection of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, was collected in Uzbekistan in 1921.

In most nations, premature births—at or before 37 weeks—have risen in the past 20 years. Leaving the nourishing confines of the womb too early can result in complications and often leads to a stay in a hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). At University Hospital in Geneva, Switzerland, music is folded into the care plan for some preemies. But unlike other NICU music programmes, this novel project features three specific songs, which babies listen to through special headphones made for tiny, fragile heads. The songs are part of an ongoing study that aims to understand how music affects a preterm newborn’s brain and how well it can recognise melody, tempo, and pitch—skills likely related to language processing. Developed by neonatologist Petra Huppi, researcher Manuela Filippa, and composer Andreas Vollenweider, the project involves scanning babies’ brains via MRI as they listen and comparing the scans to those of babies who were not exposed to the music. The songs—short and “much simpler than Mozart,” says Huppi—were composed to help the infants fall asleep, wake up, or interact. Further research will assess the full benefit of this therapy, but early findings are promising. MRI scans reveal improved brain connectivity, and the songs appear to support the daily rhythm of sleeping and waking—key to thriving in a noisy NICU and the world beyond. Catherine Zuckerman