People with chronic lung disease breathe better after two months of laughter therapy, results from a small trial show. The promising results may prompt further research into the low-cost treatment option.

In chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) – a leading cause of disability and death worldwide – air isn’t fully expelled when exhaling, meaning stale air remains trapped inside the lungs. The millions of people who are affected by the condition often feel breathless, even during simple daily activities.

Doctors treat COPD with medications like bronchodilators and corticosteroids, and may also recommend specialised breathing exercises. These include pursed-lip breathing, in which patients breathe in through the nose and out slowly through the lips, which creates a gentle build-up of pressure that helps release some of the air trapped in the lungs. But many people with COPD continue to become increasingly dependent on others for care over time, reducing their quality of life.

, formerly at Hacettepe University Faculty of Nursing in Ankara, Turkey, had seen research showing that laughter therapy shows promise in people with , and and thought it might help those with COPD as well – both physically and mentally.

To find out, she and her colleagues recruited 63 people who were already being treated for COPD at Ankara Bilkent City Hospital and divided them into three groups of 21. In their randomised controlled trial, all participants continued their medications, but those in one group additionally performed pursed-lip breathing exercises and those in another group received laughter therapy. Participants in the third, control, group did neither.

The laughter therapy is an established programme that differs from simple responses to humour. It includes playful exercises like mimicking a motorcycle starting or a lion roaring, rhythmic clapping with vocal sounds and relaxation with calm breathing and smiling. The participants were coached by laughter therapists in face-to-face sessions and then instructed to perform the techniques on their own for 30 minutes, three times per week.

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After eight weeks, participants in the laughter therapy and the pursed-lip breathing groups had less difficulty breathing and better overall health than those in the control group. Those benefits were still ongoing even a month after the trial ended, says Aldan. Even so, the therapies didn’t change how much daily assistance participants needed from caregivers. Aldan and her colleagues didn’t directly compare the effects of pursed-lip breathing and laughter therapy. They at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

While more research could help clarify exactly how laughter therapy helps, Aldan suspects it might exercise the breathing muscles, promote deeper exhalation, improve lymphatic flow and trigger the release of endorphins, while also lowering levels of stress hormones.

“This structured approach may help facilitate gentle air expulsion and reduce air trapping without overwhelming the respiratory system,” she says. “Psychologically, it can also offer a safe, enjoyable way to reduce anxiety and support emotional wellbeing.”

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Importantly, however, laughter therapy is distinct from intense or unguided laughter – like the response to a funny social media video – which can actually trigger adverse effects like acute airway collapse or exertion, says Aldan. “Laughter therapy is not merely ‘laughing’ – it is a structured protocol that naturally incorporates deep breathing exercises and rhythmic warm-ups to prepare the lungs and body for laughter.”

“This is a small but well-run study,” says at Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona, Spain, who wasn’t involved in the research. “These results – showing that patients can breathe more easily and feel better in general – are promising. Laughter therapy is simple and low-cost, meaning it could be used by anyone, anywhere in the world. We look forward to further research in this area.”

The team hopes to expand its work with international collaborators.

Running with a pram or stroller might make parents less susceptible to ankle pain and injuries to their calf muscles, foot arches and Achilles tendons. A survey of parents suggests there is a 37 per cent drop in injury risk with pram use. This may be partly due to changes in vertical forces – how much force our legs absorb with each step – when pushing a child.

“You get a little bit of a walker effect where you’re leaning and putting some weight on the stroller,” says at Pennsylvania State University, who ran with a pram after the births of her two children. “That led me to wonder, you know, is this actually protective?”

Previous research suggests that people running with a pram tend to have . They also lean forward more, with . Last year, Altman Singles and her colleagues found there is a when running with a pram, but whether this affects injury risk was unclear.

To learn more, Altman Singles and her team analysed self-reported running and injury data from 196 parents who used any kind of pram on at least some of their runs while their children were younger than 3 years old. These individuals were compared against another 53 mothers or fathers who ran when their children were the same age, but without prams. All the participants had some running experience before becoming parents.

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The two groups of parents covered similar total distances and were relatively well matched in terms of factors like age, height and weight. But there were many more women than men in both groups, particularly the pram one.

Overall, 30 per cent of the non-pram runners reported having had running-related injuries, compared with 19 per cent of the pram runners. These included a higher incidence of ankle pain, calf muscle injury, plantar fasciitis (heel pain that occurs when the thick band of tissue on the bottom of the foot becomes irritated or inflamed) and Achilles tendinitis (injury of the Achilles tendon).

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“Generally, stroller running involves rapid steps with short stride lengths,” says at Seattle Pacific University. “Although this can increase metabolic cost, it can also decrease the force production at each foot strike, which might explain some of these injury reductions.”

Wall-Scheffler says we should see this paper as a “great start” to understanding an important topic. However, future work should include a more balanced mix of men and women, she says. For instance, oestrogen and progesterone , which could affect a woman’s injury risk.

Future studies should also collect injury-related data more regularly over time and could even investigate the effects of different pram-pushing styles, such as using one or two hands, says Wall-Scheffler.

Extraordinary underwater videos have captured orcas making sunfish explode by ramming them at high speed. The behaviour may help juvenile orcas feed by breaking the prey into many small pieces, but it also appears that the orcas may enjoy playing with their food.

“It’s a hunting tactic, but that involves a play game in the process,” says , an independent marine biologist in Mexico. “There’s ‘high-octane’ adrenaline and a lot of other hormones rushing through their bodies, so, of course, there’s got to be some sort of excitement.”

Sharp-tail sunfish (Masturus lanceolatus) are among the largest bony fish, weighing up to 2000 kilograms. Higuera had already seen groups of orcas (Orcinus orca) attacking sunfish in the Gulf of California, ripping off parts of their flesh and tossing them around to each other in a playful manner. In the past few years, he had even witnessed them .

Then, in July 2024, his colleague at US non-profit organisation Beneath the Waves caught an explosive interaction on her GoPro camera while diving in the Gulf of California. An adult female orca held onto a dead sunfish while an adult male orca swam upside down towards it at full speed. The female released the sunfish at the last second, and the male hit it with so much force that the fish burst into a flurry of small fragments.

A year later, tourist Hector Franz shot a similar underwater scene in the same bay. This time, an adult female rammed right-side-up into a sharp-tail sunfish held in place by another adult female, popping it into pieces. Combined, the two events mark the first time scientists have seen such behaviour by orcas, say Higuera, Ayres and their colleagues.

Sunfish have “an incredibly dense, rubbery, collagenous” outer layer that’s harder to bite through, so bursting them open could be an effective way to feed on them, says Higuera.

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“The explosive fragmentation seemed mostly to be of the stiff gelatinous capsule that makes up a high percentage – more than 80 per cent in large fish – of the body mass of the sunfish,” says at University College Cork in Ireland. “I suspect that calves cannot achieve enough force to do this, as their mass is too low. But they can exploit a cloud of objects that contain tasty morsels.”

Earlier sightings without full footage indicated that the entire pod was involved in a strategic attack process leading up to the rammings, says Higuera. The findings point to advanced cooperative hunting skills and even planning – especially adapting their techniques for different kinds of prey, he says.

Higuera suspects that popping the sunfish offered a learning experience for the calves, while providing them with bite-sized snacks. Simultaneously, these events could also reinforce social bonds through “play” and social learning in this highly intelligent species, he adds.

at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville says it is possible the orcas were having some fun in demolishing the fish, but play wouldn’t be the only goal, as there is clearly cooperative foraging going on as well.

“One of the fascinating things about play is that it can be a driver of behavioural innovation,” says at the University of Pisa, Italy. “It’s possible that a behaviour like this may have originated in a playful context and later acquired a feeding function, or vice versa. At this stage, we simply don’t know.”

A man who became paralysed after a diving accident six years ago regained the ability to move and feel pressure in his hands thanks to brain stimulation. Now, researchers have revealed he maintained this ability for months after the stimulation was turned off. This suggests the intervention has caused a rerouting of his neuronal connections through neuroplasticity.

“We turned everything off completely, for many months, and yet he’s maintained these gains,” says at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York. “That’s unheard of.”

Keith Thomas, 48, was paralysed from the chest down in July 2020. He had no sensation or control over his limbs and had significant muscle wasting, says Bouton.

In 2023, Bouton and his colleagues performed a double neural bypass surgery on Thomas, placing five electrodes into his brain in regions associated with arm movements and feeling. They then connected computer cables to these electrodes, so artificial intelligence could interpret his movement intentions. That information was then wired into electronic splints that stimulated his arms, hands and fingers to carry out his intended movements, enabling him to pick up coffee cups and scratch his face.

To recreate the sense of feeling, the team embedded force sensors into 3D-printed wearable devices for Thomas’s hands and fingers, which sent feedback via electrical stimulation into the brain’s sensory areas.

After conducting a series of experiments – which even involved Thomas feeling objects through another person’s hand – Bouton says the team planned to stop the stimulation for about a month, to test for any lingering effects. “Then we had a fire in the building, and it actually forced us to stop stimulation for even longer than we’d planned, for about three months.”

The unexpected interruption led to surprising findings: Thomas continued to maintain strength, feeling and function in his hands. “He’s now also controlling individual fingers with even more accuracy, so that’s big,” says Bouton.

In a video interview with �鶹��ý, Thomas raised his elbows nearly to shoulder level and described feeling “tingling” in his wrist in response to pressure, even when he’s “unplugged from the computer”. “When I first felt it, it was amazing,” he says. “I’m used to it now.”

 at the University of California, Davis, says the work suggests that this approach promotes lasting recovery of the nervous system. “The goal is to help the nervous system partially heal so the person can move their own body better,” he says.

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“If these improvements persist even when the system is turned off, then the device is doing more than temporarily restoring function,” says at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It may be helping the nervous system reorganise itself through neuroplasticity.”

This describes the brain’s ability to rewire itself by forming new neural connections, such as or even . “After an injury such as spinal cord injury, those same mechanisms may help restore function by strengthening spared pathways or recruiting alternative circuits, allowing neural signals to travel through networks that were previously too weak to support meaningful movement,” says Lu.

The researchers have observed stronger neural responses in Thomas’s sensory cortex since the intervention.

But this is just a single case report, so it’s unclear how well this approach would work on other people with paralysis from different types of injuries. at the University of Chicago says he has spent years working on stimulation and continues to find that some respond better than others, and some not at all. “And we have no idea why,” he says. “So, the question is: can you replicate it? This is a really ambitious study, but we need to see them replicating their results in more participants before we believe the hype.”

As to Thomas’s future, “at this point now we know nothing’s impossible, or anything’s possible”, says Boulton. “I think it’s possible he will continue to to improve,” he adds.