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I’ve worked to cope with the chronic pain through ashtanga yoga, says Louise Zamparutti . Plus letters from Kirie Pedersen and Alice Devon

Thank you for publishing Natasha Livingstone’s article ( A moment that changed me: I started yoga – and saw my scoliosis in a surprising new light, 15 July ). I have been ashamed of my scoliosis my entire life. It wasn’t diagnosed until my early 20s, and by that time I had begun a career as a dancer and choreographer. My dance teachers were always criticising my off-kilter posture and I constantly felt that I didn’t deserve to pursue a career in dance due to my disfigured spine. My curvature is both thoracic and lumbar, and runs both sideways and forward-backward. I, too, have an uneven waistline, a hip curve on one side and straight rib-to-hip line on the other. Pants fit unevenly on me, and for years I would never wear an open-backed top.

Reading this piece made me recognise how hard I’ve worked to cope with the chronic pain, through ashtanga yoga, which I taught for over 10 years, and now through lap swimming. But I haven’t come to terms with the shame. This piece gave me the sense that I am not alone – that there are others of us who have scoliosis and deal with it in a myriad of ways. As the author of this article shows, there should be no shame in having the strength to cope with it and do whatever we want to do in our lives.

Louise Zamparutti

Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, US

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Dozens of researchers funded by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality received notices last week that they would not receive future installments of funding for their ongoing research grants. While frustrating, the development was largely not a surprise to these researchers, many of whom had been waiting months for renewed funding or been unable to get explanations as to why the funding spigots had run dry from staffers at the agency.

The notices punctuated nearly a year of uncertainty for health services researchers funded by AHRQ and left those who lost funding concerned about the future of their field. AcademyHealth , a professional organization representing health services researchers, has confirmed at least 78 grants worth $200 million have been affected. In all, those grants had $109.2 million in funding remaining, it estimated.

Grant recipients were told in a letter of “non-award” that “AHRQ is adjusting its discretionary health services research award portfolio in order to better prioritize agency resources towards the above-mentioned priorities to best serve the interests of the Federal Government,” according to one such letter reviewed by STAT. The letter states the agency is prioritizing research on patient safety, antibiotic resistance, AI, long Covid, nutrition, and understanding autism, among others.

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Science word of the day: Abiogenesis

Pronunciation: Ay-bye-oh-JEN'-ih-sis

What it means: Abiogenesis is the emergence of life from nonliving matter through chemical processes. Scientists still don't know exactly how abiogenesis happened on Earth. Theories range from lightning strikes that could have scrambled water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen into amino acids and sugars ‪—‬ the building blocks of life ‪—‬ to chemical reactions at deep-sea vents. Abiogenesis is not the same as spontaneous generation, which held that living organisms such as maggots formed directly from decaying matter. It was a compelling idea for anyone who had watched meat rot, but Louis Pasteur, inventor of pasteurization, disproved it in the 1860s by showing that microbes could only grow from preexisting microbes .

How to use it in a sentence: All life on Earth may owe itself to an incident of abiogenesis more than 3.7 billion years ago .

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word ?