Scientists may have accidentally discovered a dementia prevention tool that's been available for years.

A shingles vaccine — originally designed to prevent that painful rash you might get from a dormant childhood virus — appears to cut dementia risk by 20%. And in people already diagnosed with dementia, it seems to slow the disease's progression.

The discovery came from a quirk in Welsh health policy. In 2013, Wales offered the vaccine only to people who were exactly 79 — anyone who had already turned 80 was ineligible. This created a near-perfect natural experiment: two groups of people, virtually identical except for a few weeks of age difference, one vaccinated and one not.

When Stanford Medicine researchers tracked these groups for nine years, the results were striking. Among those vaccinated, dementia diagnoses dropped significantly. Even more surprising: people who already had dementia and got the vaccine were far less likely to die from it.

The effect was strongest in women. Whether this comes from stronger immune responses or something else entirely remains unclear. Scientists don't yet know if the vaccine works by suppressing the virus itself or by generally boosting the immune system.

Would you consider getting the shingles vaccine earlier if these findings hold up in clinical trials? Does it change how you think about the connection between viruses and brain health?

For more details, see the full article from Stanford Medicine: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/03/shingles-vaccination-dementia.html

#dementia #vaccines #neuroscience #aging #medicine #science

This is Guizhou Province, China — mountains completely covered with solar panels.

The scale is so massive that drones don’t have enough battery to capture the entire mountain range in a single flight. Just endless ridges of photovoltaics stretching to the horizon.

By turning rugged, hard-to-use terrain into energy infrastructure, China is effectively farming millions of kilowatt-hours every month.

Guizhou has become a symbol of China’s renewable strategy:
• use land with low alternative economic value
• build at industrial scale, not pilot projects
• integrate renewables directly into national energy planning

While others debate whether such transitions are realistic, China simply builds them.

The greenest country?
At the very least — the most scalable one.

@science

How inflation is rising in the U.S. dollar, the euro, and the Swiss franc.
@science

🧠🦠 Your gut may be shaping your mind more than you think

A new peer-reviewed study adds to the growing evidence that the gut microbiome plays a direct role in brain function, behavior, and mental health — far beyond digestion.

Researchers show that changes in gut bacteria can influence:
• 🧩 cognitive performance
• 😌 stress and anxiety levels
• 🧠 neuroinflammation and brain signaling
• 🔄 the gut–brain communication loop via immune and neural pathways

What’s especially striking is that the effects are bidirectional:
your mental state alters the microbiome, and the microbiome, in turn, alters your mental state.

This reinforces a major shift in neuroscience and medicine:

The brain is not an isolated organ — it’s deeply integrated with the immune system, metabolism, and trillions of microbes living inside us.

Implications range from mental health treatments to personalized nutrition, probiotics, and even preventive psychiatry.

📄 Source (open access):
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2025.2599562

NASA has released a high-resolution video of the surface of Mars, created from images captured by the HiRISE camera aboard a spacecraft.

The footage stitches together ultra-detailed orbital photos, revealing Mars’ terrain with stunning clarity — from ancient channels to rugged geological formations.

This stunning 9-gigapixel image of the Milky Way contains 84 million stars.

In 2025, the United States carried out more than 500 bombings around the world. This doesn’t include the hundreds of bombs dropped by Israel. America launched strikes in Asia, Africa, and South America. The Nobel Peace Prize is still waiting for its recipient.
@science

Scientists Discover a New Way to Slow Cellular Aging

Biologists at Cornell University have uncovered a surprising mechanism that may help cells resist aging.

The key players are extracellular vesicles — tiny membrane bubbles released by embryonic stem cells. When these vesicles interact with aging cells, they significantly slow down cellular senescence, a process triggered by oxidative stress that halts cell division and degrades tissue function.

In experiments with mouse embryonic stem cells, researchers found that these vesicles helped skin, muscle, and nerve cells stay active and functional for much longer than usual.

🔬 Why does it work?
The vesicles carry fibronectin, a protein on their surface that helps them bind to older cells. Once attached, they stimulate the production of enzymes that neutralize free radicals, reducing oxidative damage — one of the main drivers of aging.

🧪 What’s next?
The team plans to test the effect of these vesicles in living organisms to see how they influence aging at the whole-body level.

🚀 Why it matters
If confirmed, this discovery could pave the way for anti-aging therapies and treatments for age-related diseases — not by replacing cells, but by protecting them from aging in the first place.

@science

In short, here’s where things stand today:

On a distant planet, there is a massive superpower comfortably settled on one half of a continental landmass. It keeps glancing at the other half — a patchwork of semi-vassal micro-states, always rushing around, arguing about whom to serve, yet sitting atop sacred deposits of vibrium, the fuel that powers the entire cosmic economy.
Naturally, such chaos simply must be “put in order,” right? Preferably — in its own kind of order.

On the other side of the world lives another great power, and beside it — the fractured shard of a once-mighty empire. A strange shard: wounded, supposedly humbled, expected to quietly repent and be grateful for whatever scraps it’s given…
Yet instead of embracing eternal pacifism, it occasionally smacks some overly radicalized neighbors who have clearly lost contact with reality.

This, of course, horrifies the enlightened cluster of “cosmo-partners,” sincerely convinced that true Neo-Cosmic Values™ mean you get to lecture everyone else on how to live… while staying responsible for absolutely nothing.
The shard disrupts their cosmic harmony: it talks back, survives, grows stronger, and worst of all — refuses to hand over everything it produces for free.
How dare it?

So the first superpower begins crafting the perfect master plan:
— weaken the shard;
— unleash obedient vassals against it — but painfully, so they learn their lesson too;
— while everyone is busy with the fires, quietly seize control of the richest vibrium kingdoms;
— and under all that chaos, grab a giant vibrium cargo shuttle belonging to the shard itself.
Because when the world turns a blind eye to small acts of impunity, why not try bigger ones?

And while the planet passionately debates ideals, justice, and “fair rules,” somewhere behind the scenes everything is already counted, arranged, signed, and ready to go.
All that’s left is to explain to everyone that it’s all in the name of peace, progress, and of course… the right values™.

P.S. Meanwhile, scientists also figured out how to slow cellular aging.


P.P.S. This story is strictly relevant only to the inhabitants of the 3rd planet of Great Alpha in the Andromeda sector. Any resemblance to other star systems is, of course, purely coincidental…

The aerodynamics of the Red-billed Blue Magpie in flight.

Native to Asia, this bird is roughly the size of a magpie — but with an exceptionally long tail, one of the longest among all corvids.

That tail isn’t just for show. In flight, it acts as an aerodynamic stabilizer, improving balance, maneuverability, and control during sharp turns and gliding. Nature’s engineering at its finest.

#LookAtThis #Aerodynamics #BirdFlight #NatureEngineering #Science