A shingles vaccine may protect the brain, and ancient pines keep history

Comparing those who received the newer recombinant shingles vaccine, sold as Shingrix, against those who didn't, the team found a lower rate of dementia diagnosis over a four-year period, enough that they estimate the shot could prevent roughly one in every 17 cases [196]. It builds on an older, discontinued shingles vaccine that showed the same signal, and on the theory that shingles itself inflames the brain and raises stroke risk, so muting the virus might mute that damage too.

Paul Krusic had spotted the trees years earlier in an old dissertation photograph and recognized the telltale shape of real age: an untapered trunk, a flattened crown, heavy exposed roots. On a barren, rocky ridge where almost nothing else survives, insects, fire, and people rarely reach the pines, so some specimens simply keep living. The team drove corers into living trunks and cut cross-sections from centuries-dead relic logs scattered across the slope, hoping the wood held a record stretching back over a thousand years [528].

Researchers at UC San Diego, led by Michael Corley, then measured several "epigenetic clocks," tools that read chemical tags on DNA to estimate how fast someone's cells are actually aging. The semaglutide group aged more slowly across clocks tied to inflammation and the health of the blood, brain, heart, kidneys, liver, and metabolism, including a 9% slower pace of biological aging on one widely used clock called DunedinPACE [6].

One fragment, a foot bone riddled with the porous texture of actively growing blood vessels, turned out to belong to the smallest T. rex ever documented, an animal that would have fit in your arms like a cat [128]. The findings, published in the journal Biology, also suggest tyrannosaur nests weren't solitary; young hatched by the dozen.

Singh's team engineered T cells against GPNMB and watched them destroy glioblastoma, the lethal brain cancer, in patient tissue samples and shrink tumors in mice. The second team carried the same idea into an early trial: one participant's disease stabilized for three months after a single infusion, with no serious side effects [370].

Their research found the series, which follows a gay teenager named Charlie and a bisexual jock named Nick falling for each other without the trauma so often written into queer stories, became a genuine source of healing and community for fans well outside its teenage target audience, ahead of its finale airing July 17 [264].

She's part of a wave of women, disabled players, and people from minority backgrounds now filling grassroots football clubs across the UK, groups that were priced out of stadiums or shut out of the sport for generations [475].