Psilocybin puts veterans' PTSD into remission, and farm dust names its magic germs

The answer was yes. People who did 75 minutes of brisk interval walking once a week lost comparable body fat, trimmed their waistlines by a similar amount, and improved their cardiovascular fitness about as much as the group walking three times a week 2. The trial, published in Nature Communications, ran from September 2021 to September 2024.

Published July 31 in the Cell Press journal Cell Press Blue, the analysis found that lower protein intake raises a hormone called FGF21, which boosts energy expenditure and improves blood sugar control, while easing the signaling from amino acids like methionine, isoleucine, and valine that drives inflammation and metabolic wear when nobody's using the extra protein to build muscle. Human trials found people who cut protein lost fat and improved fasting glucose without cutting overall calories. "It's absolutely crystal clear that there are benefits of protein to muscle growth and exercise response of active individuals," says lead author Dudley Lamming of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, "but because most people are relatively sedentary, many people are likely consuming more protein than they actually need" 27.

The 11-week Ohio State University protocol paired 14 to 16 hours of preparation and integration psychotherapy with two psilocybin sessions, 15 milligrams and then 25 milligrams, and produced an average 27.5-point drop in clinician-rated symptom severity, no serious adverse events, and no rise in suicidal thinking. "For a population with severe treatment-resistant PTSD, these results are striking," said lead author Stacey Armstrong 33. Meanwhile, a separate UCSF study of 25 healthy adults used brain scans to explain why a single high dose of psilocybin keeps working for weeks: activity in circuits linking the frontal lobes to deeper reward and motivation structures shifted from rigid top-down control toward more flexible, bottom-up processing, a change still visible a full month later 46.

Now a team led by epidemiologist Markus Ege at Helmholtz Munich has pinned it down to species level 21. Analyzing dust from the mattresses of 1,018 rural South German schoolchildren and air samples from the cow sheds of 47 of their farms, the researchers identified nine bacteria species, including Romboutsia timonensis and Glutamicibacter arilaitensis, that together account for two-thirds of the entire protective effect against asthma and half the effect against hay fever and eczema. These microbes, which come from cow guts and end up airborne in barns, made up just 6 percent of the microbes in mattress dust generally, but a full 25 percent in cow shed air. "With our new study, we can make a much stronger case," Ege says, "because we can identify the individual links in the proposed causal chain" 21.

For older adults who didn't already exercise regularly, showing up to these low-key, resident-led groups cut their risk of developing cognitive disability by roughly 50 percent compared to non-participants. For people who were already exercising on their own, the gatherings added no extra measurable protection, suggesting the groups work by giving sedentary, isolated seniors something exercise-adjacent to opt into, not by adding to what active people were already getting 25.

When the site was slated for housing in 2015, wealthy neighbors fought it for a decade, a fight so bitter that Las Vegas was eventually forced to pay a developer $286 million last year, more than the city's entire annual culture and recreation budget, for illegally blocking the permits 71. Eleven years after the fight started, construction has finally begun, and the site is on track to become the largest affordable housing complex in Nevada's history. Nevada needs 120,000 more affordable homes and is short on land, since roughly 85 percent of the state is federally owned; abandoned golf courses, already wired into city infrastructure, turn out to be some of the best-positioned parcels left 71.

As of July 16, 2026, that figure is 156.7 million of 193.6 million rural households, more than four in five 136. That's 124 million additional households gaining running water in the span of six years, through a partnership between the central government and India's states, sustained by field teams sent to slower-moving regions and a funding boost after COVID-era supply disruptions. A 2022 independent assessment found the connections are actually functioning, not just installed on paper: 86 percent of connected households had working taps, and among those, 85 percent got adequate water, 80 percent on a regular schedule, and 87 percent met quality standards 136.

Then they pointed it at older, undiscovered lineages. Every person alive today, the study published in Science found, carries DNA, up to 1 percent of the genome, from a "ghost ancestor" that interbred with Homo sapiens before the major migration out of Africa more than 50,000 years ago, likely the species Homo heidelbergensis. People from Oceania carry something even stranger: a "super-archaic" contribution from a lineage that split off more than 1.8 million years ago, probably Homo erectus, whose DNA appears to have entered Denisovans first and then passed into us through them 148. "We often think of human evolution as a branching tree," said co-author Priya Moorjani of UC Berkeley, "but new genomic data and analytical methods reveal a much more interconnected history, more like a complex web of populations connected by repeated episodes of migration and mixing" 148.