An mRNA flu shot finally wins approval, and practice rewires the brain

The vaccine teaches cells to build hemagglutinin, the protein flu viruses use to break into cells, so the immune system learns to recognize it before an infection ever starts 4. The approval closes a strange loop: it comes exactly one year after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. canceled 22 mRNA vaccine projects worth about $500 million, calling the technology too risky, five weeks after Moderna's own trial data had already shown the opposite 63. In February, FDA official Vinay Prasad refused to even review the file; a week later, after Moderna pushed back, the agency reversed course, and Prasad left the agency in April 141.

Her team suction-cupped tags carrying accelerometers and ECG sensors onto five blue whales and four humpbacks in Monterey Bay, the Channel Islands, and the Antarctic Peninsula, work published in PNAS. Right after a lunge at prey, heart rates jumped to about 21.9 beats per minute in blue whales and 28.2 in humpbacks, then eased back down slowly between lunges 43. Getting a usable heartbeat signal at all required tags placed close enough to a whale's blubber-buried heart to catch a faint electrical trace, something that took years of engineering to get right.

His method for winning over skeptical fishermen was simple: he brought along fishermen from Gökova who'd already seen their own catches grow after that bay's protections went in seven years earlier. Between 2019 and 2023, the project created or expanded 18 no-fishing zones across 310 miles of coastline, tripling the total protected seascape 200. Kızılkaya won the 2023 Goldman Environmental Prize for the work.

Microbiome scientist Jens Walter of University College Cork traces a direct line from that shift to rising chronic disease: "we disrupt our microbiome and chronic diseases go up." Researchers have moved past the old soluble-versus-insoluble split to classify fiber by how it behaves in the body, its bulking capacity, how gut microbes ferment it, how much it thickens into a gel, and a growing body of evidence ties well-fed gut microbes to lower rates of inflammatory bowel disease, colorectal cancer, and diabetes 1.

What they found were two distinct processes running on two different clocks: a temporary swelling of cell bodies across several brain regions, a kind of housekeeping response to intense activity that fully reversed by 24 hours, and a separate, lasting increase in neurite density confined to just two regions, the precuneus and posterior parietal cortex, that held steady and tracked with how much each person had actually improved 218. Standard brain-imaging methods would have blurred both signals into one and missed the distinction entirely.

Twenty countries have banned production alone, but most still allow imports, which is exactly the loophole France was counting on: a new EU trade deal with Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay had just taken effect in January 2026, and French diplomats reportedly lobbied hard to stop the ban before lawmakers passed it anyway 191. Animal Equality's president, Sharon Núñez, called it "a historic moment," pointing to more than 310,000 signatures her organization gathered pushing for the vote.

Her team recruited 130 single university students, average age 22.7, who first rated how much they believed being unpartnered offered "growth potential," then logged their life satisfaction and daily activities for two weeks. Students who believed singlehood held real growth potential engaged in more novel activities day to day, and on the days they tried something new, they reported higher life satisfaction, greater fear reduction around being single, and stronger feelings of autonomy and connection 80. Notably, that growth showed up through friends, family, and solo pursuits, not just romance.