Dogs have read our faces for 14,000 years, and light turns out to feed us

From there dogs diverged wildly to match the people around them: compact, heavily coated sled dogs in the Arctic, leaner hunters near the equator, and on the Tibetan Plateau, dogs that evolved some of the same genetic fixes for thin air that Tibetan people did. Meanwhile, a University of Vienna team put eight dogs, mostly border collies, into an fMRI scanner and showed them a stream of human faces 168. Their temporal cortex and caudate nucleus, the reward center, lit up specifically for happy expressions, and earlier work from the same lab found dogs' brains registering anger, sadness, and fear as genuinely distinct signals, not just "not happy."

Using causal inference modeling to untangle two things that usually move together, they found social isolation, the objective fact of living alone, having no partner, skipping community groups, damages cognition on its own, whether or not the person actually feels lonely.

That's the entry point to what neuroscientist Glen Jeffery at University College London and former astrophysicist Bob Fosbury have been documenting: red and infrared light, the long wavelengths in sunlight, feed mitochondria and help power metabolism in animals and fungi, not just plants. The catch is that two energy-saving shifts in the early 2000s, LED bulbs and infrared-filtering window glass, stripped about 95 percent of that spectrum out of the indoor light most people now spend up to 90 percent of their lives under. "Suddenly, without warning, boom, the long wavelengths go," Jeffery said 33.

Fecal samples testing for stress hormones came back within the normal range for fully wild elephants, and the animals behaved "very similarly" to their wild neighbors despite decades behind fences. The group represents more than half of every rewilded elephant in South Africa. "Seeing them respond to their environment and function much like wild elephants was truly awe-inspiring," said co-author Tenisha Roos 218.

Researchers Eric Hoffman and Raju Nagaraju at Binghamton University tested their drug Vamorolone, already FDA-approved for DMD, in 20 boys between ages 2 and not-yet-4 who had never had steroids before, giving them 2 or 6 milligrams per kilogram daily for 12 weeks. "We were surprised at the rapid improvement of gross motor skills," Hoffman said 219. Most of the boys have since continued treatment for roughly two years through an expanded-access program.

So Muso trained community health workers from the same neighborhoods they serve to show up at a sick patient's door within 24 hours, at no cost, and paired that with rehabilitating local clinics for the cases that need more than a house call. The result in Mali: infant mortality dropped more than 90 percent, and governments across the region are now funding and scaling the model themselves, reaching over 12 million people and growing 259.

The protective effect vanished for drivers on fixed routes, like bus drivers and pilots, pointing researchers toward continuous, real-time navigation itself as the active ingredient, not driving in general. It echoes a landmark 2000 study of London cabbies, who must memorize more than 25,000 streets within six miles of Charing Cross, a test called simply "The Knowledge," and who were later found to have measurably more gray matter in the hippocampus, one of the first regions Alzheimer's attacks 270.