New heart-attack rules finally see women, and sleep science gets its due

Yanagisawa wasn't even looking for it. He was testing "orphan" receptors on brain cells, chemicals no one had matched to a trigger yet, when he and his team went fishing through rat brain tissue for the peptides that would switch them on. "We got very lucky, initially," he said. The fifth or sixth receptor they tried had a hit, and the trail led to two peptides made in the hypothalamus, the same region known for regulating hunger. A separate Lasker award for public service went to Michael J. Fox, honored for two decades of pushing Parkinson's research forward from the other side of the microscope, as a patient rather than a scientist 13. Each award carries a $250,000 honorarium, presented September 17 in New York.

The fix targets two blind spots. Three heart attack types that are up to ten times more common in women, coronary artery spasm, coronary embolism, and spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD, a tear in the artery wall that happens mostly during or right after pregnancy), had been ranked below the classic clot-caused kind, so women with them often got care that didn't match what was actually wrong. Those three now sit in the same top tier. And the standard blood test for heart attacks, which measures a protein called troponin, gets sex-specific thresholds, because the old single cutoff was tuned to catch men and quietly missed some women. Prof. Nicholas Mills of the University of Edinburgh, who led the task force, called the old approach "unintended systematic bias against women" 234.

It turns out that habit lines up with real physiology 113. Humming vibrates the vocal cords in a way that stimulates the vagus nerve, the body's longest nerve and the main highway of the "rest and digest" system that counters chronic stress. A study in Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback found humming significantly increased heart rate variability, the standard measure of how well that system is working, compared to normal breathing. Within minutes, researchers have measured a drop in heart rate and blood pressure, lower cortisol, and a fifteen-fold spike in nasal nitric oxide 113.

Two endocannabinoids told different stories. Anandamide, named for the Sanskrit word for bliss, climbed steadily from the 14-kilometer mark onward and stayed elevated even after 45 minutes of rest, tracking closely with the mood boost researchers call the runner's high. 2-AG behaved differently, rising later, near the finish, and staying high through recovery, suggesting it's more about managing inflammation and repair than mood.

He weeded them out and let natives back in. Over 26 years, he says the whole project cost about $100, just seeds put in the ground. The payoff: more than 1,380 moth species documented on the property, 62 breeding bird species, luna moths at record numbers, wood thrushes nesting in what used to be hayfields. Tallamy's nonprofit, Homegrown National Park, now has over 52,000 people registered on a nationwide map, tending more than 187,000 acres of native habitat in their own yards 221. His math: 80% of land east of the Mississippi is privately owned, 135 million of those acres are residential, and if just 10 to 20% of landowners planted natives, that alone would add up to habitat larger than ten Yellowstones.

The university's actual response was to fit its strays with reflective collars carrying a QR code linked to each dog's location history, vaccination record, and identity, essentially a digital ID a student or caretaker can scan before deciding how to treat the dog they've just met. On August 20, Mumbai's municipal corporation signed on with the Ridlan AI Foundation to roll the same system out across the entire city, building on a Supreme Court order from May 2026 that told municipalities every stray dog now needs to be sterilized, vaccinated, and recorded rather than managed ad hoc 232. The foundation's founder built the original version in 2020 after his own street dog went missing with no way for anyone to identify him.

Over 24 weeks, results showed up by week 8. By the trial's end, 44% of people on the lower dose and 55% on the higher dose had regrown enough hair to cover 80% of their scalp and eyebrows, and between 13% and 22.5% got their full head of hair back. Participants also scored better on quality of life measures, including depression, by the study's end.