Scientists may have accidentally discovered a dementia prevention tool that's been available for years.

A shingles vaccine — originally designed to prevent that painful rash you might get from a dormant childhood virus — appears to cut dementia risk by 20%. And in people already diagnosed with dementia, it seems to slow the disease's progression.

The discovery came from a quirk in Welsh health policy. In 2013, Wales offered the vaccine only to people who were exactly 79 — anyone who had already turned 80 was ineligible. This created a near-perfect natural experiment: two groups of people, virtually identical except for a few weeks of age difference, one vaccinated and one not.

When Stanford Medicine researchers tracked these groups for nine years, the results were striking. Among those vaccinated, dementia diagnoses dropped significantly. Even more surprising: people who already had dementia and got the vaccine were far less likely to die from it.

The effect was strongest in women. Whether this comes from stronger immune responses or something else entirely remains unclear. Scientists don't yet know if the vaccine works by suppressing the virus itself or by generally boosting the immune system.

Would you consider getting the shingles vaccine earlier if these findings hold up in clinical trials? Does it change how you think about the connection between viruses and brain health?

For more details, see the full article from Stanford Medicine: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/03/shingles-vaccination-dementia.html

#dementia #vaccines #neuroscience #aging #medicine #science

This is Guizhou Province, China — mountains completely covered with solar panels.

The scale is so massive that drones don’t have enough battery to capture the entire mountain range in a single flight. Just endless ridges of photovoltaics stretching to the horizon.

By turning rugged, hard-to-use terrain into energy infrastructure, China is effectively farming millions of kilowatt-hours every month.

Guizhou has become a symbol of China’s renewable strategy:
• use land with low alternative economic value
• build at industrial scale, not pilot projects
• integrate renewables directly into national energy planning

While others debate whether such transitions are realistic, China simply builds them.

The greenest country?
At the very least — the most scalable one.

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How inflation is rising in the U.S. dollar, the euro, and the Swiss franc.
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🧠🦠 Your gut may be shaping your mind more than you think

A new peer-reviewed study adds to the growing evidence that the gut microbiome plays a direct role in brain function, behavior, and mental health — far beyond digestion.

Researchers show that changes in gut bacteria can influence:
• 🧩 cognitive performance
• 😌 stress and anxiety levels
• 🧠 neuroinflammation and brain signaling
• 🔄 the gut–brain communication loop via immune and neural pathways

What’s especially striking is that the effects are bidirectional:
your mental state alters the microbiome, and the microbiome, in turn, alters your mental state.

This reinforces a major shift in neuroscience and medicine:

The brain is not an isolated organ — it’s deeply integrated with the immune system, metabolism, and trillions of microbes living inside us.

Implications range from mental health treatments to personalized nutrition, probiotics, and even preventive psychiatry.

📄 Source (open access):
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2025.2599562

NASA has released a high-resolution video of the surface of Mars, created from images captured by the HiRISE camera aboard a spacecraft.

The footage stitches together ultra-detailed orbital photos, revealing Mars’ terrain with stunning clarity — from ancient channels to rugged geological formations.

This stunning 9-gigapixel image of the Milky Way contains 84 million stars.

In 2025, the United States carried out more than 500 bombings around the world. This doesn’t include the hundreds of bombs dropped by Israel. America launched strikes in Asia, Africa, and South America. The Nobel Peace Prize is still waiting for its recipient.
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