🧠 Your Mind Can Switch On Your Immune System — Literally

A recent immunology session reminded me of a striking study: participants in VR were shown faces of supposedly “infected” people — and their innate immune biomarkers actually increased.
In other words, both real pathogens and completely virtual ones triggered the same physiological immune response. No microbes needed.

Another paper impressed me even more: tumor growth in mice was suppressed simply through social interaction.
We all know loneliness is harmful, but the effect here was dramatic:
just one hour of daily social contact significantly reduced tumor growth and anxiety-like behavior.

This fits into a growing body of work on how the brain regulates the body — including immunity. If you want a solid overview, Cell has a great review by Ayelet “A.C.” Rolls, with a deep dive into immunoceiving (how the brain senses and modulates immune activity).

The bigger picture?
We’re moving toward a future where maintaining health won’t rely only on pharmaceuticals, but also on managing mental states.
Drugs are easier — you take a pill and don’t have to change yourself.
Mind-body interventions are harder — but potentially just as powerful.

I still hope medicine will more actively tap into the brain–body connection.

🔗 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02008-y

China just rolled out its own T-800. And no, this is not CGI.

🤖 Chinese company EngineAI (Zhòngqíng) has unveiled a full-size humanoid robot called T800 — the promo stresses: “All real footage – no CGI, no AI, no video acceleration.”

Key specs:
• Height: 173 cm
• 29 degrees of freedom (not counting the hands)
• Peak joint torque: up to 450 N·m

Capabilities:
• 360° surround vision system
• Active cooling for the leg joints (so it doesn’t overheat while walking/running)
• Battery life: ≈ 4–5 hours of operation on a single charge

Humanoids are rapidly moving from flashy concept videos to more practical platforms: with this level of torque, sensing and runtime, robots like T800 are getting closer to tasks in logistics, manufacturing, and hazardous environments — not just lab demos.

#robotics #AI #humanoid #China

🤖 When EngineAI’s T800 humanoid went viral, a lot of people were sure the video was just CGI.

So the CEO, Zhao Tongyang, literally stepped into the ring with his own robot — and let it kick him. 🦶

No VFX, no compositing, no AI post-processing — just a full-size humanoid, real-time control, and a CEO who’s very confident in his product. 📷

As humanoids get more powerful (high joint torque, fast reaction times, active cooling), trust and safety are becoming just as important as raw specs. EngineAI decided to demonstrate that trust the hard way.

#robotics #humanoid #AI #China

Imagine your liver biopsy being scored not by a panel of pathologists, but by an AI that regulators officially treat as a “lab tool” for drug trials. That just became real.

PathAI has announced that its AIM-MASH AI Assist system is the first AI-powered pathology tool ever qualified by the US FDA (and already by the European Medicines Agency) for use in clinical trials of MASH — a common, fatty liver disease that can progress to cirrhosis and cancer. Instead of three experts arguing over how bad the damage looks on a slide, the model helps a single pathologist assign consistent scores.

Why this matters: drug trials for liver disease live and die on tiny changes in biopsy scores. Human reads are slow, expensive and notoriously variable. An AI that gives the same answer every time for the same slide can make trials faster, cheaper and statistically cleaner — which may mean more liver drugs actually making it to market.

Important caveat: this AI is cleared only as a biomarker tool for trials, not for diagnosing individual patients. But if regulators are starting to trust models as part of the evidence pipeline, how long until similar systems sit inside routine hospital workflows?

Would you be comfortable knowing an AI scored your tissue sample in a drug trial? Should this kind of model stay in research, or gradually move into everyday diagnostics?

Full story from PathAI’s press release: https://www.pathai.com/news/pathais-aim-mash-ai-assist-becomes-first-ai-powered-pathology-tool-to-receive-fda-qualification-for-mash-clinical-trials

#AI #medicine #pathology #liverdisease #clinicaltrials #FDA #biotech

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.

@science

How inflation is rising in the U.S. dollar, the euro, and the Swiss franc.
@science

🧠🦠 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