Six months of high-intensity aerobic exercise preserves the dopamine-producing neurons in the brain, a small pilot study finds.
Category: health
Popular workout supplement may blunt heart benefits of exercise in women
A supplement widely promoted for athletic performance may interfere with some of the heart’s beneficial adaptations to exercise, according to new Dalhousie University research published in Scientific Reports.
While these supplements are often promoted to support exercise performance and cardiovascular function, researchers found the combination of sodium nitrate and running prevented several beneficial cardiac improvements normally associated with exercise in females.
Those benefits included changes linked to heart structure, ventricular function and calcium handling in heart cells, which helps regulate contraction and relaxation. The effects were much less pronounced in males, pointing to important sex differences that researchers say are too often overlooked in supplement research.
Coral study could help explain infertility and ovarian cancer by decoding cilia-driven fluid flows
A study by researchers at The University of Manchester, carried out alongside the Universities of Melbourne and Copenhagen, could hold the key to understanding the causes of long-term health problems, such as infertility and ovarian cancer.
The study, published in PRX Life, used a combination of high-resolution imaging, flow measurements, and mathematical modeling to examine fluid flows around corals that are driven by cilia—densely packed tiny hairs on the coral’s surface. The collective beating of the cilia contributes to the movement of fluid around the surface of the coral, regulating the animal’s immediate environment through the transport of particles such as oxygen.
The researchers found that heterogeneity in ciliary orientation —small variations in the direction individual cilia beat—can significantly boost transport efficiency. For substances that diffuse slowly through the fluid, this natural variability increased particle transport by more than 50% compared to perfectly aligned cilia. This contrasts with other biological systems, highlighting how coral cilia are uniquely adapted to their environment.
An astronaut’s mystery illness could change the way NASA plans future missions
A health scare prompted the first ever early return from the International Space Station for a medical reason. Does it change the plan for deep space missions?
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Wristwatch-like device enables assessment of health risks for astronauts on mission to the moon
Just a few hours before the Orion spacecraft crossed the sky en route to the moon on April 1, mechatronics engineer Rodrigo Trevisan Okamoto received confirmation he had been waiting for since the Artemis 2 mission was announced in 2023. The email from NASA stated that the crew of the first crewed mission to orbit the moon in half a century would carry a device developed by Okamoto and his team at Condor Instruments, a São Paulo-based startup.
“The NASA announcement was sudden and caught us by surprise. And it was only after the mission concluded that we learned the astronauts had been using the equipment in tests for the past two years,” Okamoto told Agência FAPESP.
The device, called an actigraph, is shaped like a wristwatch and incorporates accelerometers, as well as light and temperature sensors, to precisely map the user’s sleep and wake patterns over the course of days or weeks.
Childhood trauma predicts higher risk of combined mental and physical illness in later life
Researchers modeled the specific dosage of trauma to highlight an escalating relationship between the sheer volume of trauma and later health vulnerabilities. Small amounts of childhood adversity corresponded to relatively modest increases in health risks. However, once a person’s trauma score passed four distinct adverse experiences, the upward trajectory of their health risk accelerated rapidly.
The researchers also investigated the stepping stones connecting early trauma to later disease onset. Using a statistical technique called mediation analysis, they looked for intermediate health issues that acted as bridges over the span of a lifetime. They found that developing either a single physical illness or isolated depression in early adulthood often served as an indirect pathway to combined disease in older age.
For individuals with the highest amounts of early trauma, early-onset depression played a particularly strong bridging role. An initial diagnosis of depression frequently paved the way for additional physical conditions as time went on. These findings align with biological theories suggesting that severe childhood stress permanently disrupts the body’s immune regulation and stress hormone pathways.
AI-powered stretchable computing patch can run algorithms directly on the body
A new skin-like computing patch developed at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) can analyze health data using artificial intelligence in an unprecedented way. Unlike today’s wearable devices, it carries out its AI computations directly on the body, in mere milliseconds, without relying on a wireless connection.
While your current smartwatch may be able to track your heart rate or movements, it doesn’t analyze what it finds. The analysis happens elsewhere, after it shuttles data to an external server. In some situations—detecting ventricular fibrillation in the heart, for instance—that few-seconds lag to communicate with the server is too long.
The new device, designed and tested in collaboration with researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, was made possible by the development of manufacturing processes that allow organic electrochemical transistors to be printed onto flexible surfaces.