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

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.
@science

Scientists Discover a New Way to Slow Cellular Aging

Biologists at Cornell University have uncovered a surprising mechanism that may help cells resist aging.

The key players are extracellular vesicles — tiny membrane bubbles released by embryonic stem cells. When these vesicles interact with aging cells, they significantly slow down cellular senescence, a process triggered by oxidative stress that halts cell division and degrades tissue function.

In experiments with mouse embryonic stem cells, researchers found that these vesicles helped skin, muscle, and nerve cells stay active and functional for much longer than usual.

🔬 Why does it work?
The vesicles carry fibronectin, a protein on their surface that helps them bind to older cells. Once attached, they stimulate the production of enzymes that neutralize free radicals, reducing oxidative damage — one of the main drivers of aging.

🧪 What’s next?
The team plans to test the effect of these vesicles in living organisms to see how they influence aging at the whole-body level.

🚀 Why it matters
If confirmed, this discovery could pave the way for anti-aging therapies and treatments for age-related diseases — not by replacing cells, but by protecting them from aging in the first place.

@science

In short, here’s where things stand today:

On a distant planet, there is a massive superpower comfortably settled on one half of a continental landmass. It keeps glancing at the other half — a patchwork of semi-vassal micro-states, always rushing around, arguing about whom to serve, yet sitting atop sacred deposits of vibrium, the fuel that powers the entire cosmic economy.
Naturally, such chaos simply must be “put in order,” right? Preferably — in its own kind of order.

On the other side of the world lives another great power, and beside it — the fractured shard of a once-mighty empire. A strange shard: wounded, supposedly humbled, expected to quietly repent and be grateful for whatever scraps it’s given…
Yet instead of embracing eternal pacifism, it occasionally smacks some overly radicalized neighbors who have clearly lost contact with reality.

This, of course, horrifies the enlightened cluster of “cosmo-partners,” sincerely convinced that true Neo-Cosmic Values™ mean you get to lecture everyone else on how to live… while staying responsible for absolutely nothing.
The shard disrupts their cosmic harmony: it talks back, survives, grows stronger, and worst of all — refuses to hand over everything it produces for free.
How dare it?

So the first superpower begins crafting the perfect master plan:
— weaken the shard;
— unleash obedient vassals against it — but painfully, so they learn their lesson too;
— while everyone is busy with the fires, quietly seize control of the richest vibrium kingdoms;
— and under all that chaos, grab a giant vibrium cargo shuttle belonging to the shard itself.
Because when the world turns a blind eye to small acts of impunity, why not try bigger ones?

And while the planet passionately debates ideals, justice, and “fair rules,” somewhere behind the scenes everything is already counted, arranged, signed, and ready to go.
All that’s left is to explain to everyone that it’s all in the name of peace, progress, and of course… the right values™.

P.S. Meanwhile, scientists also figured out how to slow cellular aging.


P.P.S. This story is strictly relevant only to the inhabitants of the 3rd planet of Great Alpha in the Andromeda sector. Any resemblance to other star systems is, of course, purely coincidental…

The aerodynamics of the Red-billed Blue Magpie in flight.

Native to Asia, this bird is roughly the size of a magpie — but with an exceptionally long tail, one of the longest among all corvids.

That tail isn’t just for show. In flight, it acts as an aerodynamic stabilizer, improving balance, maneuverability, and control during sharp turns and gliding. Nature’s engineering at its finest.

#LookAtThis #Aerodynamics #BirdFlight #NatureEngineering #Science

🧠 AI didn’t just replace jobs.
It rehired people — to train their replacement.

As companies deploy AI to write, diagnose, analyze, and edit, many professionals have already lost their full-time roles.
What comes next is more subtle: the same people are brought back as short-term contractors — not to do the job, but to teach AI how to do it better.

Doctors review AI-generated medical notes.
Lawyers check legal reasoning written by models.
Editors polish AI texts they once wrote themselves.

This is no longer “human + AI collaboration.”
It’s a transition phase: human as quality control for a system designed to outgrow them.

The work pays — for now.
But its purpose is temporary by design.

AI still makes mistakes.
And those already displaced are the ones fixing them — accelerating the moment when even that role disappears.

GPT-5.2 Pro has solved its fourth Erdős problem.

Mathematician Terence Tao described the result as “perhaps the most unambiguous so far” in terms of the uniqueness of the approach.

The author of the solution (if we can even call a human that — given the problem was simply fed into ChatGPT 🤔) claims that no prior solutions existed at all.
That’s not entirely true: forum users point out draft proofs in the literature from 1936 and 1966. However, Tao emphasizes that GPT-5.2’s method is fundamentally different from those earlier attempts.

Now the obvious question remains:
how will GPT-5.2 surprise us once the Erdős problems finally run out? 😏

Forum discussion:
www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread/281?order=oldest

@science

Last night’s strong geomagnetic storm painted the sky with an unusually rare red aurora — and from the International Space Station it looked like the crew was literally flying through the glowing curtain, Russian cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov said.

Why the red? Green auroras typically glow around ~100 km altitude, but red emissions come much higher (~300–400 km), where the atmosphere is thinner and it takes more energy to light it up — which is why this color is far less common.

#SpaceWeather #Aurora #ISS #SolarStorm

We all need humor sometimes

Mom says: “Since AI bots will kick office plankton out of offices, you should go to a farm and harvest crops — AI won’t be a problem there.” 🤝🌾

Meanwhile, a farm owner in China — who used to hire people to pick the harvest — is watching this:

Robots now pick fruit, navigate rows, detect ripeness, and work day/night.
So yeah… the “safe haven” plan might need a Plan B. 😅🤖

AI-projects

#humor #farms #robots

The recent AI boom, combined with long and quiet winter holidays, unexpectedly resulted in a short piece of speculative fiction.

It’s not about evil machines.
It’s about responsibility, optimization, and the moment when systems designed to assist humans quietly begin making decisions instead of them.

The text is available in EPUB and FB2 formats.

Feedback is simple:
👍 — if it resonates

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