Research shows that living with friends may quietly be altering your gut bacteria. Research on a colony of tiny island birds in the Seychelles revealed they share more of their gut bacteria with the birds they spend the most time with. And the team say the same principle almost certainly applies to humans too. Dr Chuen Zhang Lee, from UEA’s School of Biological Sciences, said: “Translated into human terms, this means that cosy nights in, shared washing‑up duties, and even sitting close on the sofa may bring your microbiomes quietly closer together." The new research provides unusually clear evidence of how social closeness itself - not just shared environment - drives the exchange of gut bacteria.

Could mining Reddit with AI help spot drug side effects earlier? A new Penn study suggests it might. Using large language models to map patient posts to standardized medical terms, researchers analyzed more than 400,000 Reddit posts about GLP-1s and found both known side effects and possibly underrecognized symptoms, like menstrual changes. The team says the approach could eventually help generate early safety signals for other drugs and wellness trends discussed online.

An Osaka Metropolitan University researcher investigated how multimodal travel affects daily physical activity in Senboku New Town, Osaka. The study found that combining Demand-Responsive Transport (DRT) with fixed-route buses was associated with an increase of approximately 1,730 steps per day, more than double the increase seen with DRT alone.

From refusing to doff hats in court to resisting hat-snatching highway robbers, England’s relationship with hats goes far deeper than fashion, new research published in The Historical Journal shows.