Environmental enrichment (EE), which involves a combination of voluntary exercise and social interaction has been known to improve poststroke functional recovery. However, its effect on chronic inflammation and white matter pathology remains elusive. Now, a new study reveals that EE improves sensorimotor recovery after stroke while weakening correlation of infarct size with chronic inflammation and myelin damage. It also identifies TREM2-positive microglia in white matter as a potential cellular signal associated with improved functional recovery.

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.

Thanks to supercomputing, the research was able to analyze the activity of 20,000 genes in more than one million cells with unprecedented resolution, revealing different aging dynamics between men and women, which will be key to achieving precision medicine.

This study highlights that many characteristics of immune system aging that were previously considered universal actually present specific dynamics according to biological sex.

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.