Science

Meet the new potential dementia vaccine that’s been on the shelf for decades

A 20% reduction in a serious mental health risk as a bonus for an already powerful drug? Yes please!

We’re rightfully wary of the long parade of side effects they rattle off at the end of pharma ads*, but scientists keep uncovering unexpected upsides too. Ozempic started as a diabetes drug before becoming a weight loss phenomenon. Ketamine, once known mostly as an anesthetic, is now a breakthrough depression treatment. And now the shingles vaccine, the wildly successful treatment for painful late-life rashes, has been shown to do something no one expected at all.

In this story by Mark Wales, we learn that researchers studying the shingles shot stumbled onto a startling pattern. People who received the vaccine had a 20 percent lower risk of developing dementia. Even more intriguing, folks who already had cognitive impairment saw the disease slow down after vaccination.

The implications go way beyond shingles. If the early data holds, this everyday pharmacy staple might be doing something extraordinary inside the brain. The full story is a twisty one and absolutely worth the jump.

* - Did you know: advertising pharmaceuticals on TV is an American thing that visitors from other countries often find utterly confounding.

Yesterday’s Results

When should we start the holiday celebrations? If the other people in my life had their way, it’d be in late September. GOOD readers

• Put the last Thanksgiving dish away, then reach for the holly (29.2%)

• Let's at least wait until December, shall we? (40.4%)

• Somewhere around the 10th? 15th maybe? (18.0%)

• I don't partake. Let others run up their electricity bills with all those lights. (12.4%)

GOOD reader JSJudySimmons summed it up succinctly for the largest cohort: “Gotta slow it downnnnn.”

Science

Two pro athletes, one glitch in the matrix

I feel like Maury. Let’s go to the DNA test!

Brady Feigl is 6’4”, red-haired, red-bearded, wears thick glasses, and plays pro-level baseball. And so is Brady Feigl. But Brady Feigl had Tommy John surgery performed by Dr. James Andrews, and… let me check my notes… Brady Feigl did, too. Huh?

So what’s going on? Clones? Long-lost twins? As Adam Albright Hanna reports, scientists say the DNA shows they’re just two guys with vaguely similar Germanic roots. (I personally think it was a Trek-style transporter accident.)

But that’s not where the coincidences end...

Science

The “Wow!” signal mystery might finally be solved

From Contact to 2010, the Wow signal has permeated sci-fi for decades.

On August 15, 1977, astronomer Jerry Ehman saw something he couldn’t unsee: a 72-second radio signal so intense and specific, he circled it in red pen and wrote one word beside it: “Wow!”

For decades, the “Wow! Signal” stood as the best candidate for proof of extraterrestrial life. It never repeated. It matched the hydrogen line (the cosmic version of an interstellar “hello”). And it has lived rent-free in the minds of alien-curious humans ever since.

Now, a new study led by Abel Méndez suggests it wasn’t aliens tapping on our cosmic window but a hypermagnetized neutron star, aka a magnetar, flaring through a hydrogen cloud. Basically, a natural maser (that’s like a microwave laser) that just happened to scream across the sky at exactly the right moment.

It's not confirmed yet, but it’s the first theory that checks all the weird little boxes. Méndez’s team just found more similar signals while scanning red dwarfs. Which means space might be weirder, and louder, than we thought.

On December 9, 1965, a small production team lined up to kick the football and, against expectations, knocked it out of the park. Execs hadn’t seen it coming. What kind of 1960s Christmas special (brought to you by the Coca-Cola Company) uses child voice actors, skips the laugh track, embraces a melancholy tone, quotes directly from the Bible, and sets it all to a laid-back Vince Guaraldi jazz ensemble? A hit, apparently. Exactly 60 years ago today, A Charlie Brown Christmas premiered, adding an indelible set of songs and images to the season’s canon.

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💬 From the group text…

Greetings, 20th-century people! What did the future-looking folk of the 80s think life today would be like? VR headsets and smart watches are both here, but so is a portable briefcase printer. Can’t win ‘em all.

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