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May 20, 2025—Giant hailstones, Murderbot's brain and the healing potential of sunlight. —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | Exposure to UV light, the highest-energy band of the electromagnetic spectrum reaching Earth's surface, calms an out-of-control immune system and might quell the symptoms of various autoimmune diseases, writes journalist and book author Rowan Jacobsen. Early evidence shows that "phototherapy" reduces the severity of multiple sclerosis symptoms and seems to hush an immune system's attack on the very-same body it usually defends from viruses, bacteria and other pathogens. The findings have launched a discipline called photoimmunology, which is investigating whether sunlight also can help to heal people with type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease and other autoimmune diseases. These conditions, along with Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease, are more common among people who have less exposure to sunlight. How it works: Starting in the 1980s, researchers thought that sunlight exposure protected us from cancer and several other diseases by producing Vitamin D in the skin, but it's not that simple. The search is on for a disease-inhibiting "golden molecule" among the various hormones, neurotransmitters and other vitamin D-like compounds produced when our skin is exposed to UV light. What the experts say: "You get this rebalancing. UV light calms inflammation in the skin. But it also then calms inflammation in the central nervous system. It'll calm inflammation in the pancreas and the gut. So I think it's not fully realized the potential it has to be a controller of body homeostasis," says Prue Hart, an immunologist at the Kids Research Institute Australia. | | The titular Murderbot character, made of cloned human tissue and robot hardware and featured in the TV show by the same name, is portrayed as having feelings and memories. So Scientific American mind and brain editor Allison Parshall looked into the real-world feasibility these days of a cyborg and how far the show strays from science in its depiction of "constructs," including one addicted to watching soap operas that it beams into its mind's eye. Many medical advances today rely on brain-computer interfaces, such as implanted electrodes that enable people with ALS to communicate. But experts do not foresee the invention of a bot-human construct anytime soon, because human brains and cyborg brains rely on entirely different strategies for processing information. How it works: For instance, to enable seeing a digital display in one's own head, such as a soap-opera episode, technologists would have to cram millions of electrodes into the brain to enable it to read a high-resolution image. That's not plausible in the near term. Human brains are abstraction machines that care little for details, says neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga. What the experts say: "The human brain doesn't want to remember. It wants to understand, which is very different," says Quiroga, who studies visual perception and memory at the University of Leicester in England. | | - Drawing on Hannah Arendt's insights into social isolation and mistrust, Oxford University research fellow Kim Samuel connects the inflammatory effects of loneliness felt by individuals with the inflammatory conditions in societies with "no shared objective facts and no potential collective action to solve shared challenges." | 5 min read
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