As Canadians brace for “vitamin D winter”—months when the sun’s angle is too low to produce the vitamin in the skin—a McGill University study explains why vitamin D deficiency early in life is associated with a higher risk of autoimmune diseases.

During childhood, the thymus helps train immune cells to distinguish between the body’s own tissues and harmful invaders. A vitamin D deficiency at that stage of life causes the thymus to age more quickly, the researchers discovered.

The study is published in the journal Science Advances.

“An aging thymus leads to a ‘leaky’ immune system,” said lead author John White, a Professor in and Chair of M...

A team of AI researchers with Google’s DeepMind London group has found that certain large language models (LLMs) can serve as effective mediators between groups of people with differing viewpoints regarding a given topic. The work is published in the journal Science.

Over the past several decades, political divides have become common in many countries—most have been labeled as either liberal or conservative...

One of the brightest stars in the night sky, Betelgeuse, may not be on the brink of exploding as a supernova, according to a new study of the star’s brightening and dimming. Instead, recent research shows that the observed pulsing of the starlight is probably caused by an unseen companion star orbiting Betelgeuse.

Formally named Alpha Ori B, the “Betelbuddy” (as astrophysicist Jared Goldberg calls it) acts like a snowplow as it orbits Betelgeuse, pushing light-blocking dust out of the way and temporarily making Betelgeuse seem brighter. Goldberg and his colleagues present their simulations of this process in a paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. The findings are published on the arXiv preprint server.

“We ruled out e...

As people who research aging like to quip, the best thing you can do to increase how long you live is to pick good parents. After all, it has long been recognized that longer-lived people tend to have longer-lived parents and grandparents, suggesting that genetics influence longevity.

Complicating the picture, however, is that we know that the sum of your lifestyle, specifically diet and exercise, also significantly influences your health into older age and how long you live. What contribution lifestyle versus genetics makes is an open question that a recent study in Nature has shed new light on.

Scientists have long known that reducing calorie intake can make animals li...