Exercise pumps up your muscles ' but it might also be pumping up your neurons. According to a study published today in Neuron1, repeated exercise sessions on a treadmill strengthen the wiring in a mouse's brain, making certain neurons quicker to activate. This 'rewiring' was essential for mice in the study to gradually improve their running endurance. The work reveals that the brain ' in mice and, presumably, in humans ' is actively involved in the development of endurance, the ability to get better at a physical activity with repeated practice, says Nicholas Betley, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and a co-author of the paper. 'You go for a run, and your lungs expand, your heart gets pumping better, your muscles break down and rebuild. All this great stuff happens, and the next time, it gets easier,' Betley says. 'I didn't expect that the brain was coordinating all of that.' They decided to focus on the ventromedial hypothalamus, a brain region that regulates appetite and blood sugar. The team then zeroed in on a group of neurons in that region that produce a protein called steroidogenic factor 1 (SF1), which is known to play a part in regulating metabolism2. A previous study3 found that the deletion of the gene that codes for SF1 impairs endurance in mice....

January is peak gym time ' the month when fitness seekers commit to New Year's resolutions. By February, however, those goals are often forgotten. That busting of best intentions begs the question: how much exercise do people really need, and what's the ideal way to get it' Recent research fortunately has some welcome advice for the time-stressed in 2026. Existing guidelines from most national and global health organizations call for at least 150'300 minutes of moderate physical activity each week, or 75'150 minutes of vigorous activity, for healthy adults, sometimes alongside activities to strengthen muscle and bone. Although those guidelines remain good goals to aim for, newer studies suggest that meaningful health benefits emerge with much less exercise. Researchers are getting a clearer understanding of the bare minimum amount of exercise needed for health gains thanks to data from wearable devices. These can provide more-reliable measurements than do self-reported data, which form much of the basis for current guidelines. By incorporating wearables into study design, researchers can collect accurate data on physical activity minute by minute, says I-Min Lee, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. 'And this is when we start to see that even low levels of physical activity are helpful,' she says....

Earlier this month, many attractive people filled a room in Lower Manhattan. They drank elaborate cocktails and gazed upon Instagram-y art installations and left with a gift bag that contained, among other things, earbuds studded with Swarovski crystals. The vibe was high-end, sophisticated, arty. The guest of honor was a color. Pantone throws a party like this one annually, in conjunction with the announcement of its 'Color of the Year.' For 2026, it's 'Cloud Dancer,' which, the company notes in a press release, 'serves as a symbol of calming influence in a frenetic society rediscovering the value of measured consideration and quiet reflection.' The color, the release continues, also helps peel 'away layers of outmoded thinking,' 'making room for innovation,' and, of course, reminds us that 'true strength lies not just in doing, but also in being.' (It's white.) The choice was controversial in the banal way that everything is controversial now. Some people noted, pointing to the news, that this was maybe not the year to publish a press release about how awesome whiteness is, and some other people found that argument to be a very serious symptom of the woke mind virus. People took to Instagram to call the choice tone-deaf, or to label it trolling, or, in a few cases, to announce that they were 'rejecting' Cloud Dancer, as though the color itself were an unsavory ideology and not a band of light visible to the human eye. Other people reacted to the reaction by suggesting that critics of Cloud Dancer were terminally offended hysterics looking for racism where absolutely none exists. Credulous news stories about the debate filled my feeds. I began to seriously worry that this frenetic society might not, in fact, rediscover the value of measured consideration and quiet reflection....

In recent years, power outages caused by extreme weather or substation attacks have exposed the vulnerability of the electric grid. For the nation's military bases, which are served by the grid, being ready for outages is a matter of national security. What better way to test readiness than to cut the power' Lincoln Laboratory is doing just that with its Energy Resilience Readiness Exercises (ERREs). During an exercise, a base is disconnected from the grid, testing the ability of backup power systems and service members to work through failure. Lasting up to 15 hours, each exercise mimics a real outage event with limited forewarning to the base population. 'No one thought that this kind of real-world test would be accepted. We've now done it at 33 installations, impacting over 800,000 people,' says Jean Sack '13, SM '15, who leads the program with Christopher Lashway and Annie Weathers in the laboratory's Energy Systems Group. According to a Department of Energy report, 70 percent of the nation's transmission lines are approaching end of life. This aging infrastructure, combined with increasing power demands and interdependencies, threatens cascading failures. In response, the Department of Defense (DoD) has sharpened its focus on energy resilience, or the ability to anticipate, withstand, and recover from outages. On a base, an outage could disrupt critical missions, open the door to physical or cyberattacks, and cut off water supplies....