Stress can make you sick, and scientists are learning why

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An oral vaccine could curb rabies infections among vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) in Central and South America. The vaccine is applied to the bats’ fur in a thick gel. The bats can then spread the vaccine among themselves through mutual grooming — licking one another’s fur to keep clean. In a small test, researchers applied the gel to 24 bats in a colony of 117. After seven days, they found that the vaccine had been spread among 88% of the colony. Vaccinating the bats against rabies could stop them from spreading the virus to farm animals without resorting to harmful measures such as poisons.

Science | 5 min read

Reference: bioRxiv preprint (not peer reviewed)

Six US medical organizations and an anonymous pregnant physician have filed a lawsuit against US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr and the Department of Health and Human Services over recent decisions to remove COVID-19 vaccines from a list of those recommended to children and pregnant people. The plaintiffs assert that the decision that limits access to these vaccines — made by Kennedy without the input of independent experts — is harmful to the public and unscientific. “The secretary’s intentions are clear,” says Richard H. Hughes IV, a lawyer leading the effort. “He aims to destroy vaccines.”

The New York Times | 4 min read

Hotter, faster, stronger

The “unprecedented frequency of heatwaves across multiple regions in 2024 underscores an accelerating pattern of extreme temperature events, particularly affecting tropical and subtropical regions”, found an analysis published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment in April. (10 min read)

See a larger version of this graphic here (Roshan Jha et al./Nature Reviews Earth & Environment)

The worst heatwaves are being supercharged by climate change, posing a threat to ecosystems and to people’s health and livelihoods. Scientists used predictive models and looked at historical data to discover that the most extreme heat waves are getting longer, and their duration increases faster with each degree of warming. In equatorial Africa, for instance, heatwaves that are longer than 35 days are projected to be more than 60 times more common in the near future (2020–2044) than in the recent past (1990–2014).

Nature Research Highlight | 2 min read

Reference: Nature Geoscience paper

4 billion

The number of people — about 49% of the globalpopulation — who experienced at least 30 additional days of extreme heat between May 2024 and May 2025 because of climate change. (The Conversation | 5 min read)

Reference: Climate Change and the Escalation of Global Extreme Heat report

Millions of people across North America and Europe are sweltering under dual ‘heat domes’, in which a high-pressure system traps heat. Scientists have linked these — and other heatwaves, floods and wildfires across the globe — to climate-change-driven resonances in the jet stream. Climate scientist and co-author Michael Mann says the heat domes are part of a larger pattern associated with a “very wiggly jet stream where the ‘wiggles’ stay in place for days on end”, causing extreme weather to persist over one region for longer periods. Mann and his colleagues found that these stalled atmospheric events have increased in frequency from around one a year in the 1950s to three a year now.

Financial Times | 5 min read

Reference: PNAS paper

Notable quotable

“We must remind ourselves this is not normal. Climate change is standing before our eyes.”

Climate scientist Amanda Maycock says that the weather considered typical for summer is being changed forever because of the climate crisis. (Financial Times | 5 min read)

Features & opinion

When George Slavich’s father died suddenly, the clinical psychologist was well aware of how the stress could affect his health, but his health-care providers weren’t as interested. “The experience highlighted a paradox between what I know stress is doing to the brain and body, and how little attention it gets in clinical care,” says Slavich. He is among the researchers investigating how the body reacts to stress and how it contributes to deadly diseases.

Nature | 11 min read

In the 1960s, groups of children in some English-speaking countries learned a different alphabet to everyone else. The Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA), made up of more than 40 characters that each represented a distinct sound, was designed to be more phonetically intuitive than the standard one. The idea was to use the ITA to teach children to read quickly, and transition to teaching with the normal alphabet later. But the ITA was scrapped in the 1970s, leaving some children stuck only knowing an alphabet that was alien to the rest of the English-speaking world, with lifelong impacts on their literacy.

The Guardian | 11 min read

Today I’ve got the sniffles, and I’m pondering whether I’d let swarms of tiny robots clean up my sinuses. Such robots could offer safer, more targeted treatment than antibiotics or other drugs and be cleared out with a nice big blow into a tissue, say scientists.

While I dream of a team of mini-Roombas to brush my teeth, why not send me your feedback on this newsletter? Your e-mails are always welcome at [email protected].

Thanks for reading,

Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing

With contributions by Jacob Smith

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