Mind & body, in brief

Switching on a barely-felt buzz under the feet cut standing sway from about 438 to 266 square millimetres in the same test. [1]

The buzz was set at the edge of what each person could feel, measured individually, and ankle muscle activity did not change. The gain was in sensing, not in strength. [1]

The effect has a name: stochastic resonance. Random noise added to a weak signal lifts part of it over the cut-off that would otherwise silence it. [2]

It only works where there is a hard cut-off. In a system without one, added noise just masks the signal. [2]

Too little noise does nothing. Too much drowns the signal. The benefit peaks in the middle, in an upside-down U. [10][12]

The peak sits in a different place for each person, so trials now set the level individually before testing anything. [3][12]

A 2026 review of noise delivered behind the ears settled on 100 to 400 millionths of an amp, in bursts of 10 to 30 seconds. It also says the effect is not universal. Where the inner-ear balance sense was lost on both sides, it helped only those with some function left. [3]

Where it fails, it fails badly. In 14 people with Parkinson's, noise during disturbed walking made body sway worse on the more affected side. [4]

It is not dependable in children either. In eye-movement tasks with children who had varying ADHD symptoms, white noise helped some and did nothing for others. The authors say this challenges the idea that it is reliably useful. [9]

Other senses show it too. Random electrical noise over the visual part of the brain improved reading at the edge of vision, where a steady current did not. Random visual static fed through augmented-reality glasses has been reported to improve sight in age-related macular degeneration. [13][11]

The brain appears to run the trick on itself. After hearing loss it turns up its own internal noise to keep faint sounds detectable, and tinnitus may be the bill for that repair. [6]

The boldest recent claim, that tuned noise could reset immune tolerance, is a hypothesis paper whose authors say direct evidence is lacking. [2]

Why it matters. The next real test is whether tuned noise beats the sound therapies and insoles already on sale, a comparison the tinnitus review says has never been run. [6]

A Yale and Mount Sinai team tested antibodies from 147 people, reporting in Cell on 28 May 2026. [18] Blood from long COVID patients reacted to human nervous-system tissue more often than blood from healthy people. [18]

Why it matters. It offers a mechanism rather than a symptom list, and in children a one-year study found fatigue in about half of both girls and boys with the condition. [31]

A multi-centre study scanned 140 adults who had lasting neurological symptoms after COVID, at 6 and 12 months. White-matter spots were no more common than in healthy controls, and changes over time were rare. [32]

Why it matters. Real symptoms with a clean scan is the hardest kind of illness to have taken seriously.

A Stanford and Arc Institute team reported in Nature on 11 March 2026 that old mice did worse on memory tasks. [19] Swapping young mice onto older gut microbes changed how they performed. [19]

Why it matters. Mice are not people, but it names a route from gut to memory that reviews now trace into Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis. [27]

Nearly 300 older adults were followed up to 14 years. Among those starting with high beta-amyloid, low to moderate activity halved the rate of decline, levelling off around 5,000 to 7,500 steps a day. [20]

Why it matters. The protection tracked slower tau build-up, not the amyloid that most current drugs are aimed at. [20]

Blood from 56 people with ME/CFS and 52 matched controls was tested before and after exercise. The ME/CFS samples carried more inflammatory molecules, signs of oxidative damage and impaired energy production. [21]

Why it matters. It joins chronic pain, where a review argues that worn-out and aged immune cells are the piece nobody has examined. [28]

In young women in Saudi Arabia, insomnia symptoms went with fewer natural killer cells overall, and anxiety symptoms with fewer of the kind that circulate in the blood. [22]

Why it matters. Stress reaches further than mood: another review traces long stress into acne, psoriasis and eczema. [29]

A 2026 review argues that day-to-day swings in how long and when people sleep affect heart and metabolic risk in their own right, separately from total hours. [23] A 2025 review sets out how sleep reaches those systems at all: glucose handling, blood pressure, appetite hormones and inflammation. [24]

Why it matters. Nearly all sleep guidance is built around a nightly number, which is blind to the swing.

A pilot in 38 cancer survivors with nerve damage from chemotherapy found low-intensity vibration improved reported sensory symptoms and lower-body function against usual care. A separate open-label pilot ran a 40 Hz buzz with 20 long COVID patients. [14][30]

Why it matters. Both are small and the second had no dummy device, so this is promise rather than proof.

A review finds non-sugar sweeteners shift gut bacteria, cut short-chain fatty acid production and blunt fullness signals, while separating sweet taste from calories in the brain's reward pathways. [26]

Why it matters. The whole premise of a sugar substitute was that the body would not notice it.