AI-generated audio overview of this week's newsletter, with two virtual hosts.
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This week's stories all point inward at scientists rather than outward at science's critics. A Nature paper finds chronic viruses waking up after severe COVID in people whose immune systems were never suppressed. A cardiology press release credits a shingles vaccine with preventing death from every cause at once, which is the tell for a healthy-user effect, while a Welsh natural experiment quietly does the job properly. A gene-editing trial in Shanghai ends in a six-year-old's death that the resulting paper never mentions. And a research team decodes inner speech from motor cortex, discovers it can hear sentences nobody asked it to hear, and builds a mental password to lock itself out.
Plus the kidney's role in altitude sickness, the difference between finding something cute and seeing a face that isn't there, and what harvestmen get up to.