Researchers just restored two hours of sleep a night in Alzheimer's brains

Happy Tuesday. Today's lead story is one of the most interesting pieces of Alzheimer's research I've read in years. Researchers at the University of Kentucky discovered that it's not the plaques themselves causing sleep loss in Alzheimer's patients, it's the brain's own immune cells overreacting to them. The implications are significant.

We also have a Wendy's franchise in Cape Cod that paid for a Brazilian immigrant's community college tuition — he just got into Yale with a full ride, Italian garbage workers who spent an entire day searching a trash truck for a woman's million-euro lottery ticket, and a rescue horse in California who learned to play guitar and is now featured on his owner's debut album.

Dive in.

—Stephanie S

For decades, scientists assumed sleep loss in Alzheimer's was caused by dying neurons or amyloid plaque buildup. A new University of Kentucky study upends both. The real culprit is the brain's own immune cells.

When plaques appear, immune cells called microglia launch a cascade of inflammation that keeps the brain awake. "It's as if the microglia are partying all night," said lead researcher Shannon Macauley. The stage they disrupt most is deep NREM sleep, the stage responsible for physical repair, memory consolidation, and washing out daily toxins.

The team temporarily removed 87% of the brain's immune cells in animal models using a drug called Pexidartinib. More than two hours of restorative sleep returned per night, without changing plaque levels at all. Macauley called it "paradigm shifting."

The team is now testing whether existing drugs like Metformin could calm microglia without removing them, potentially restoring sleep years before memory loss begins. Portable EEG systems could eventually allow home monitoring and early screening at local clinics. Read the full story.

Thalles DeSouza grew up near Rio de Janeiro, lost both parents, and lived on the streets. In 2016, after nearly being killed in a shootout inside his home, his mother moved the family to Massachusetts. He started working at a Wendy's in Cape Cod while in high school.

His bosses, Usama El-Sehrawey and the late Ernest Smily, noticed him and made an offer: they would pay his community college tuition. "College to me was something really far from my reach," DeSouza said. "I understood that someone was betting on me, so it was now my time to do my part." After three years at Cape Cod Community College, he applied to prestigious schools and was accepted to Yale with a full-ride scholarship.

He starts this fall, majoring in political science with a minor in human rights, hoping to become a lawyer. "Sometimes all it takes is one person who believes in you," he said. "I'm living proof of that." Read the full story.

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A woman in southern Italy won a million euros on a lottery ticket, then threw it away. The machine at her local tobacconist said the ticket was "non-payable," which can mean either no winnings or winnings too large for the shop to redeem. She assumed the former.

A family member noticed the winning numbers were her regular ones and called her immediately. She rushed back to the shop but the trash had already been collected. The local waste management company SANB received her frantic call, and administrator Roberto Nicola Toscano reconstructed the ticket's likely location and transferred the truck to a special station equipped with safety measures for workers.

After a full day of searching, the ticket was found "miraculously still in one piece." The woman's reaction was tearful. Toscano credited "professionalism, organization, and a great deal of luck" and the extra search costs were covered as a courtesy by the very grateful winner. Read the full story.

Mikayla Khramov is a Los Angeles singer-songwriter who started volunteering at a horse rescue in Moorpark, California in 2023. There she met Yupia, a 7-year-old Kentucky-bred horse who was stubborn, predisposed to biting, and didn't trust anyone. It took nine months to build a relationship.

One day Mikayla brought her guitar to the barn and started playing in the pasture. Yupia moved closer, then started lightly chomping on the strings. "Music was the tool to help build trust," she said. "He was almost like communicating or understanding me through the music." She later brought her harp, and Yupia nuzzled those strings too.

The collaborations rekindled Mikayla's love of music after years of treating it like a job. Her debut album, due in September, blends Portuguese musicians, folk, and electronic sounds — with Yupia's contributions woven through the tracks. "He has inspired me to love music again." Watch the Dodo video and read more.

🌻 Scotland: Balgone Estate in East Lothian has planted a million sunflowers across its fields, creating a sea of gold across the Scottish countryside that visitors are calling one of the most breathtaking sights of the summer. The photos are extraordinary.

🐟 USA: A creek restoration project in northern California has helped young coho and chinook salmon grow twice as fast and doubled their survival rate, by reintroducing floodplain habitat that gives juvenile fish shelter, food, and cooler water during their critical early months.

💪 USA: Jason Burns secretly trained for two months so he could appear alongside his girlfriend mid-race during her first half-marathon to make sure she didn't have to finish it alone, having never run more than a few miles in his life.

🪐 Global: Astronomers have confirmed two new "super-puff" planets less dense than cotton candy despite being the size of Jupiter, orbiting a star 1,110 light-years away in a rare synchronized gravitational dance, with densities the lead researcher described as "comparable to a nice blob of shaving foam." University of Oxford, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

💉 Global: Irish scientist Sir Adrian Hill and his team at Oxford University have received the European Inventor Award 2026 for the R21/Matrix-M malaria vaccine, which achieved 75-80% protection in trials, costs less than £2.50 per dose, and is now being rolled out across 20+ African countries.

On August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified, giving women the right to vote for the first time in American history. The culmination of four decades of organized effort, the amendment passed after suffragists spent 41 years lobbying Congress, building state-by-state coalitions, and surviving repeated defeats. Carrie Chapman Catt, who took over from Susan B. Anthony as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1900, refocused the movement's strategy on a single federal amendment, calling it "The Winning Plan." By 1915, NAWSA had 44 state chapters and more than two million members.

Tennessee became the decisive 36th state needed to ratify, enfranchising 26 million American women in a single stroke. On the day of ratification, Catt wrote: "We are no longer petitioners. We are not wards of the nation, but free and equal citizens." The amendment was the product of a movement that had outlasted most of its founders, including Anthony herself, who died in 1906 — 14 years before the vote she spent her life fighting for finally arrived.

Other notable August 18 events:

1963: James Meredith became the first Black person to graduate from the University of Mississippi, 63 years ago today, two years after his admission sparked riots requiring 31,000 National Guard members to restore order. He graduated with a degree in political science and went on to a long career of civil rights activism.

1969: Jimi Hendrix closed Woodstock with a psychedelic rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, 57 years ago today, performing at sunrise to the 200,000 people who had stayed through the rain, before seguing into Purple Haze.

1962: Ringo Starr made his debut with The Beatles, 64 years ago today, at a horticultural society dance in England, marking the first time John, Paul, George, and Ringo performed together in public.

1868: Helium was discovered for the first time during a solar eclipse, 158 years ago today, when Norman Lockyer identified an unknown yellow spectral line in sunlight that turned out to be the second most abundant element in the universe.

— Cesare Pavese

Every day brings amazing advances and uplifting moments that remind us just how wonderful the world can be. Here are five reasons why today is the best time ever to be alive:

🧬 Giving Sight to the Blind: Viral vectors carrying working copies of defective genes directly into the retina are now restoring usable vision in people born with inherited blindness conditions, with several therapies already approved and dozens more moving through clinical trials.

🔬 A Human Organ the Size of a Thumbnail: Microfluidic devices that mimic the function of human organs using living cells are replacing animal testing in early drug development, accurately predicting how new compounds will behave in the human body before any clinical trial begins.

🔭 Mapping the Milky Way in Unprecedented Detail: New radio telescope surveys are producing the most precise maps ever made of hydrogen gas distribution across our entire galaxy, revealing its spiral arms, star-forming regions, and dark matter distribution with a clarity that was unimaginable a decade ago.

🌱 Bringing Wildlife Back Into Cities: Cities from London to Singapore are converting abandoned lots, rooftops, and green corridor strips into connected wildlife habitat, creating urban ecosystems that support biodiversity while measurably improving air quality and residents' mental health.

🔦 Surgery at the Level of a Single Cell: Ultrashort laser pulses lasting quadrillionths of a second can now cut biological tissue with such extraordinary precision that surrounding cells experience no heat or shock, enabling surgical interventions at a cellular level that no conventional tool could achieve.

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