Algorithm changes amplify polarization as stress exposes biological tradeoffs

Today's r/science slate stitched together a compelling arc: how bodies weather stress, how planets and ecosystems process building blocks, and how minds navigate information and uncertainty. Across labs and comment threads, the community weighed evidence that nudges us to rethink aging, origins, and the levers that steer public opinion.

Bodies under pressure: aging, immunity, and memory

Readers gravitated to studies reframing stress and resilience, including research on coffee consumption tied to longer telomeres in people with severe mental illness and an experiment showing that a single acute stress can trigger hair follicle death and later autoimmune attacks. Together they underscore a fine line between helpful and harmful activation—where dose, timing, and context can flip biology from protection to damage.

"I had telogen effluvium and my hair stopped falling out after 6 months... But following any kind of stress the hair loss happened again."- u/PunyCocktus (72 points)

That tension reappeared in clinical frontiers: a large cohort analysis linking GLP-1 drugs to increased chronic cough risk prompted calls for mechanistic follow-up, while basic neuroscience mapped a thalamocortical gene cascade that stabilizes memories over time. The throughline is actionable nuance—side effects to monitor amid rapid adoption, and circuit-level timing that might one day be harnessed to fortify memory rather than fight it.

Planetary ingredients and environmental feedbacks

Beyond Earth's surface, the OSIRIS-REx cache spurred awe by revealing tryptophan in pristine samples from asteroid Bennu, expanding the catalog of amino acids riding through space. Back on the farm, researchers showed that ruminants don't simply pass plastics; microplastics interact with the gut microbiome and are partially broken down, hinting that animal digestion is a bioreactor reshaping what ultimately cycles into food systems.

"How then could complex amino acids, like tryptophan, develop in a 'dry' extraterrestrial environment?"- u/Demortus (668 points)

Earth history added another twist: new reconstructions argue the Canadian ice sheet, not Antarctica, drove late–ice age sea-level rise. From amino acids arriving on airless rocks to plastics reshaped in bovine rumens and ice masses rewiring oceans, the day's conversations spotlighted how origins and outcomes hinge on context—temperature, medium, and time—rather than simple binaries.

Algorithms, uncertainty, and the politics of attention

In the human arena, subtle design choices carried outsize effects. A field test suggested that small shifts in X's “for you” feed can accelerate polarization within a week, while a parallel line of research proposed that openness to uncertainty predicts less support for right‑wing populism. Together they frame a feedback loop: platforms amplify affect, and minds interpret the unknown as threat or possibility.

"Seems kind of like a circular syllogism... it makes sense that a rise in policies that produce rapid and unpredictable change would trigger a move towards conservatism."- u/slayer_of_idiots (91 points)

The day's least flashy but quietly relevant finding linked moral reasoning to communication norms, as a survey in Turkey reported that valuing loyalty, hierarchy, and purity aligns with more restrictive language beliefs. That matters because platform rules and discourse expectations coevolve; if feeds can steer sentiment, the moral frames we bring to words may set the bounds for what algorithms then amplify.

"Everyone needs to just get off of all social media. Reddit included."- u/IamMarsPluto (327 points)

Every subreddit has human stories worth sharing. - Jamie Sullivan