Daily cups of coffee and tea have been linked to slower brain ageing. Plus, a view of global hot and cold weather extremes and tips for commanding the conference stage.
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Ditch the decaff: only caffeinated coffee is linked to brain benefits.Credit: Matthew Horwood/Getty
Regular caffeine intake from coffee and tea might slow cognitive decline and reduce a person’s risk of dementia, a huge study suggests. Researchers used data from two health studies to track the caffeine-drinking habits of more than 130,000 people over four decades. They found that drinking 2–3 cups of coffee or 1–2 cups of tea a day was associated with the greatest reductions in rate of cognitive decline, a result that held true even in people with a genetic variant called APOE4, which is associated with Alzheimer’s disease. “However, because it uses observational, not experimental, evidence, the findings can only be considered suggestive,” says cardiometabolic medicine specialist Naveed Sattar.
Nature | 4 min read
Reference: JAMA paper
France has announced that its initiative to recruit foreign researchers will award funds to 46 scientists who are relocating to the country — 41 of them from the United States. Eight of these researchers worked at Columbia University, which last year saw hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of its research grants cut and frozen by the administration of US President Donald Trump. The high proportion of US scientists among those recruited by the programme shows that “enthusiasm and morale for doing science is low” in the United States, says Sharon Milgram, who used to lead training of early-career researchers at the US National Institutes of Health.
Nature | 6 min read
Infographic of the week
“January 2026 delivered a stark reminder that the climate system can sometimes simultaneously deliver very cold weather in one region, and extreme heat in another,” says Samantha Burgess of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). This view of surface temperatures in the middle troposphere (around 5.5 kilometres above sea level), as seen from over the North pole on 24 January, shows the Northern Hemisphere experiencing severe cold waves as a meandering polar jet stream spilled icy air into Europe and North America. Meanwhile, record-breaking heat provided fuel for extreme conditions, including wildfires and floods, in the Southern Hemisphere. (Euronews | 4 min read)
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