Lund University

Older adults who remain active recover faster from hospitalization, surgery, and acute illnesses than their sedentary peers.

One of my favorite studies comes from Aging Cell, led by Abel Plaza-Florido, with collaborators across UC Irvine, Copenhagen University Hospital, and Lund University, published in 2025.

The researchers studied people aged 100 to 104, and they asked a simple question, does movement still matter that late in life? The answer was a resounding yes.

After just a brief bout of physical activity, centenarians showed a measurable drop in inflammatory proteins and the activation of protective immune and stress response pathways that were largely silent at rest.

You can be anxious and concerned and afraid because of what you know about it, um, because of what you hear about in the media, and those tend to be younger people who are more worried about how their future will be a- affected by climate change.

That fear of what's coming, even from a distance, is what a team at Lund University in Sweden set out to measure.

They pulled together 200 separate studies and found something striking.

More and more people, especially in wealthier Western countries, are developing not just anxiety about the warming climate, but something closer to a fear, even a dislike of nature itself.

Now, it turns out that we have, um, a lot of different ways we can show up in the world, of course.

And one of my, uh, great colleagues, a woman named, uh, Kim Nicholas at, uh, Lund University in Sweden, she's a professor there, um, at, at Lund in Sweden.

Uh, she used to be a student of mine years ago in her master's degree, but then she went and got her PhD at Stanford, is just wickedly smart, amazing person.

She created a kind of a guide for individual climate action that's really grounded in the research.

I mean, unless a kinetic impact or a massive gravitational disruption occurs, an icy body will happily orbit in the dark outer rim for billions of years.

And this brings us back to the Lund University team because they didn't stop at just analyzing the light shadows.

To find that gravitational engine, they ran highly complex n-body orbital simulations of the entire PDS 70 system.

Which takes a lot of computing power.

But if we pull back, the crucial question is: what does a 370 light year distant pinball game actually have to do with us?

It matters deeply because analyzing PDS 70 is functionally identical to looking into a mirror that reflects our own deep geological past.

past.Alexandra Stockwell Murphy, an astronomer at Lund University who collaborated on this research, highlighted this connection perfectly.

She pointed out that this exact transport process, massive gas giants slinging icy comets inward, is highly reminiscent of the dominant theories regarding our own early solar system.

Starting with fact number one, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that in many Indian languages, Lund University means penis university.

[laughs]

And does that make it popular?

[laughs]

In Sweden.

[laughs] And, uh, there was a moment where it sort of became a meme because the Facebook page that was the official Lund University Facebook page put out a statement saying, "Could everyone stop tagging their friends who are nothing to do with this university," because everyone was just doing it so they could go, "Look, it's penis university." Because in Hindi and a few other languages in India, that is the translation in the written word of it.

So I suppose actually the Lund Comedy Festival that we're here at right now-

He's Dieter Schwartz, Associate Professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Oxford Martin City Fellow at the Oxford Martin School, both at the University of Oxford.

He's a fellow at Mansfield College, the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford, and Lund University's Department of Economic History.

His other book, is The Technology Trap, Capital, Labour and Power in the Age of Automation.

I finished his other book.

From programmable textiles, we shift to another advance in controlling light at small scales.

Lund University engineers created light-emitting diodes using thin, branched nanowires that generate light at controlled locations within the structure.

By directing emission away from loss-prone regions, the design improves the fraction of light that exits the device.

The approach also targets lower production costs compared with conventional LED fabrication.