Take two seconds scrolling on social media and you'll find everyone has a different piece of advice when it comes to keeping your body and mind healthy.

It's impossible to keep up with.

Magnesium at night, exposure to daylight, first thing in the morning, 10,000 steps a day, hitting your protein goals, weight training, reading, drinking water, drinking alkaline water, I could go on and on.

There's lots of advice and not often a lot of evidence, so it's hard to know what's worth your

effort. But what if you could go to the doctor and get an actual prescription for not a

medication, but an activity? It's the difference between saying, you know, Sam, you should go, you know, exercise more

and saying, Sam, I'm going to prescribe you a 10-week cycling course.

And get this, if you don't have a bike, insurance is going to cover that.

Julia Hatz is the author of The Connection Cure, where she explores a concept called Social Prescription.

She's got more to explain later in the

episode, but before then, we'll explore some exciting, yes, exciting side effects that were

recently discovered from the shingles vaccine, and a new study that uses fan fiction to explore

our preferences when it comes to art and culture. My name is Dr. Smadley Amin, and this is Curiosity Weekly from Discovery.

We got to talk about a vaccine side effect no one else is talking about. A massive study led by

Stanford scientists in April 2025 found that vaccination against shingles led to a 20% relative

reduction in dementia risk. That means that the shingles

vaccine not only helps prevent the painful rash and blisters of shingles, it also means you

have less risk of dementia, for example, Alzheimer's disease. A vaccine being protective

against neurodegeneration. It's not entirely unprecedented. Scientists had suspected

for a while that infection with varicelel oster, the virus that causes shingles, might affect the nervous

system in a way that can increase the risk of brain diseases like dementia. But it's a really

difficult question to study because you can't just deny half a population an important vaccine

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