This week we’re talking about the immune system, health and happiness, with Dr Pippa Kennedy and Alex Kogan.

The immune system is one of your body’s most powerful tools. It can be your best friend, fighting off disease; or your worst enemy, doing more harm than good. It feels intuitive that how healthy you think you are can affect your happiness, but what about the other way round? Are your cells affected by your mood swings and nagging doubts.

Watch the videos mentioned and find out more about Dr Kennedy’s work at the links belowWho are we?Pippa Kennedy is part of Dan Davis’ lab http://www.davislab.ls.manchester.ac.uk/ at the MCCIR http://www.mccir.ls.manchester.ac.uk/

Alex Kogan is a Lecturer at the University of Cambridge http://www.psychol.cam.ac.uk/people/[email protected] cell videos for free! (or ‘why open access science policies are so great’)

1950s chase – you don’t need fancy microscopes to make amazing videos:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/16/white-blood-cell-goes-aftn463887.html

Touch and smell – how a cell communicates with the world around ithttp://bme.ucdavis.edu/heinrichlab/

T cells killing cancer – a video by Misty Jenkinshttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-05/waeh-ht052016.php

Macrophages battling yeast (supporting information at the end)http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1002578

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