By Kaia Glickman Anyone with a computer has been asked to “select every image containing a traffic light” or “type the letters shown below” to prove that they are human. While these log-in hurdles — called reCAPTCHA tests — may prompt some head-scratching (does the corner of that red light count?), they reflect that vision is considered a clear metric for differentiating computers from humans. But computers are catching up. The quest to create computers that can “see” has made huge progress in recent years. Fifteen years ago, computers could correctly identify what an image contains about 60 percent of the time. Now, it’s common to see success rates near 90 percent. But many computer systems still fail some of the simplest vision tests — thus reCAPTCHA’s continued usefulness. Digital artwork, one in a series displayed at CERN in Geneva. The foreground shows a particle collision event which is a possible candidate for a decay of the Higgs-like particle to a final state. The background depicts selected pages from articles published by the CMS collaboration at the LHC. Newer approaches aim to more closely resemble the human visual system by training computers to see images as they are — made up of actual objects — rather than as just a collection of pixels. These efforts are already yielding success, for example in helping develop robots that can “see” and grab objects. Computer vision models employ what are called visual neural networks. These networks use interconnected units called artificial neurons that, akin to in the brain, forge connections with each other as the system learns. Typically, these networks are trained on a set of images with descriptions, and eventually they can correctly guess what is in a new image they haven’t encountered before.

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 29996 - Posted: 11.01.2025

By Ellen Barry One of the most popular mental health innovations of the past decade is therapy via text message, which allows you to dip in and out of treatment in the course of a day. Say you wake up anxious before a presentation: You might text your therapist first thing in the morning to say that you can’t stop visualizing a humiliating failure. Three hours later, her response pops up on your phone. She suggests that you label the thought — “I’m feeling nervous about my presentation” — and then try to reframe it. She tells you to take a deep breath before deciding what is true in the moment. You read her answer between meetings. “I’m pretty sure my boss thinks I’m an idiot,” you type. The therapist responds the next morning. “What evidence do you have that she thinks that?” she asks. She tells you to write a list of the available evidence, pros and cons. Text-based therapy has expanded swiftly over the past decade through digital mental health platforms like BetterHelp and Talkspace, which pair users with licensed therapists and offer both live chat and as-needed texting sessions. A new study published on Thursday in the journal JAMA Network Open provides early evidence that the practice is effective in treating mild to moderate depression, finding outcomes similar to those of video-based therapy. In a clinical trial, 850 adults with mild to moderate depression were randomly assigned to two groups: One group received psychotherapy via a weekly video session; the other received unlimited, as-needed messaging or emailing with a therapist. After 12 weeks, participants in both groups reported similar improvement in depression symptoms. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 29995 - Posted: 11.01.2025

By Sarah DeWeerdt A temporary increase in neuronal activity in the cortex of newborn mice leads to social deficits in adulthood, according to a new preprint. Those adult rodents also show changes in brain electrical activity, gene expression and connectivity that are reminiscent of autism. The analysis lends support to a prominent hypothesis of autism’s origins, which holds that the condition can arise from an excess of excitatory signaling or insufficient inhibitory signaling in the brain, the study investigators write in their paper. Over the years, support for this signaling imbalance hypothesis has come from other studies in mice and observations that some people with autism have seizures or display excess neuronal activity in electroencephalography (EEG) recordings relative to people without the condition. Postmortem analysis suggests autistic people have more excitatory synapses in the prefrontal cortex than non-autistic people. But determining causality and the role of inhibitory signaling has been difficult. In contrast with most earlier work, the new study “really underscore[s] a different way of looking at excitation-inhibition imbalance, which is looking at it during development as a cause of subsequent changes in brain function that could be associated with autism,” says Vikaas Sohal, professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the work. The study was posted on bioRxiv last month. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Autism
Link ID: 29994 - Posted: 11.01.2025

Ian Sample Science editor It’s never a great look. The morning meeting is in full swing but thanks to a late night out your brain switches off at the precise moment a question comes your way. Such momentary lapses in attention are a common problem for the sleep deprived, but what happens in the brain in these spells of mental shutdown has proved hard to pin down. Now scientists have shed light on the process and found there is more to zoning out than meets the eye. The brief loss of focus coincides with a wave of fluid flowing out of the brain, which returns once attention recovers. “The moment somebody’s attention fails is the moment this wave of fluid starts to pulse,” said Dr Laura Lewis, a senior author on the study at MIT in Boston. “It’s not just that your neurons aren’t paying attention to the world, there’s this big change in fluid in the brain at the same time.” Lewis and her colleague Dr Zinong Yang investigated the sleep-deprived brain to understand the kinds of attention failures that lead drowsy drivers to crash and tired animals to become a predator’s lunch. In the study, 26 volunteers took turns to wear an EEG cap while lying in an fMRI scanner. This enabled the scientists to monitor the brain’s electrical activity and physiological changes during tests in which people had to respond as quickly as possible to hearing a tone or seeing crosshairs on a screen turn into a square. Each volunteer was scanned after a restful night’s sleep at home and after a night of total sleep deprivation supervised by scientists at the laboratory. Unsurprisingly, people performed far worse when sleep deprived, responding more slowly or not at all. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep; Attention
Link ID: 29993 - Posted: 11.01.2025

Imma Perfetto Anyone who has ever struggled through the day following a poor night’s sleep has had to wrench their attention back to the task at hand after their mind drifted off unexpectedly. Now, researchers have pinpointed exactly what causes these momentary failures of attention. The new study in Nature Neuroscience found that the brains of sleep-deprived people initiate waves of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), the liquid which cushions the brain, which dramatically impaired attention. This process usually happens during sleep. The rhythmic flow of CSF into and out of the brain carries away protein waste which has built up over the course of the day. When this is maintenance interrupted due to lack of sleep, it seems the brain attempts to play catch up during its waking hours. “If you don’t sleep, the CSF waves start to intrude into wakefulness where normally you wouldn’t see them,” says study senior author Laura Lewis of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Institute for Medical Engineering and Science. “However, they come with an attentional trade off, where attention fails during the moments that you have this wave of fluid flow. “The results are suggesting that at the moment that attention fails, this fluid is actually being expelled outward away from the brain. And when attention recovers, it’s drawn back in.” © Copyright CSIRO

Keyword: Sleep; Attention
Link ID: 29992 - Posted: 11.01.2025

By Nima Sadrian In the popular narrative, cannabidiol, or CBD, is portrayed as a natural, non-intoxicating cure for a host of ailments — and sometimes that extends to the anxieties of modern adolescence. CBD is everywhere, infused in products such as gummy candies, vapes, skincare serums, and even fizzy seltzers. Usually derived from the hemp plant, CBD is pitched as a calming remedy with none of the stigma of marijuana. Even a 2018 World Health Organization report noted that CBD shows no signs of abuse or dependence potential. But as a physician and neuroscientist who studies how CBD affects the developing brain, I have to offer a different, more troubling answer: We simply don’t know if it’s safe for teens. And early evidence suggests potential for real, lasting harm. The comforting story our culture tells itself about CBD — that it offers harmless, botanical relief for stress and sleep problems — is dangerously out of step with the science. While we have been sold a simple wellness narrative, my own work and that of other scientists reveal a far more complex and cautionary tale — one that challenges the very foundation of the multibillion-dollar CBD industry. How did a compound that the Food and Drug Administration has only approved as a potent prescription drug for severe childhood epilepsy become a common additive? The answer lies in a catastrophic regulatory failure. The 2018 farm bill legalized hemp, but the legislation and its extensions created no framework to ensure that the products made from it were safe, effective, or accurately labeled, nor did the bill set an age limit for it. The result is a market that operates like the Wild West, a gold rush where consumer safety is an afterthought. The FDA-approved CBD medicine, Epidiolex, comes with a long list of documented risks, including liver damage and suicidal ideation, and requires careful medical supervision. Yet numerous consumer products containing CBD are sold without such warnings, mandatory testing, or oversight.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29991 - Posted: 11.01.2025

Joel Snape All vertebrates yawn, or indulge in a behaviour that’s at least recognisable as yawn-adjacent. Sociable baboons yawn, but so do semi-solitary orangutans. Parakeets, penguins and crocodiles yawn – and so, probably, did the first ever jawed fish. Until relatively recently, the purpose of yawning wasn’t clear, and it’s still contested by researchers and scientists. But this commonality provides a clue to what it’s really all about – and it’s probably not what you’re expecting. “When I poll audiences and ask: ‘Why do you think we yawn?’, most people suggest that it has to do with breathing or respiration and might somehow increase oxygen in the blood,” says Andrew Gallup, a professor in behavioural biology at Johns Hopkins University. “And that’s intuitive because most yawns do have this clear respiratory component, this deep inhalation of air. However, what most people don’t realise is that that hypothesis has been explicitly tested and shown to be false.” To test the idea that we yawn to bring in more oxygen or expel excess carbon dioxide, studies published in the 1980s manipulated the levels of both gases in air inhaled by volunteers – and they found that while changes did significantly affect other respiratory processes, they didn’t influence the regularity of yawns. There also doesn’t seem to be any systematically measurable difference in the yawning behaviour of people suffering from illnesses associated with breathing and lung function – which is what you would expect if yawns were respiration-related. This, more or less, was where Gallup came to the subject. “When I was pursuing my honours thesis, my adviser at the time said, well, why not study yawning, because nobody knows why we do it?” he says. “That was intriguing – we knew it had to serve some underlying physiological function. So I started to examine the motor action pattern it involves – this extended gaping of the jaw that’s accompanied by this deep inhalation of air, followed by a rapid closure of the jaw and a quicker exhalation. And it occurred to me that this likely has important circulatory consequences that are localised to the skull.” © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Emotions; Sleep
Link ID: 29990 - Posted: 10.29.2025

By Katarina Zimmer The 10 snakes faced a tough predicament. Collected from the Colombian Amazon, they had been without food for several days in captivity and then were presented with extremely unappetizing prey: three-striped poison dart frogs, Ameerega trivittata. The skin of those frogs contains deadly toxins — such as histrionicotoxins, pumiliotoxins and decahydroquinolines — that interfere with essential cell proteins. Six of the royal ground snakes (Erythrolamprus reginae) preferred to go hungry. The other four intrepidly slithered in for the kill. But before swallowing their meals, they dragged the frogs across the ground — akin to the way some birds rub toxins off their prey, noted biologist Valeria Ramírez Castañeda of the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues, who conducted the experiment. In a recent study, some royal ground snakes dragged poison frogs along the ground before eating them, probably in an effort to rub off some of the frogs’ deadly toxins. Three of the four snakes survived the meal — suggesting that their bodies were capable of handling the toxins that remained. Living beings have been wielding deadly molecules to kill each other for hundreds of millions of years. First came microbes that used the chemicals to weed out competitors or attack host cells they were invading; then animals, to kill prey or ward off predators, and plants, to defend against herbivores. In response, many animals have evolved ways to survive these toxins. They sometimes even store them to use against opponents.

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Evolution
Link ID: 29989 - Posted: 10.29.2025

By Sara Talpos As a new Ph.D. student in 2011, Steve Ramirez and his mentor performed a groundbreaking experiment in the field of memory manipulation. They placed a mouse in a small distinctive box and administered a mild electrical shock to its feet. When the rodent was placed in the box a second time, it froze up — anticipating another shock. From there, the young neuroscientists placed the mouse in a different box, one where nothing bad had happened. They then directed pulses of light to a very specific region in the mouse’s brain that had been genetically modified to respond to the light. This caused the mouse to immediately freeze. Ramirez and his mentor, it turned out, had found a way to artificially activate a fear-inducing memory. “How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past,” by Steve Ramirez will be available on November 4, 2025 (Princeton University Press, 256 pages). What was the point? A central goal of such science is to learn how memories form and function in the brain and to then apply this knowledge to treat brain disorders, writes Ramirez in his forthcoming book, “How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past.” Perhaps one day, he suggests, it will be possible to activate positive memories to curb depression or to retrieve memories that have seemingly been lost to Alzheimer’s disease. In the book, Ramirez explores the fascinating science of memory while tracing his own journey to becoming a successful professor at Boston University. His path was not without challenges, including the sudden death of his mentor and a decade-long struggle with alcohol addiction. “This book,” he writes, “is my attempt to make sense of the enigma of memory — the snippets of remembrances, the brief moments in time, the decisions we make, the blackouts, the imagined, and the dreamt of — all the things the brain does to breathe life into the past so that we can heal and become whole again.”

Keyword: Depression; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29988 - Posted: 10.29.2025

Jon Hamilton In April, the future was looking bleak for an experimental Alzheimer's drug called valiltramiprosate, or ALZ-801. Researchers had just released topline results of a study of more than 300 people age 50 or older, who were genetically predisposed to Alzheimer's. Overall, those who got the drug did no better than those given a placebo. But in September, a closer look at the results revealed benefits for a subgroup of 125 people who had only mild memory problems when they started taking the drug. Those participants, initially diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment rather than mild dementia, "showed very meaningful responses," says Dr. Susan Abushakra, chief medical officer of Alzheon, the drug's maker. By one measure, the drug slowed cognitive decline by 52% in people with mild cognitive impairment. That result appears comparable with benefits from the two Alzheimer's drugs now on the market: lecanemab and donabemab. But the true effect of ALZ-801 is hard to quantify because of the relatively small number of participants in the group with mild cognitive impairment. Three scientists learned they carry genes that significantly increase their risk for Alzheimer’s. Here's how they're grapping with the news, and working to keep their brains healthy. More robust results came from measures of brain atrophy — the shrinkage that tends to come with Alzheimer's. © 2025 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 29987 - Posted: 10.29.2025

By Roberta McLain Two small genetic changes reshaped the human pelvis, setting our early ancestors on the path to upright walking, scientists say. One genetic change flipped the ilium — the bone your hands rest on when you put them on your hips — 90 degrees. The rotation reoriented the muscles that attach to the pelvis, turning a system for climbing and running on all four legs into one for standing and walking on two legs. The other change delayed how long it takes for the ilium to harden from soft cartilage into bone, evolutionary biologist Gayani Senevirathne of Harvard University and colleagues report in the Sept. 25 Nature. The result: a distinctive bowl-shaped pelvis that supports an upright body. While nonhuman primates can walk upright to some extent, they typically move on all fours. The newly identified changes to human pelvic development were “essential for creating and shifting muscles that are usually on the back of the animal, pushing the animal forward, to now being on the sides, helping us stay upright as we walk,” says coauthor Terence Capellini, a Harvard evolutionary biologist. The researchers examined tiny slices of developing pelvic tissue from humans, chimpanzees and mice under a microscope, and paired those findings with CT imaging. Human ilium cartilage grows sideways, not vertically as it does in other primates, the team found. What’s more, the cartilage transitions to bone more slowly than in nonhuman primates and in other human body parts. Together, these shifts allow the pelvis to expand sideways and maintain its wide, bowl-like shape as it grows. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 29986 - Posted: 10.29.2025

By Rachel Nuwer No one knows why magic mushrooms evolved to produce psilocybin, a powerful psychedelic molecule. But this trait was apparently so beneficial for fungi that it independently evolved in two distantly related types of mushrooms. An even greater surprise to biologists was that rather than arriving at the same solution for producing psilocybin, the two groups pursued completely different biochemical pathways, according to a study published last month in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition. “This finding reminds us that nature finds more than one way to make important molecules,” said Dirk Hoffmeister, a pharmaceutical microbiologist at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany and an author of the study. He added that it was also evidence that mushrooms were “brilliant chemists.” Practically speaking, Dr. Hoffmeister said, the research also suggested a possible new path for synthesizing psilocybin for use in scientific research and therapies. “We can expand our toolbox,” he said. Psilocybe and Inocybe mushrooms occur in some of the same habitats, but they follow different lifestyles. Psilocybe, the group that includes what are traditionally called magic mushrooms, thrives on decaying material such as decomposing organic matter or cow dung. Inocybe, commonly known as fiber caps, are symbiotic organisms that form intimate, mutually beneficial relationships with trees. In 1958, Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD, became the first researcher to isolate psilocybin from Psilocybe mushrooms. Some scientists later suspected that a few Inocybe mushrooms also produced the compound. Since then, psilocybin has been identified in around half a dozen Inocybe species. (The other species tend to produce a potent neurotoxin.) © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Evolution
Link ID: 29985 - Posted: 10.25.2025

By Holly Barker At first glance, the mice in Pierre Vanderhaeghen’s lab in Leuven, Belgium, seem unremarkable. But inside their tiny heads, their cerebral cortex contains a mix of mouse and human neurons at two stages of development: Their native synapses are fully mature, but the connections formed from human cells are delayed and comparable to those of a newborn human baby. Vanderhaeghen and his colleagues are studying the chimeric mice to explore this drawn-out process of synaptic development, a feature that distinguishes human brains from those of other mammals. Many aspects of human brain development proceed slowly—neurogenesis, myelination, gliogenesis—but synaptic maturation is particularly protracted. In the prefrontal cortex, for instance, some synapses don’t fully develop until a person reaches their mid-20s. Deviations from this maturation rate could mean that “milestones won’t be reached at the same time” and might underlie some forms of autism or intellectual disability, says Vanderhaeghen, professor of neurosciences and group leader at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain and Disease Research. An evolutionarily conserved protein called SRGAP2 controls this timing in most mammals. Humans, however, have partially duplicated copies—SRGAP2B and SRGAP2C—that inhibit the ancestral protein, two teams reported in 2012. Like other duplicated genes found only in humans, SRGAP2 resides in a repetitive—and therefore unstable—part of the genome, says Evan Eichler, professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington, and an investigator on one of the 2012 studies. “These regions create liability by predisposing us to genomic rearrangement, [but] to persist in the population, they must have an advantage. It’s part of the cost of what it is to be human.” © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29984 - Posted: 10.25.2025

Will Stone Doctors have long known that antidepressants come with side effects for cardiovascular and metabolic health. But a major analysis from a team of researchers in the U.K. has, for the first time, pulled together data from more than 150 clinical trials to compare the physical side effects of dozens of antidepressants. The study, published in the Lancet this week, details how each medication can affect weight, blood pressure, heart rate, cholesterol and other areas of health. The end result is something akin to a "sports league table" for 30 different antidepressants based on their side effect profile, says lead author Dr. Toby Pillinger, a psychiatrist at King's College London. "It's never been done at this scale before and no one's ever put specific numbers to the amount of weight you'll put on, or to the amount that your cholesterol goes up," he says. The findings are based on existing data, mostly from 8-week drug studies, that altogether represent more than 58,000 patients. The most frequently prescribed antidepressants in the U.S. — selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, like Zoloft and Prozac — tended to have fewer physical side effects, according to the analysis. Other medications, particularly some of the older drugs, were shown to have more significant impacts. © 2025 npr

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 29983 - Posted: 10.25.2025

By Meghan Rosen It sounds like something from a horror movie: A disease that eats through bone, dissolving the fused plates of the skull like bubbling acid. But a type of brain cancer called glioblastoma actually does something similar, triggering the erosion of living skull tissue, researchers report October 3 in Nature Neuroscience. The work shows in gory detail that brain cancer can erode bone, a harmful effect that wasn’t previously known, says Jinan Behnan, a brain tumor immunologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, New York. Behnan’s findings uncover a creepy new facet of glioblastoma, an enigmatic cancer still cloaked in scientific questions. “We really still don’t understand exactly what this disease is,” she says. Glioblastoma is an aggressive form of brain cancer that’s particularly lethal and nearly impossible to cure. In the United States, doctors diagnose more than 12,000 new cases every year. Five years after diagnosis, only about five percent of patients over 40 years old survive. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 29982 - Posted: 10.25.2025

By Gina Kolata For the first time, researchers restored some vision to people with a common type of eye disease by using a prosthetic retinal implant. If approved for broader use in the future, the treatment could improve the lives of an estimated one million, mostly older, people in the United States who lose their vision to the condition. The patients’ blindness occurs when cells in the center of the retina start to die, what is known as geographic atrophy resulting from age-related macular degeneration. Without these cells, patients see a big black spot in the center of their vision, with a thin border of sight around it. Although their peripheral vision is preserved, people with this form of advanced macular degeneration cannot read, have difficulty recognizing faces or forms and may have trouble navigating their surroundings. In a study published Monday in The New England Journal of Medicine, vision in 27 out of 32 participants improved so much that they could read with their artificial retinas. The vision that is restored is not normal: It’s black and white, blurry, and the field of view is small. But after getting the retinal implant, patients who could barely see gained on average five lines on a standard eye chart. The implant gets signals from glasses and a camera that projects infrared images to the artificial retina. The camera has a zoom feature that can magnify images like letters, allowing people to read, albeit slowly because with the zoom they don’t see many letters at a time. “This is at the forefront of science,” said Dr. Demetrios Vavvas, director of the retina service at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, a specialty hospital in Boston. He was not involved in the study and emphasized that the implant was not a cure for macular degeneration. But he called it the dawn of a new technology that he predicted will significantly advance. The treatment is only for people with a loss of retinal photoreceptors, so it would not work for other forms of blindness. The study participants had an average age of 79 and had been told that once vision was lost, it was gone forever. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision; Robotics
Link ID: 29981 - Posted: 10.22.2025

Rachel Fieldhouse Slow, sleep-like brain waves persist in part of the brain that has been surgically disconnected from the rest of the organ even though the person is awake. The findings1, published in PLoS Biology, add to researchers’ understanding of what conscious and unconscious brain states look like. Children with severe epilepsy who do not respond to medication can undergo a surgical procedure called a hemispherotomy. During surgery, clinicians disconnect the part of the brain in which seizures originate from the rest of the brain, stopping them from spreading. The disconnected tissue is left in the skull and has an intact blood supply. The team wanted to find out whether the disconnected part has some form of awareness — or was capable of exhibiting consciousness, says co-author Marcello Massimini, a neurophysiology researcher at the University of Milan in Italy. “The question arises because we have no access” to the disconnected region, he says, adding that it was unclear what happens once part of the brain is isolated. Studies investigating consciousness are difficult because there is no consensus on what conscious and unconscious states in the brain look like, says Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, a neuroscientist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. “There’s no generally accepted definitive signatures of consciousness in terms of electrical readings or brain activity,” he adds. Even defining unconsciousness is challenging, because activities associated with consciousness, such as remembering dreams, can occur during states associated with unconsciousness, such as sleep or anaesthesia, Massimini says. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 29980 - Posted: 10.22.2025

By Grigori Guitchounts On a mellow spring night, I gazed at the setting desert sun in Joshua Tree National Park in California. The sun glowed a warm blood-orange and the sky shimmered pink and purple. I had just defended my Ph.D. in neuroscience, and my partner and I had flown west to celebrate and exhale. It was early March 2020, and we were hoping to quiet our minds in the desert. I was also hoping to change mine. I had been curious about psychedelics for years, but it wasn’t until I read How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan about the new science of psychedelics, that I felt ready. The book made a compelling case that psychedelics provided a fascinating introspective experience. Still, I was nervous. I’d heard stories about bad trips and flashbacks. I knew enough neuroscience to know these were serious drugs—compounds that could temporarily dismantle how the brain makes sense of reality and potentially change it irreversibly. I also knew I was burned out. My Ph.D. had been hard in the way Ph.D.s often are: thrilling, lonely, disorienting. My advisor had left academia halfway through, and I’d spent years without much supervision, never quite sure whether I was on the right track and if I had a future in academia. But I didn’t take LSD seeking healing or clarity. I just wanted to see what the fuss was about. After years of hunkering down, I was craving a freeing experience. What followed was strange, intense, and beautiful. The wooden floorboards of our cabin turned into a bustling cityscape. The mirror in the bathroom showed my face aged beyond recognition: The natural lines in my skin became deep wrinkles, my eyes sunken, as if time had decided to give me a sneak peak of what would come. Later, absorbed with coloring pencils, I watched the marks I was making dissolve in real time, as if the paper were being erased by invisible rain. © 2025 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Consciousness
Link ID: 29979 - Posted: 10.22.2025

By Susan Dominus Spend enough time speaking to women who are taking testosterone — specifically, in very high doses — and you start to notice that they sound messianic. They’re often talking fast and intensely; they’re amped up; they’re describing what they clearly consider a miracle drug; and they have no intention of lowering their dose, despite the unknown risks or some problems with facial hair. After all, how can they worry about facial hair when they feel so alive? It’s nothing they can’t take care of with a quick waxing, which they now have the energy to do at the end of the day — right after they prepare a high-protein dinner for their family and before they put the finishing touches on their spreadsheets, close their laptops and light a few mood candles for the sex that they know will be great, maybe even better than the sex they had last night, even though they’re a day older. “It’s changed my marriage,” Jessica Medina, a 41-year-old marketing consultant in Orange County, Calif., told me. With four kids in the house, and sex happening six times a week (up from “How about never?” pre-testosterone), she had to put a lock on the bedroom door. She and her husband had attended a “marriage growth” group at church for years, but it took testosterone for their relationship to be, as she put it, “100 times closer.” She was a little less emotional, a little less sentimental than she used to be, but she didn’t have time for that kind of thing, anyway. “It’s more like: Get stuff done, handle business, work out,” she said. “In order to do all that and still have time for our kids and their sports, there’s no time to whine about how hard it is.” Catherine Lin, a single mother who ran a bicoastal fashion media company, went on testosterone in her early 40s to raise her energy. She got the boost she wanted, started lifting heavier weights, decided to pursue a degree in holistic nutrition and enjoyed an unexpected side effect: She started having orgasms for the first time in years. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 29978 - Posted: 10.22.2025

By Giorgia Guglielmi Male and female human fetuses show distinct patterns of gene activity and DNA regulation in the cerebral cortex, according to a new analysis of thousands of individual brain cells. The study offers one of the most detailed maps to date of how such activity differs between boys and girls’ brains during the second trimester. It also compares sex differences in gene activity in fetuses with spontaneous genetic changes in autistic people, revealing clues as to how these de novo changes affect boys and girls. “As the field evolves, this [work] will be a helpful reference” for exploring sex-related molecular differences in early brain development, says Matthew Oetjens, assistant professor of human genetics at Geisinger Medical Center, who was not involved in the study. Understanding these differences may help explain why certain neurodevelopmental conditions are more common in one sex than the other, he says. Autism, for example, is diagnosed about four times more often in boys than in girls, but scientists are still trying to understand why. Theories include the possibility that boys are more vulnerable, girls are sometimes protected, or a combination of both. “We know that autism … has a very strong genetic component. What is not known is how the genetic risk architecture intersects with any differences at the molecular level that might exist between male and female human brains,” says study investigator Tomasz Nowakowski, associate professor of neurological surgery, anatomy and psychiatry, and behavioral sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. More than 940 genes are expressed differently between the sexes, according to the new analysis of more than 38,000 brain cells from 21 female and 27 male mid-gestation fetuses. Most of these differentially expressed genes are more active in females. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 29977 - Posted: 10.22.2025