Ian Sample Science editor People who have a couple of teas or coffees a day have a lower risk of dementia and marginally better cognitive performance than those who avoid the drinks, researchers say. Health records for more than 130,000 people showed that over 40 years, those who routinely drank two to three cups of caffeinated coffee or one to two cups of caffeinated tea daily had a 15-20% lower risk of dementia than those who went without. The caffeinated coffee drinkers also reported slightly less cognitive decline than those who opted for decaf and performed better on some objective tests of brain function, according to a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The findings suggest habitual tea and coffee drinking is good for the brain, but the research cannot prove it, as caffeine drinkers may be less prone to dementia for other reasons. A similar link would arise if poor sleepers, who appear to have a greater risk of cognitive decline, steered clear of caffeine to get a better night’s rest. “Our study alone can’t prove causality, but to our knowledge, it is the best evidence to date looking at coffee and tea intake and cognitive health, and it is consistent with plausible biology,” said the lead author, Yu Zhang, who studies nutritional epidemiology at Harvard University. Coffee and tea contain caffeine and polyphenols that may protect against brain ageing by improving vascular health and reducing inflammation and oxidative stress, where harmful atoms and molecules called free radicals damage cells and tissues. Substances in the drinks could also work by improving metabolic health. Caffeine, for example, is linked to lower rates of type 2 diabetes, a known risk factor for dementia. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Alzheimers
Link ID: 30113 - Posted: 02.11.2026

By Ellen Barry A new analysis of birth cohorts in the Canadian province of Ontario has found a striking rise in the incidence of psychotic disorders among young people, a finding that its authors said could reflect teens’ increasing use of substances like cannabis, stimulants and hallucinogens. The study, published on Monday in The Canadian Medical Association Journal, found that the rate of new diagnoses of psychotic disorders among people ages 14 to 20 increased by 60 percent between 1997 and 2023, while new diagnoses at older ages plateaued or declined. Compared with people born in the late 1970s, those born in the early 2000s were about twice as likely to have been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder by age 20. The researchers included 12 million people born in Ontario between 1960 and 2009, of which 0.9 percent were diagnosed with a psychotic disorder during the study period. The study was epidemiological and did not try to identify a cause for the rising prevalence. There are a number of possible explanations, among them older paternal age, the stress of migration, neonatal health problems and early intervention programs that now regularly identify the disorders at younger ages, the authors note. But Dr. Daniel Myran, one of the study’s authors, said he undertook the study, in part, to follow up on concerns that the legalization of cannabis might increase population-level rates of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. “I was expecting to see some increases in these younger folks, but I was quite surprised by the scale,” said Dr. Myran, a family physician and research chair at North York General Hospital. He said the results suggested a need for more research into the impact of expanding cannabis use by young people. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30106 - Posted: 02.04.2026

By Amy X. Wang Alice, fumbling through Wonderland, comes across a mushroom. One bite of it shrinks her down in size. Chowing on the other side makes her swell up, huge, taller than the treetops. Urgently, Alice sets to work “nibbling first at one and then at the other, and growing sometimes taller and sometimes shorter,” until finally she succeeds in “bringing herself down to her usual height” — whereupon everything feels “quite strange.” Is this Lewis Carroll’s 1865 fantasy tale or … the average body-conscious, improvement-obsessed 2026 Whole Foods shopper? Mushrooms, long venerated in literature as dark transformative forces, have become Goopified. Nowadays, you can chug “adaptogenic mushroom coffee,” slurp “functional mushroom cocoa,” doze off with “mushroom sleep drops” or ingest/imbibe any number of other tinctures in the billion-dollar fungal supplements market that promise to fine-tune, or even totally recalibrate, the self. The latest and hottest items in this booming new retail category are mushroom gummies, gushed over by wellness influencers, spilling out from supermarket shelves right there next to your standard cough drops and protein bars. Fungi have aided medical advances like antibiotics and statins, it’s true, and certain species have shown promising results in fighting Parkinson’s or cancer — but what these pastel gumdrops proffer is a broader, more elliptical “cellular well-being.” The mystique feels intentional on product-makers’ part: Like Carroll’s baffled heroine, maybe you’re meant to be in a bit of thrall to the mysterious, almighty mushroom — lurching through Wonderland, charmed and confused by design. After all, you wonder, what are these ancient, alien creatures, growing in the secret dark? Hippocrates was supposedly using them to cauterize wounds around the 5th century B.C.E. In the Super Mario video games, mushrooms might give you extra lives; in HBO’s “The Last of Us,” they bring about the ruin of human civilization. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30102 - Posted: 01.31.2026

By Andrew Jacobs In the billion-dollar race to commercialize psychedelic medicine, psilocybin, a naturally occurring hallucinogen better known as magic mushrooms, or “shrooms,” has decisively pulled ahead of the pack. The Food and Drug Administration in November said it would move up its review of a psilocybin treatment for severe depression by nine to 12 months, according to the applicant, Compass Pathways. It hopes to receive the agency’s approval for the therapy before the end of the year. The news is among the first concrete signs that the Trump administration is recognizing psychedelic medicine as a potential therapy tool. The moves have injected a fresh dose of optimism into a nascent field, which was rattled by the F.D.A.’s rejection in 2024 of MDMA-assisted therapy, the first psychedelic to reach a formal review by federal regulators. “Between research results and policy changes, it’s a watershed moment for psychedelic health care, and psilocybin is the star,” said Nate Howard, director of operations at InnerTrek, a psilocybin clinic in Portland, Ore. Mr. Howard was a driving force behind a successful ballot measure in 2023 that created Oregon’s psilocybin program. State lawmakers, however, are not waiting for regulators in the nation’s capital. Last year, New Mexico joined Colorado and Oregon in offering legal psilocybin therapy to adults. Lawmakers in a dozen states, including North Carolina, Maryland, Georgia and California, are considering easing restrictions on the drug using public funds to research the potential benefits of psilocybin therapy. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30081 - Posted: 01.14.2026

Jon Hamilton Scientists are updating their view of how drugs like Adderall and Ritalin help children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder stay on task. The latest evidence is a study of thousands of brain scans of adolescents that confirms earlier hints that stimulant drugs have little direct impact on brain networks that control attention. Instead, the drugs appear to activate networks involved in alertness and the anticipation of pleasure, scientists report in the journal Cell. "We think it's a combination of both arousal and reward, that kind of one-two punch, that really helps kids with ADHD when they take this medication," says Dr. Benjamin Kay, a pediatric neurologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the study's lead author. The results, along with those of smaller studies, support a "mindset shift about what stimulants are doing for people," says Peter Manza, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the research. The new research analyzed data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, a federally funded effort that includes brain scans of nearly 12,000 children. About 4% of these kids had ADHD when they entered the study, and nearly half of those were on a prescription stimulant. About 3.5 million children in the U.S. take an ADHD medication, and the number is rising. © 2025 npr

Keyword: ADHD; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30059 - Posted: 12.31.2025

By Calli McMurray For the past two and a half years, a team of five labs in the San Francisco Bay Area have endeavored to nail down how psilocybin affects the way mice behave. Psilocybin and other psychedelic drugs have been shown to improve anxiety and depression symptoms in people, but results in mouse studies are less consistent. Those inconsistencies spell trouble for researchers trying to unpack the drug’s mechanism, because if behavioral changes in mice don’t mirror those in humans, the underlying biological changes might be irrelevant, says team member Boris Heifets, associate professor of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine at Stanford University. So, to establish a behavioral ground truth, the five labs gave about 200 mice the same dose of psilocybin and measured how the drug affected the animals’ performance on a range of simple behavioral assays, including the elevated plus maze and open field, tail suspension and forced swim tests, while taking the drug as well as 24 hours later. While on psilocybin, the mice showed a temporary increase in anxiety-like behaviors, including spending less time than usual exploring new objects and open areas, the team reported in April. But, unlike in people, the drug had no lasting effects once it wore off. The issue, some behavioral neuroscientists argue, is not replication between labs—it’s the assays themselves. “I love the idea of these multisite experiments in animal models, but the models—the behavioral models—still have to be the right ones,” says Jennifer Mitchell, professor of neurology and psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. “The tests themselves—I’m not sure how much they tell us about what a psychedelic is actually doing.” © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30055 - Posted: 12.20.2025

By Jan Hoffman Around 2 a.m., Joseph felt the withdrawal coming on, sudden and hard. He fell to the floor convulsing, vomiting ferociously. The delirium and hallucinations were starting. He shook awake his friend, who had let him in earlier to shower, wash his clothes and grab some sleep. “Do you have a few dollars?” he pleaded. “I have to get right.” The friend, a community outreach worker who had been trying for years to get him into treatment, looked up at him standing over her raving and unfocused. “Either leave or let me call an ambulance,” she demanded. At 34, Joseph (who, with his friend, recounted the evening in interviews with The New York Times) had been through opioid withdrawals many times — on Philadelphia streets, in jail, in rehab. But he had never experienced anything as terrifyingly all-consuming as this. A new drug has been saturating the fentanyl supply in Philadelphia and moving to other cities throughout the East and Midwestern United States: medetomidine, a powerful veterinary sedative that causes almost instantaneous blackouts and, if not used every few hours, brings on life-threatening withdrawal symptoms. It has created a new type of drug crisis — one that is occasioned not by overdosing on the drug, but by withdrawing from it. Since the middle of last year, Philadelphia’s hospitals have been strained by patients coming in with what doctors have identified as medetomidine withdrawal. Although the heart rate slows drastically right after use, in withdrawal the opposite occurs: The heart rate and blood pressure become catastrophically high. Patients experience tremors and unstoppable vomiting. Many require intensive care. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30053 - Posted: 12.17.2025

By Mattha Busby Bruce Damer had the audience under his Gandalf spell. He was giving a keynote speech in a grand hall at Breaking Convention, a psychedelic-consciousness conference in Exeter, England, in April 2025. Tall and slender, very much bearded, and sporting two large gold hoop earrings, one on either side, Damer looked exactly like you would expect a sexagenarian psychedelic professor to look. A boyishly enthusiastic speaker, he said a psychedelic trip had transported him through time to face a deep trauma. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . “If you believe in a ‘mother ayahuasca’ or a healing force, I was allowed to experience my conception and birth and be in my mother’s belly,” Damer said. His birth mother had given him up because she and his father were too poor to raise him. Ayahuasca had released him from the pain. “Being in the belly, I could feel her love, and it healed,” he said. “As a result of the clarity and the opening of the blockage that had been this sort of knot in my belly, my whole system opened wide,” Damer continued. “And I thought for a moment, I could potentially travel through time to a place where I’ve been working on the question of how life began, the birth of us all.” In psychedelic science, a field dominated by scientists who are loath to be pigeon-holed as too woo-woo, Damer, 63, has become a cult figure by wearing his woo on his sleeve. His adoptive mother described him as “in his own world” when his new parents brought him home. And he has been his own thinker ever since. His science cred is sound: a Ph.D. in computer science from University College Dublin in Ireland, former relationships with Xerox and NASA, and papers published in journals like Astrobiology. Currently he is a research associate in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. © 2025 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30052 - Posted: 12.17.2025

By Alex Kwan Despite decades of basic research, many neurological and psychiatric conditions lack effective treatments, or at least treatments that work for everyone. For that reason, when I talk with colleagues about the value of research, I often hear the same negative refrain: “Basic neuroscience has not produced new drugs.” Their argument carries some weight; many of today’s medications trace their origins to long-standing human use or to chance discoveries. The opium poppy, used for thousands of years to ease pain, paved the way for morphine and other opioids that are widely used as analgesics. Ketamine was designed as an anesthetic but was later unexpectedly revealed to be an antidepressant at low doses. Yet this narrative is incomplete. It overlooks a growing list of medications—including zuranolone for postpartum depression, suzetrigine for pain, and the gepants class of migraine medicines—that exist only because of insights from basic research. These drugs were not stumbled upon or borrowed from traditional remedies. They were born out of a long arc of studies in the lab. These success stories matter, because they demonstrate that neuroscience research can deliver new medicines. Acknowledging and publicizing such successes is especially important now, as public funding for basic research in the United States faces growing cuts and restrictions. The development of zuranolone stemmed from an observation about allopregnanolone, a steroid our bodies naturally produce. It has little interaction with steroid receptors and instead acts on GABA receptors in the brain, making neurons less excitable. In the late 1990s, researchers reported that allopregnanolone levels in the rat brain rise dramatically during pregnancy, reaching concentrations of up to three times higher than normal. Just before giving birth, however, the level drops precipitously. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Depression; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 30051 - Posted: 12.17.2025

By Jan Hoffman To treat their pain, anxiety and sleep problems, millions of Americans turn to cannabis, which is now legal in 40 states for medical use. But a new review of 15 years of research concludes that the evidence of its benefits is often weak or inconclusive, and that nearly 30 percent of medical cannabis patients meet criteria for cannabis use disorder. “The evidence does not support the use of cannabis or cannabinoids at this point for most of the indications that folks are using it for,” said Dr. Michael Hsu, an addiction psychiatrist and clinical instructor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the lead author of the review, which was published last month in the medical journal JAMA. (Cannabis refers to the entire plant; cannabinoids are its many compounds.) The analysis arrives amid a surging acceptance and normalization of cannabis products, a $32 billion industry. For the review, addiction experts at academic medical centers across the country studied more than 2,500 clinical trials, guidelines and surveys conducted mostly in the United States and Canada. They found a wide gulf between the health purposes for which the public seeks out cannabis and what gold-standard science shows about its effectiveness. The researchers distinguished between medical cannabis, sold at dispensaries, and pharmaceutical-grade cannabinoids — the handful of medicines approved by the Food and Drug Administration with formulations containing either low-grade THC, a psychoactive compound, or CBD, a nonintoxicating compound. Those medicines, including Marinol, Syndros and Cesamet, are available by prescription at conventional pharmacies and have had good results in easing chemotherapy-related nausea, stimulating the appetite of patients with debilitating illnesses like H.I.V./AIDS, and easing some pediatric seizure disorders. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 30045 - Posted: 12.13.2025

By Siddhant Pusdekar A single dose of psilocybin leads to widespread network-specific changes to cortical circuitry in mice, according to a new study published today in Cell. The results help explain how psilocybin can bring about lasting changes in behavior, and they pinpoint “the neurons that are most affected,” says Andrea Gomez, assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study. Specifically, the psychedelic strengthens cortical inputs from sensory brain areas and weakens inputs into cortico-cortical recurrent loops. Overall, these network changes suggest that psychedelics reroute information in a way that enhances responses to the outside world and reduces rumination, says study investigator Alex Kwan, professor of biomedical engineering at Cornell University. “This study provides some more mechanistic insight for why the drug may be a good antidepressant.” And the rewiring itself is not static, Kwan adds: “It can be influenced by manipulating neural activity” during psychedelic treatment. With this locus of psychedelic-induced changes identified, researchers can unpack how these neuronal ensembles coordinate “to create particular percepts or particular cognitions,” Gomez says. Kwan’s team focused on the mouse dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), which includes the anterior cingulate cortex—an important hub for the serotonin receptors that psilocybin targets. One dose of psilocybin increases dendritic spine growth in the medial prefrontal cortex of mice, an effect that lasts for at least a month, according to a 2021 study by Kwan’s team. And the treatment reduces the animals’ learned stress-related behaviors, but only if pyramidal tract neurons—one of the major types of excitatory neurons in the dmPFC—are active, Kwan’s group reported in April. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 30042 - Posted: 12.06.2025

Elie Dolgin Last April, neuroscientist Sue Grigson received an e-mail from a man detailing his years-long struggle to kick addiction — first to opioids, and then to the very medication meant to help him quit. The man had stumbled on research by Grigson, suggesting that certain anti-obesity medications could help to reduce rats’ addiction to drugs such as heroin and fentanyl. He decided to try quitting again, this time while taking semaglutide, the blockbuster GLP-1 drug better known as Ozempic. “That’s when he wrote to me,” says Grigson, who works at Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine in Hershey. “He said that he was drug- and alcohol-free for the first time in his adult life.” Stories like this have been spreading fast in the past few years, through online forums, weight-loss clinics and news headlines. They describe people taking diabetes and weight-loss drugs such as semaglutide (also marketed as Wegovy) and tirzepatide (sold as Mounjaro or Zepbound) who find themselves suddenly able to shake long-standing addictions to cigarettes, alcohol and other drugs. And now, clinical data are starting to back them up. Earlier this year, a team led by Christian Hendershot, a psychologist now at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, reported in a landmark randomized trial that weekly injections of semaglutide cut alcohol consumption1 — a key demonstration that GLP-1 drugs can alter addictive behaviour in people with a substance-use disorder. More than a dozen randomized clinical studies testing GLP-1 drugs for addiction are now under way worldwide, with some results expected in the next few months. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Obesity
Link ID: 30036 - Posted: 12.03.2025

Mark Brown Sophisticated and deadly “brain weapons” that can attack or alter human consciousness, perception, memory or behaviour are no longer the stuff of science fiction, two British academics argue. Michael Crowley and Malcolm Dando, of Bradford University, are about to publish a book that they believe should be a wake-up call to the world. They are this weekend travelling to The Hague for a key meeting of states, arguing that the human mind is a new frontier in warfare and there needs to be urgent global action to prevent the weaponisation of neuroscience. “It does sound like science fiction,” said Crowley. “The danger is that it becomes science fact.” The book, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, explores how advances in neuroscience, pharmacology and artificial intelligence are coming together to create a new threat. “We are entering an era where the brain itself could become a battlefield,” said Crowley. “The tools to manipulate the central nervous system – to sedate, confuse or even coerce – are becoming more precise, more accessible and more attractive to states.” The book traces the fascinating, if appalling, history of state-sponsored research into central nervous system (CNS)-acting chemicals. During the cold war and after, the US, Soviet Union and China all “actively sought” to develop CNS-acting weapons, said Crowley. Their purpose was to cause prolonged incapacitation to people, including “loss of consciousness or sedation or hallucination or incoherence or paralysis and disorientation”. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Aggression
Link ID: 30023 - Posted: 11.22.2025

By Kevin Berger Steve Ramirez was feeling on top of the world in 2015. His father, Pedro Ramirez, had snuck into the United States in the 1980s to escape the civil war in El Salvador. Pedro Ramirez held jobs as a door-to-door salesman for tombstones, a janitor in a diner, and a technician in an animal lab. After years of ’round-the-clock work, Pedro Ramirez became a U.S. citizen. And here was his son, born in America, with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, still in his 20s, being celebrated as one of the most exciting and promising neuroscientists in the country. Steve Ramirez had published research papers with his MIT mentor Xu Liu that reported how they used lasers to erase fear memories, spur positive memories, and even fabricate new memories in the brain. The experiments were only in mice. But they were impressive. Memories are made of networks of brain cells called engrams. The lasers targeted specific cells in engrams. Zap those cells and the whole engram was muted. The pair of neuroscientists gave a popular TED Talk on memory manipulation and were featured in international press stories that invariably mentioned the plotlines in the movies Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Inception could be real. Bad memories could be deleted. New memories could be implanted. One night in 2013 Ramirez and Liu were celebrating the publication of one of their papers in a jazz lounge at the top of the Prudential Building in Boston. The music was grooving, and the city below glittered like stars. Ramirez thought, I’ve never been so happy and so fully alive. In early 2015, Liu, age 37, died suddenly. There had been no warning signs. Ramirez had never had a friend like Liu. Liu opened his mind to experiences in science he couldn’t have imagined. Their relationship felt organic from Ramirez’s first day in the lab. Liu joked they would always have chemistry doing science together. Grief is when the future your brain plans for is cut off. Ramirez’s thoughts of doing science without Liu became a trapdoor that landed him in a cellar of pain. © 2025 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30007 - Posted: 11.12.2025

By Paula Span For years, the two patients had come to the Penn Memory Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where doctors and researchers follow people with cognitive impairment as they age, as well as a group with normal cognition. Both patients, a man and a woman, had agreed to donate their brains after they died for further research. “An amazing gift,” said Dr. Edward Lee, the neuropathologist who directs the brain bank at the university’s Perelman School of Medicine. “They were both very dedicated to helping us understand Alzheimer’s disease.” The man, who died at 83 with dementia, had lived in the Center City neighborhood of Philadelphia with hired caregivers. The autopsy showed large amounts of amyloid plaques and tau tangles, the proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease, spreading through his brain. Researchers also found infarcts, small spots of damaged tissue, indicating that he had suffered several strokes. By contrast, the woman, who was 84 when she died of brain cancer, “had barely any Alzheimer’s pathology,” Dr. Lee said. “We had tested her year after year, and she had no cognitive issues at all.” The man had lived a few blocks from Interstate 676, which slices through downtown Philadelphia. The woman had lived a few miles away in the suburb of Gladwyne, Pa., surrounded by woods and a country club. The amount of air pollution she was exposed to — specifically, the level of fine particulate matter called PM2.5 — was less than half that of his exposure. Was it a coincidence that he had developed severe Alzheimer’s while she had remained cognitively normal? With increasing evidence that chronic exposure to PM2.5, a neurotoxin, not only damages lungs and hearts but is also associated with dementia, probably not. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 30000 - Posted: 11.05.2025

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 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

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 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

Mohana Basu The opioid class of drugs includes heroin and morphine. Unlike those drugs, which are derived from naturally occurring opium, nitazenes are synthesized from scratch in a laboratory. The first nitazenes were developed as painkillers in the 1950s, but were never approved for medical use because they carried a high risk of dangerous side effects such loss of consciousness, coma and death. But since 2019, there has been a rise in the reported use of nitazenes, according to the World Drug Report 2025, which was released in June. In 2023, the report states, 20 different nitazenes were seized by authorities across 28 countries and reported to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Early Warning Advisory on New Psychoactive Substances. Nitazenes can be as much as 500 times more potent than opium-derived drugs. For example, butonitazene is 2.5 times more potent than heroin, whereas isotonitazene and etonitazene are 250 and 500 times more potent, respectively. This means that just a tiny amount can be deadly. In the United Kingdom, there were 179 confirmed deaths from nitazene overdoses in the year to 31 May 2024. And reports suggest that thousands of people might have died from nitazene overdoses in the United States since 2019. In Australia, researchers note that the unpredictable presence of nitazenes in various drugs is increasing the risk of overdose in the country. Most nitazene overdoses are unintentional, says Suzanne Nielsen, an addiction researcher at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Overdose tends to occur when nitazenes are sold as other drugs, such as heroin, oxycodone and MDMA (also known as ecstasy). Overdoses can be treated with naloxone, a drug that has long been used to treat other opioid overdoses. More awareness of this among drug users and their families could help save lives, Nielsen adds. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29963 - Posted: 10.11.2025