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

By Catherine Offord Neuroscientists have been studying synapses, the fundamental junctions that allow rapid communication between neurons, for well over a century. But now, a research team has identified a different set of neuronal connections in the brain—one that might bypass synapses altogether, the group reports today in Science. Using high-resolution images of mouse and human brains, the researchers documented a network of tubes, each about 3 micrometers long and just a few hundred nanometers thick, connecting neurons to one another. In mouse cells, the team found evidence of neuron-to-neuron transfer of electrical signals via these nanotubes, and even the passage of proteins linked to Alzheimer’s disease. “We’ve been looking at the brain forever now, and every once in a while, a surprise comes along,” says Lary Walker, a neuroscientist and professor emeritus at Emory University who was not involved in the work. Although there’s still a lot to pin down about these nanotubes’ basic biology, he suggests the discovery could have wide implications for scientists’ understanding of neuronal communication and disease. Researchers already knew some cells form nanotubes. In a 2004 Science paper, a team in Germany described tiny channels that emerged spontaneously between rat kidney cells in a dish and allowed the transfer of organelles. Studies since then have documented these so-called tunneling nanotubes (TNT) in a variety of cell and tissue types, and have linked their presence to processes including organ development, tissue repair, and the spread of viruses within the body. Recent research has identified TNTs forming between neurons and microglia, the brain’s immune cells, and hinted that they have important functions in brain health and disease. But scientists have struggled to find such conduits connecting neurons to one another in the mammalian brain. The search is particularly tricky because neurons’ branching ends, or dendrites, form a tangled mass with one another, and because researchers lack molecular markers distinguishing nanotubes from other cell structures. © 2025 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain imaging
Link ID: 29957 - Posted: 10.04.2025

By Devin Effinger, Melissa Herman Psychedelics show growing promise as treatments for a variety of psychiatric diseases. Clinical trials have demonstrated rapid and persistent improvements in major depressive disorder, for example, sparking interest among both psychiatrists and neuroscientists. However, the clinical use of psychedelics is challenging; the drugs induce prolonged visual hallucinations and must be administered and monitored by trained staff, which creates barriers in terms of their availability and accessibility. Clinical trials are also challenging. Psychedelics produce profound subjective effects that make it impossible to properly placebo-control or effectively blind participants. And given the widespread cultural fascination with these drugs, it’s difficult to remove expectancy bias—if someone strongly believes a drug will work, that can influence their perception and reporting of their outcome. Moreover, these drugs are typically delivered and tested in combination with psychotherapy. Discerning whether any treatment effects stem from the drug versus the psychotherapy, as well as the role of therapy in clinical response, is a point of debate within the field. To help resolve some of these issues, we need to better understand the neurobiological mechanisms involved. Human imaging studies have shown that some psychedelics, such as psilocybin, produce long-lasting alterations in global connectivity and negative affect. But to design more effective versions of these drugs, we need to uncover their underlying mechanisms of action at greater resolution—something that is possible only through preclinical research at the level of molecular, cellular and systems neuroscience. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 29956 - Posted: 10.04.2025

By Roni Caryn Rabin Women who are pregnant, planning a pregnancy or breastfeeding should be screened for cannabis use and strongly discouraged from it, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said in new clinical guidelines published on Friday. Cannabis use during pregnancy has been rising for years. Many women rely on the drug to cope with nausea and other pregnancy symptoms. But the college warned that mounting evidence linked cannabis to preterm births, low birth weights and a greater need for neonatal intensive care, as well as neurocognitive and behavioral problems in children. “Patients are often using cannabis to help with some kind of medical ailment, not recreationally — in their mind, they think it’s a more natural way to deal with a medical problem,” said Dr. Melissa Russo, an author of the new guidance. “But there are lots of natural things that are not safe,” Dr. Russo said. There are no studies demonstrating that cannabis is effective for pregnant or lactating women, she added, “and research now shows there are potential adverse effects.” The college warned against blood or urine tests for cannabis screening. Instead, it urged physicians to talk with women about their habits, and to encourage them to stop using marijuana as soon as possible while offering alternative therapies for medical ailments. The screening should be universal in an effort to avoid bias and racism, the college said. It noted that pregnant Black and Hispanic women are four to five times as likely as white women to be tested for drug use. Black women are almost five times as likely to be reported to child protective services for suspected drug use. The new guidelines say that cannabis should be discouraged among breastfeeding women, but that breastfeeding should continue even with use of the drug because the benefits most likely outweigh the potential risks. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29942 - Posted: 09.24.2025

By Sara Kiley Watson Humans started brewing alcohol for consumption thousands of years ago, and researchers have suggested that our ability to break down booze in our bodies has evolutionary roots dating back millions of years. Alcohol, known to scientists as ethanol, occurs naturally throughout nature, when microbes like bacteria and yeast break down sugars. This process of fermentation, harnessed by humans since ancient times, has given us the gifts of cheese, pickles, and wine, among other delights.* Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . But humans are far from the only creatures that imbibe—aye ayes, a species of lemur, will seek out nectar with a higher alcohol content, and spider monkey urine has been found to contain secondary metabolites of alcohol. Wild chimps, with whom humans share over 95 percent of our DNA, were caught on film snacking on fermenting fruit with their buddies earlier this year. Now, for the first time, researchers have discovered just how much alcohol some chimps are getting out of their fermented fruit snacks. In a new paper published in Science Advances, a team of scientists from the United States and the Ivory Coast reported that, in the course of a day, the wild chimps in their study consumed about 14 grams of pure ethanol. That’s about the equivalent, adjusting for body mass, of a human imbibing more than one standard drink a day, says University of California, Berkeley graduate student and study author Aleksey Maro. “We can say, pretty officially, that animals are chronically ingesting ethanol, especially our chimpanzee relatives,” Maro says. Maro and his colleagues made their discovery by following around wild chimps at two national parks in Africa—Kibale in Uganda and Taï in Ivory Coast—and scooping up test samples of 20 species of ripe fruits that the chimps typically like to eat. What they found is that these fruits have an average alcohol content of around 0.26 percent by weight. That might not sound like much, but primatologists at these locations estimate that chimps eat a whopping 10 pounds—or some 7 to 14 percent of their body weight—of fruit a day. The apes tended to prefer a fig called the Ficus mucuso at Kibale and the plum-esque fruit from Parinari excelsa trees at Taï. These treats were among the fruits with the highest alcohol content. © 2025 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Evolution
Link ID: 29937 - Posted: 09.20.2025

By Sofia Caetano Avritzer When Canada legalized cannabis in 2018, its effects on human health were all over the news. Cyntia Duval, a women’s health researcher at the University of Toronto at the time, wondered how its consumption might affect female fertility. To her surprise, there was almost no information on the subject — though there was plenty of data on marijuana’s effects on pregnancy and male fertility. Chemicals in cannabis may push eggs to become ready for fertilization. But this may come at a cost: more eggs with the wrong number of chromosomes, Duval and colleagues now report in a study published September 9 in Nature Communications. Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, is the main psychoactive chemical in marijuana. It binds to cannabinoid receptors in the brain. But these receptors are all over our bodies, including in our reproductive organs. The receptors usually bind endocannabinoids, molecules naturally produced by the body and essential for normal bodily functions like the production of eggs and sperm. Consuming THC can affect cannabinoid receptors in the reproductive system. Many studies report that using cannabis decreases sperm count and motility. Men are usually told to avoid cannabis for at least three months before trying to conceive, Duval says. But what about women? © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 29922 - Posted: 09.10.2025

Jon Hamilton A rigorous new study finds that a single dose of LSD can ease anxiety and depression for months. The study involved 198 adults with generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD, a disabling form of anxiety that affects about 1 in 10 people over the course of a year. Participants who got lower doses of LSD (25 or 50 micrograms) did no better than those who got a placebo. But people who received higher doses (100 or 200 micrograms) responded quickly, a team reports in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "By the next day, they were showing strong improvements," says Dr. David Feifel of Kadima Neuropsychiatry Institute in San Diego, one of the 22 centers that participated in the study. "And those improvements held out all the way to the end of the study, which was 12 weeks." But it's unclear whether some of the improvement was related to non-drug factors like the sensory environment in which people were treated, says Robin Carhart-Harris, a psychedelics researcher at the University of California, San Francisco who was not involved in the study. "The safety looks good, the tolerability looks good," he says, "but where is the depth of information about the way you delivered this product?" Carhart-Harris, like many scientists who study psychedelics, believes that successful treatment is more likely if a person has the right mindset when beginning a trip and if the trip occurs in a place with the right sensory environment. "It's characterized by continuous worry, inability to relax, and all the physical manifestations, racing heart rates and sweatiness," Feifel says. It's also frequently accompanied by depression. Current antidepressant and antianxiety drugs are inadequate for about half of people diagnosed with GAD. © 2025 npr

Keyword: Stress; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29917 - Posted: 09.06.2025

By Danielle Ivory. Julie Tate and Megan Twohey Amy Enochs was texting with other parents, all wondering why their central Ohio elementary school had gone into lockdown, when the school called. Several fourth graders, including Ms. Enochs’s daughter, had eaten marijuana gummies and were being taken to the hospital with racing pulses, nausea and hallucinations. A classmate had found the gummies at home and mistaken them for Easter candy. Ms. Enochs recalled hyperventilating that spring day three years ago. “I was scared to death,” she said, her voice breaking. “It was shock and panic.” As legalization and commercialization of cannabis have spread across the United States, making marijuana edibles more readily available, the number of cannabis-related incidents reported to poison control centers has sharply increased: from about 930 cases in 2009 to more than 22,000 last year, data from America’s Poison Centers shows. Of those, more than 13,000 caused documented negative effects and were classified by the organization as nonlethal poisonings. These numbers are almost certainly an undercount, public health officials say, because hospitals are not required to report such cases. More than 75 percent of the poisonings last year involved children or teenagers. In most instances of cannabis exposure, the physical effects were not severe, according to the poison control data. But a growing number of poisonings have led to breathing problems or other life-threatening consequences. In 2009, just 10 such cases were reported to poison centers; last year, there were more than 620 — a vast majority of them children or teens. More than 100 required ventilators. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29884 - Posted: 08.13.2025

By Shoshana Walter In 2005, J. was a young pharmacist, in the middle of a divorce, when he decided he needed a change. He was outgoing, a former rugby player, and he had begun to feel out of place among his quiet co-workers. “Does a pharmacist ever come over to you and chitchat?” he says. “They’re very mousy and very introverted.” For his new job, J. — who asked to be referred to by his first initial to protect his privacy — had in mind something a little more glamorous: pharmaceutical sales. He found a contract position at Reckitt Benckiser Pharmaceuticals, a U.S. subsidiary of a household-goods company based in Britain that was best known for Lysol and French’s mustard. The company had recently introduced Suboxone, a groundbreaking new medication in the United States that treats opioid addiction. Much like nicotine gum, Suboxone worked as a substitute, binding to the same receptors in the brain as illicit opioids, taking away withdrawal symptoms, quelling cravings and making it hard to continue misusing drugs. At other companies — like Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin — sales reps regularly trawled doctors’ offices and used company credit cards to treat physicians to expensive meals and lavish trips. At Reckitt, sales reps were told they had a different mandate. “You weren’t a credit card on legs,” says Chris Hassan, who oversaw Reckitt’s sales force at the time. Reps held the title “clinical liaisons,” and their job was not only to sell Suboxone but also to convince doctors that addiction was a disease, not a moral failing, and that it could be treated with medication instead of prison sentences. Reckitt hired people of all backgrounds — counselors and behavioral-health clinicians as well as traditional salespeople, including ones they recruited from Purdue Pharma. Those who had sold OxyContin, Hassan notes, seemed especially motivated to sell the solution to the problem they had helped cause. “The people that had mirrors in their home and had to look at themselves, they didn’t like what they saw,” he says. “Purdue was a great source of hires for us.” Almost right away, however, it became clear that most doctors were not lining up to care for addicted patients. Some were the same physicians who were driving the opioid crisis by overprescribing painkillers. Others felt ill equipped to treat substance users or dismissed such patients as untrustworthy. An addicted patient was “a liar or crook,” says George Agapios, an Indiana doctor who initially resisted offering treatment. He describes many physicians’ feelings in that era as: “The people associated with it were not exactly the cream of the crop — so let’s not waste our time.” Several doctors turned Reckitt reps away from their offices. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29880 - Posted: 08.09.2025

By Bridget Alex More than 10 million years ago, ancestral apes in Africa rummaged through leaf litter for tasty morsels: fallen, fermenting fruit. Tapping this resource may have given some apes a nutritional boost, an advantage that could have paved the way for the evolution of our own alcohol tolerance. A study out today in BioScience adds support to this so-called “drunken monkey” hypothesis by examining just how often living apes indulge in fallen—presumably boozy—fruits. The research also gives this behavior a much-needed name: “scrumping.” The work provides “a fresh and useful perspective on the importance of fallen fruit,” says Amanda Melin, a biological anthropologist at the University of Calgary who was not involved with the research. She adds that scrumping “is an efficient and evocative way to describe this behavior” that she will use in the future. The form of alcohol we imbibe, ethanol, occurs naturally when yeast grows in fruits, saps, or nectars. Many animals, from elephants to songbirds, can get buzzed off these wild taps. Meanwhile, most human societies have invented ways to ferment food and drink. Biomolecular traces on artifacts show that by at least 8000 years ago, people in the Caucasus region were brewing alcoholic beverages from grapes, while people in China were sipping on boozy drinks made from many ingredients, including millet, rice, ginger, and yam. These beverages’ arrival coincides roughly with the start of farming. In fact, some scholars think cereals may have been domesticated for beer rather than bread. The idea that our species’ ability to consume alcohol arose in our distant primate ancestors was formulated by evolutionary biologist Robert Dudley 25 years ago as he was studying monkeys—hence the name of the hypothesis—rather than the chimps and other apes analyzed in the new study. Rank, fermenting fruit is easy to sniff out, the idea goes, so being able to eat it would have given ancient apes an additional resource that other animals avoided.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Evolution
Link ID: 29876 - Posted: 08.06.2025

By Diana Kwon A new sensor makes it possible for the first time to simultaneously track dopamine and up to two additional molecules in the brains of living animals. The sensor, dubbed HaloDA1.0, uses a novel dopamine-tagging system that emits light at the far-red end of the color spectrum, according to the team behind the work. “There’s a real need to monitor multiple relevant molecules, as they’re doing here,” says Nicolas Tritsch, assistant professor of neuroscience at McGill University, who was not involved in the study. Because dopamine is involved in a range of key brain functions, when studying its effects on a cell it’s important to consider other neuromodulators that are released at the same time, as well as the signaling cascades these molecules may trigger, Tritsch says. Most dopamine-tracking strategies genetically encode a naturally occurring fluorescent protein into dopamine receptors; when dopamine attaches to the modified receptors, the fluorescent protein changes shape and emits light. But naturally occurring fluorescent proteins have a limited color palette, which has made it difficult to develop sensors that can go beyond two-color imaging, says study investigator Yulong Li, professor of life sciences at Peking University. Instead of genetically encoding a fluorescent protein, HaloDA1.0 attaches a synthetic molecule called HaloTag to dopamine receptors. This tag binds tightly to previously developed artificial dyes that change shape and fluoresce in the far-red spectrum when dopamine binds to its receptors. Because the dyes fluoresce at the far end of the red spectrum, it leaves room for other sensors to glow at different wavelengths. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29868 - Posted: 07.26.2025

By Jan Hoffman Jamie Mains showed up for her checkup so high that there was no point in pretending otherwise. At least she wasn’t shooting fentanyl again; medication was suppressing those cravings. Now it was methamphetamine that manacled her, keeping her from eating, sleeping, thinking straight. Still, she could not stop injecting. “Give me something that’s going to help me with this,” she begged her doctor. “There is nothing,” the doctor replied. Overcoming meth addiction has become one of the biggest challenges of the national drug crisis. Fentanyl deaths have been dropping, in part because of medications that can reverse overdoses and curb the urge to use opioids. But no such prescriptions exist for meth, which works differently on the brain. In recent years, meth, a highly addictive stimulant, has been spreading aggressively across the country, rattling communities and increasingly involved in overdoses. Lacking a medical treatment, a growing number of clinics are trying a startlingly different strategy: To induce patients to stop using meth, they pay them. The approach has been around for decades, but most clinics were uneasy about adopting it because of its bluntly transactional nature. Patients typically come in twice a week for a urine drug screen. If they test negative, they are immediately handed a small reward: a modest store voucher, a prize or debit card cash. The longer they abstain from use, the greater the rewards, with a typical cumulative value of nearly $600. The programs, which usually last three to six months, operate on the principle of positive reinforcement, with incentives intended to encourage repetition of desired behavior — somewhat like a parent who permits a child to stay up late as a reward for good grades. Research shows that the approach, known in addiction treatment as “contingency management,” or CM, produces better outcomes for stimulant addiction than counseling or cognitive behavioral therapy. Follow-up studies of patients a year after they successfully completed programs show that about half remained stimulant-free. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29854 - Posted: 07.16.2025

By Ellen Barry Few practices in mental health are debated more than the long-term use of antidepressant medications, which are prescribed to roughly one in nine adults in the United States, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A reassessment began in 2019, when two British researchers published a study that found that 56 percent of patients suffered from withdrawal symptoms when they stopped antidepressant medications and that 46 percent of those described their symptoms as severe. The findings made headlines in Britain and had a powerful ripple effect, forcing changes to psychiatric training and prescribing guidelines. And they fed a growing grass-roots movement calling to rein in the prescription of psychotropic drugs that has, in recent months, gained new influence in the United States with the rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary. A new study, published on Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, makes the case that these warnings were overblown. The authors of the new paper found that a week after quitting antidepressants, patients reported symptoms like dizziness, nausea and vertigo, but that they remained, on average, “below the threshold for clinically significant” withdrawal. Dr. Sameer Jauhar, one of the authors, said the new analysis should reassure both patients and prescribers. “The messaging that came out in 2019 was all antidepressants can cause this and this can happen in this proportion of people, and that just doesn’t survive any scientific scrutiny,” said Dr. Jauhar, a professor of psychiatry at Imperial College London. He criticized the earlier study for including data from online surveys as a quantitative measure, for failing to control for the placebo effect, and for failing to distinguish between various types of antidepressants. These methodologies, he said, led to inflated estimates of withdrawal. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 29850 - Posted: 07.12.2025

Sydney Lupkin Jerry Abrams, a 64-year-old marketing strategist in Minneapolis, used to run marathons. But two decades of degenerative spine disease have left him unable to run — and he's grieving. For Abrams, losing running felt like "the loss of a loved one – that friend who's been with you every day you needed him. "You know, having that taken away from you because of pain is the hardest thing of all," he says. The constant pain in his lower back makes running impossible. Sometimes, when the pain isn't under control, he can't get out of bed. Abrams has tried taking opioids. They help, but he feels he has to be careful because they're potentially addictive. He's also worried about building up a tolerance to them "I don't ever want to be in a situation where I need surgery and need to recover and opioid medication no longer does what it needs to do," he explains. The Food and Drug Administration approved a new non-opioid drug earlier this year called Journavx. It's a pill for severe acute pain that works by blocking plain signals from where someone hurts. It's offered hope for the 1 in 5 Americans who suffer from chronic pain, but it's also just out of reach. Journavx is the first new kind of painkiller in more than 20 years, and the medical community is cautiously optimistic that Journavx doesn't have the same addictive potential as opioids do. But the new pills are expensive, and not everyone has been able to access them, thanks to a narrowly-focused FDA approval and limited insurance coverage Abrams' doctor wanted him to be able to try Journavx. But the FDA only approved the medication for short-term use for acute pain, which is usually defined as lasting less than three months, such as right after surgery. Because Abrahm's pain is chronic, his insurance wouldn't cover it. A single Journavx pill costs around $15 without insurance, according to Vertex Pharmaceuticals, the drug's manufacturer. © 2025 npr

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29849 - Posted: 07.12.2025