Tag Archives: News

Saunas Are the Next Frontier in Fighting Depression

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WIRED

The preliminary results of a clinical trial of using heat exposure to combat depression are in—and are fueling cautious optimism that sauna practice could become an accepted treatment.

Depression runs hot. In the 1980s, psychiatrists began noticing that patients with depressive symptoms had higher body temperatures compared to people without, and that their body temperatures didn’t ebb and flow as much throughout the day. The more severe a patient’s depression, the higher their temperature tended to be.

Researchers have since noticed that when someone’s depression improves, their body temperature regularizes, “no matter how their depression got better—electroconvulsive therapy, psychotherapy, antidepressants, whatever,” says Ashley Mason, a clinical psychologist at the UC San Francisco Osher Center for Integrative Health. This got Mason thinking: If the two are linked, what happens to a depressed person’s symptoms if you provoke a change in their temperature?

Read the full story in WIRED

Umbilical cord blood: a lifeline for pediatric diseases

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DRUG DISCOVERY NEWS

Doctors are recording a wave of wins using cord blood to heal sick children. The clinical evidence suggests that more wins may come.

Caridad Martinez has a bone to pick with bone marrow. In 2008, during her pediatric bone marrow transplant fellowship, Martinez met newborns with severe immunodeficiencies. Those patients’ bone marrow manufactured dysfunctional blood and immune cells. The kids were dying. The standard remedy was to fetch marrow from a donor to hopefully replace the faulty cells with healthier ones.

However, finding a bone marrow match can be hard, especially for racial and ethnic minorities. “You don’t have the same representation of donors,” said Martinez, who is now a bone marrow transplantation researcher at Baylor College of Medicine and a physician at Texas Children’s Hospital. White patients have a 79 percent chance of finding an unrelated donor; Black and African American patients have just a 29 percent chance (1). At the time of Martinez’s fellowship, marrow transplants were a stalwart in the field, but she noticed an urgent need to challenge the status quo. She found that opportunity with a then-budding type of transplant that she felt might be more accessible: transplanting blood from umbilical cords.

Read the full story in the February Issue of Drug Discovery News

How Your Body Adapts to Extreme Cold

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WIRED

Scientists are finding a dynamic story in human physiology linked to frigid temperatures—a story that climate change may rewrite.

A bitter winter storm is sweeping across the north-east of North America this weekend, and is expected to bring significant snow to New York City for the first time in two years. Low temperatures around freezing are expected to last into next week.

If this is making you miserable, it’s because you, like most people, overwhelmingly prefer hot places. That group does not include Cara Ocobock, a biological anthropologist at University of Notre Dame who is one of the scientists trying to understand how the human body adjusts to extreme cold. “I just handle cold much better than I can handle heat,” says Ocobock.

Researchers like Ocobock have recently uncovered a variety of physiological adaptations linked to cold. Those range from anatomical to metabolic changes, and can stem from generations of natural selection or simply the short-term effects of acclimatization. These discoveries help people make practical decisions today, and most important to Ocobock, they hint at what we should expect in an increasingly capricious climate where winter cyclones freeze people in what are normally hot places, and heat waves make people swelter in what are normally icy ones.

Read the full story in WIRED

The Hidden Connection That Changed Number Theory

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Quanta Magazine

Quadratic reciprocity lurks around many corners in mathematics. By proving it, number theorists reimagined their whole field.

There are three kinds of prime numbers. The first is a solitary outlier: 2, the only even prime. After that, half the primes leave a remainder of 1 when divided by 4. The other half leave a remainder of 3. (5 and 13 fall in the first camp, 7 and 11 in the second.) There is no obvious reason that remainder-1 primes and remainder-3 primes should behave in fundamentally different ways. But they do.

Read the full story in Quanta

Why Antidepressants Take So Long to Work

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WIRED

A clinical trial reveals the first evidence of how the brain restructures physically in the first month on SSRIs—and the link between neuroplasticity and depression.

CLINICAL DEPRESSION IS considered one of the most treatable mood disorders, but neither the condition nor the drugs used against it are fully understood. First-line SSRI treatments (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) likely free up more of the neurotransmitter serotonin to improve communication between neurons. But the question of how SSRIs enduringly change a person’s mood has never returned completely satisfying answers.

In fact, SSRIs often don’t work. Scientists estimate that over 30 percent of patients don’t benefit from this class of antidepressants. And even when they do, the mood effects of SSRIs take several weeks to kick in, although chemically, they achieve their goal within a day or two. (SSRIs raise the levels of serotonin in the brain by blocking a “transporter” protein that decreases serotonin levels.) “It’s really been a puzzle to many people: Why this long time?” says Gitte Knudsen, a neurobiologist and neurologist at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. “You take an antibiotic and it starts working immediately. That’s not been the case with the SSRIs.”

Read the full story in WIRED

A Revelation About Trees Is Messing With Climate Calculations

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WIRED

Trees make clouds by releasing small quantities of vapors called “sesquiterpenes.” Scientists are learning more—and it’s making climate models hazy.

EVERY YEAR BETWEEN September and December, Lubna Dada makes clouds. Dada, an atmospheric scientist, convenes with dozens of her colleagues to run experiments in a 7,000-gallon stainless steel chamber at CERN in Switzerland. “It’s like science camp,” says Dada, who studies how natural emissions react with ozone to create aerosols that affect the climate.

Clouds are the largest source of uncertainty in climate predictions. Depending on location, cloud cover can reflect sunlight away from land and ocean that would otherwise absorb its heat—a rare perk in the warming world. But clouds can also trap heat over Arctic and Antarctic ice. Scientists want to know more about what causes clouds to form, and if that effect is cooling or heating. And most of all, says Dada, “We want to know how we humans have changed clouds.”

Read the full story in WIRED

Florida’s War With Invasive Pythons Has a New Twist

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WIRED

It may not be possible to eradicate the state’s tens of thousands of Burmese pythons. But the local wildlife is biting back—and humans wielding new tech can help.

WHILE DRIVING IN the swamplands some 40 miles west of Miami, Mike Kirkland noticed a log lying in the road ahead, so he and his colleague stepped out of their white GMC work truck. This was no log. “As we got closer, we realized it was a python,” he says. “It was so big, it looked like a fallen tree.” Kirkland asked the colleague to hang back, then crept to within five feet of the predator as it basked on the warm pavement.

“She saw me,” he says. “I’m 5’11”. And she picked herself up and practically looked me in the eye.” The snake’s sheer size gave him pause—but not for long. She stretched open her mouth, revealing dozens of curved teeth as sharp as daggers, then launched her head at Kirkland. He dodged a couple of strikes before spotting an opening to grab the snake’s head. The nonvenomous 17-foot constrictor then tried to wrap herself around the sweating Kirkland, who slipped through coil after coil. About 20 minutes later, the exhausted snake gave in, and Kirkland euthanized the animal.

Read the full story in WIRED

Bears Are Coming to a Campground Near You

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WIRED

Extreme heat and other weather events are driving bears closer to humans’ campgrounds and hiking trails—and that’s no good for either species.

STEPS AWAY FROM the public restrooms in Yosemite Village, a buzzy stop in Yosemite National Park’s iconic valley, sits a brown metal dumpster. Visitors reach up to open the trash chute. Their peanut butter jars and apple cores tumble into a sealed compartment. The slot slams shut. Then, they clip a tethered steel carabiner through a loop, which prevents less dextrous creatures from getting access. “USE CLIP,” reads a sticker on the chute. “SAVE A BEAR.”

Read the full story in WIRED

A Hair Loss Study Raises New Questions About Aging Cells

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WIRED

A protein secreted by seemingly dormant cells in skin moles causes hair to grow again. That’s a big—and potentially useful—surprise.

MAKSIM PLIKUS loves talking about hair. The cell biologist from the University of California, Irvine rattles off obscure facts: Sloth hair has a green tinge thanks to symbiotic algae; African crested rats evolved hollow hairs, which they slather with a pasty bark-derived toxin to defend themselves; his last name comes from a Latvian word for “bald.” Growing up in Eastern Europe (he’s neither Latvian nor bald, despite his name), Plikus aspired to do biomedical research. He joined a lab that had him dissecting rat whiskers under a microscope. It was hard, and his hands would shake. But eventually he got the hang of it. “I started to appreciate just the beauty of the follicle,” he says.

Read the full story in WIRED

The One-Shot Drug That Keeps On Dosing

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WIRED

Chronic illness patients often struggle to keep up with medications that need frequent, timely doses. What if a single shot lasted for months?

ON AVERAGE, PATIENTS with chronic illnesses follow their prescribed treatments about 50 percent of the time. That’s a problem. If drugs aren’t taken regularly, on time, and in the right doses, the treatment may not work, and the person’s condition can worsen.

The issue isn’t that people are unwilling to take their prescriptions. It’s that some drugs, like HIV medications, require unwavering commitment. And essential medicines, like insulin, can be brutally expensive. Plus, the Covid pandemic illustrated the difficulties of delivering perishable follow-up vaccine shots to regions with no cold chain. “Are we really squeezing all the utility out of those drugs and vaccines?” asks Kevin McHugh, a bioengineer at Rice University. “The answer is, in general, no. And sometimes we’re missing out on a lot.”

Read the full story in WIRED