From Science magazine: Cave Johnson is almost ready to start a new study in his secret underground facility. The founder of the Michigan-based technology company Aperture Science, he's invented a portal gun that allows people to teleport to various locations. Now, he and his colleagues want to see whether they can make portals appear on previously unfit surfaces with a new "conversion gel" containing moon dust. "It may be toxic. We are unsure," he wrote in a recent research proposal.

To test the gel, Johnson plans to recruit orphans, homeless people, and the elderly. They'll get 60 bucks — compensation he feels is well worth the risk of their skin potentially peeling off, death due to an artificial intelligence guide becoming sentient, or worse.

None of this is real, of course — Johnson is the villain of the popular video game Portal — but the makeshift ethical review board that evaluated his study was. At a Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research conference conducted online last month, attendees of the session "Mad Science on Trial: The Real Ethical Problems With Fictional Scientists" had some serious concerns with Johnson's research. Would the participants' data be secure and anonymized? Would the team of henchmen include some henchwomen as well? And, most importantly, would there be cake?

The moderators of the session didn't just target Johnson. They asked their audience of 450 virtual attendees to evaluate other fictional mad scientists as well, voting on whether an institutional review board (IRB) — a body of experts that a research institution uses to evaluate whether proposals are ethically sound — should approve their protocols.
Another example used was the scientist in the first-person shooter game Halo who proposed surgically enhancing 6-year-old children with armor, neural interfaces, and other technology to give them combat advantages against a theoretical alien attack.

Science interviewed two of the panelists, one noting "this format is good for making the Instituational Review Board ethics world fun and doing it in a way that kind of stretches people's minds."

Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for submitting the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: The ultraviolet nail polish drying devices used to cure gel manicures may pose more of a public health concern than previously thought. Researchers at the University of California San Diego have studied these ultraviolet (UV) light emitting devices, and found that their use leads to cell death and cancer-causing mutations in human cells. The devices are a common fixture in nail salons, and generally use a particular spectrum of UV light (340-395nm) to cure the chemicals used in gel manicures. While tanning beds use a different spectrum of UV light (280-400nm) that studies have conclusively proven to be carcinogenic, the spectrum used in the nail dryers has not been well studied.

Using three different cell lines -- adult human skin keratinocytes, human foreskin fibroblasts, and mouse embryonic fibroblasts -- the researchers found that the use of these UV emitting devices for just one 20-minute session led to between 20 and 30 percent cell death, while three consecutive 20-minute exposures caused between 65 and 70 percent of the exposed cells to die. Exposure to the UV light also caused mitochondrial and DNA damage in the remaining cells and resulted in mutations with patterns that can be observed in skin cancer in humans. [...] The researchers caution that while the results show the harmful effects of the repeated use of these devices on human cells, a long-term epidemiological study would be required before stating conclusively that using these machines leads to an increased risk of skin cancers. However, the results of the study were clear: The chronic use of these nail polish drying machines is damaging to human cells. "We saw multiple things: first, we saw that DNA gets damaged," said Ludmil Alexandrov, a professor of bioengineering as well as cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego, and corresponding author of the study published in Nature Communications. "We also saw that some of the DNA damage does not get repaired over time, and it does lead to mutations after every exposure with a UV-nail polish dryer. Lastly, we saw that exposure may cause mitochondrial dysfunction, which may also result in additional mutations. We looked at patients with skin cancers, and we see the exact same patterns of mutations in these patients that were seen in the irradiated cells."

"Our experimental results and the prior evidence strongly suggest that radiation emitted by UV-nail polish dryers may cause cancers of the hand and that UV-nail polish dryers, similar to tanning beds, may increase the risk of early-onset skin cancer," add the researchers. "Nevertheless, future large-scale epidemiological studies are warranted to accurately quantify the risk for skin cancer of the hand in people regularly using UV-nail polish dryers. It is likely that such studies will take at least a decade to complete and to subsequently inform the general public."

An anonymous reader writes:

The pharmaceutical company Moderna didn't present a set of infection data on the company's new Covid-19 booster during meetings last year when [FDA] advisers discussed whether the shot should be authorized and made available to the public
That data suggested the possibility that the updated booster might not be any more effective at preventing Covid-19 infections than the original shots. The data was early and had many limitations, but several advisers told CNN that they were concerned about a lack of transparency.

Specifically, Moderna hid data on actual infection rates among patients who were administered the original booster and those who got the bivalent vaccine. The data showed that the original booster resulted in slightly fewer infections than the bivalent version - though CNN points out that "the primary purpose of the study was not to study infection rates but to do immunogenicity analyses, taking blood from participants and examining their antibody responses to the vaccine."

CNN reports that Moderna "shared the infection data with the FDA and posted the study manuscript before the agency's panel meeting in June," but with an FDA spokesperson complaining that they received the preprint less than a day prior to the advisory committee meeting, and "therefore not provided in an adequate timeframe for it to be included in the agency's meeting materials..."

1.9% of the study participants who received the original booster became infected. Among those who got the updated bivalent vaccine -- the one that scientists hoped would work better -- a higher percentage, 3.2%, became infected.

Both versions of the shot were found to be safe. This infection data was far from complete. The number of study subjects who became infected was very small, and both the patients and the researchers were aware of who was getting the original shot and who was getting the new booster.... [S]ix FDA and CDC advisers interviewed by CNN said that this infection data wouldn't have changed how they voted, because the data had such limitations, but it still should have been presented to them.

Research released by the New England Journal of Medicine found that "boosting with new bivalent mRNA vaccines targeting both the BA.4-BA.5 variant and the D614G strain did not elicit a discernibly superior virus-neutralizing peak antibody response as compared with boosting with the original monovalent vaccines. Limitations of our study include the small sample size and follow-up period of our groups. We also note that the between-group comparisons were not controlled for factors such as age, vaccine type, and health status, which may have had an effect on antibody responses. These findings may be indicative of immunologic imprinting, although follow-up studies are needed to determine whether antibody responses will deviate over time, including after the administration of a second bivalent booster."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: An artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot can write such convincing fake research-paper abstracts that scientists are often unable to spot them, according to a preprint posted on the bioRxiv server in late December1. "I am very worried," says Sandra Wachter, who studies technology and regulation at the University of Oxford, UK, and was not involved in the research. "If we're now in a situation where the experts are not able to determine what's true or not, we lose the middleman that we desperately need to guide us through complicated topics," she adds. Researchers are divided over the implications for science. The chatbot, ChatGPT, creates realistic and intelligent-sounding text in response to user prompts. It is a 'large language model', a system based on neural networks that learn to perform a task by digesting huge amounts of existing human-generated text. Software company OpenAI, based in San Francisco, California, released the tool on November 30, and it is free to use.

Since its release, researchers have been grappling with the ethical issues surrounding its use, because much of its output can be difficult to distinguish from human-written text. Scientists have published a preprint2 and an editorial3 written by ChatGPT. Now, a group led by Catherine Gao at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, has used ChatGPT to generate artificial research-paper abstracts to test whether scientists can spot them. The researchers asked the chatbot to write 50 medical-research abstracts based on a selection published in JAMA, The New England Journal of Medicine, The BMJ, The Lancet and Nature Medicine. They then compared these with the original abstracts by running them through a plagiarism detector and an AI-output detector, and they asked a group of medical researchers to spot the fabricated abstracts.

The ChatGPT-generated abstracts sailed through the plagiarism checker: the median originality score was 100%, which indicates that no plagiarism was detected. The AI-output detector spotted 66% the generated abstracts. But the human reviewers didn't do much better: they correctly identified only 68% of the generated abstracts and 86% of the genuine abstracts. They incorrectly identified 32% of the generated abstracts as being real and 14% of the genuine abstracts as being generated. Wachter says that, if scientists can't determine whether research is true, there could be "dire consequences". As well as being problematic for researchers, who could be pulled down flawed routes of investigation, because the research they are reading has been fabricated, there are "implications for society at large because scientific research plays such a huge role in our society". For example, it could mean that research-informed policy decisions are incorrect, she adds. On the contrary, Arvind Narayanan, a computer scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey, says: "It is unlikely that any serious scientist will use ChatGPT to generate abstracts." He adds that whether generated abstracts can be detected is "irrelevant."

"The question is whether the tool can generate an abstract that is accurate and compelling. It can't, and so the upside of using ChatGPT is minuscule, and the downside is significant," he says.

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved a new Alzheimer's drug that may modestly slow the pace of cognitive decline early in the disease, but also carries risks of swelling and bleeding in the brain. From a report: The approval of the drug, lecanemab, to be marketed as Leqembi, is likely to generate considerable interest from patients and physicians. Studies of the drug -- an intravenous infusion administered every two weeks -- suggest it is more promising than the scant number of other treatments available. Still, several Alzheimer's experts said it was unclear from the medical evidence whether Leqembi could slow cognitive decline enough to be noticeable to patients.

Even a recent report of findings from a large 18-month clinical trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and co-written by scientists from the lead company making the drug, concluded that "longer trials are warranted to determine the efficacy and safety of lecanemab in early Alzheimer's disease." Eisai, a Japanese pharmaceutical company, led the development and testing of the drug. It is partnering with the American company Biogen, maker of the controversial Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm, for its commercialization and marketing, and the companies will split the profits equally. Eisai said the list price for Leqembi (pronounced le-KEM-bee) would be $26,500 per year. The price is slightly lower than Aduhelm's, but higher than that recommended by some analysts.

Slashdot reader guest reader shares some interesting research from the University of Missouri: Nearly 10,000 years ago, humans settling in the Fertile Crescent, the areas of the Middle East surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, made the first switch from hunter-gatherers to farmers. They developed close bonds with the rodent-eating cats that conveniently served as ancient pest-control in society's first civilizations.

A new study at the University of Missouri found this lifestyle transition for humans was the catalyst that sparked the world's first domestication of cats, and as humans began to travel the world, they brought their new feline friends along with them.

Leslie A. Lyons, a feline geneticist and Gilbreath-McLorn endowed professor of comparative medicine in the MU College of Veterinary Medicine, collected and analyzed DNA from cats in and around the Fertile Crescent area, as well as throughout Europe, Asia and Africa, comparing nearly 200 different genetic markers.... Lyons added that while horses and cattle have seen various domestication events caused by humans in different parts of the world at various times, her analysis of feline genetics in the study strongly supports the theory that cats were likely first domesticated only in the Fertile Crescent before migrating with humans all over the world....

Lyons, who has researched feline genetics for more than 30 years, said studies like this also support her broader research goal of using cats as a biomedical model to study genetic diseases that impact both cats and people, such as polycystic kidney disease, blindness and dwarfism.... "[A]nything we can do to study the causes of genetic diseases in cats or how to treat their ailments can be useful for one day treating humans with the same diseases," Lyons said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Deep brain stimulation is already used to treat severe cases of epilepsy and a few movement disorders such as Parkinson's. But depression is more complicated -- partly because we still don't fully understand what's going on in the brain when it occurs. "Depression is a complex illness," says Patricio Riva Posse, a neurologist at the Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, who was not involved in the trial. "It's not like trying to correct one tremor -- there's a whole universe of symptoms." These include low mood, suicidality, inability to experience pleasure, and changes in motivation, sleep, and appetite.

Doctors have been using electricity to treat brain disorders -- including depression -- for decades, and some studies have found that electrodes placed deep inside the brain can jolt some people out of their symptoms. But results vary. Neuroscientists hope that by getting a better idea of what's happening inside the brains of people with symptoms like John's, they can make the treatment more effective. John is one of five people who have volunteered to have their brains probed as part of a clinical trial. At the start of 2020, he had a total of 14 electrodes implanted across his brain. For nine days, he stayed in a hospital with protruding cables wrapped around his head, while neuroscientists monitored how his brain activity correlated with his mood.

The researchers behind the trial say they have developed a "mood decoder" -- a way of being able to work out how someone is feeling just by looking at brain activity. Using the decoder, the scientists hope to be able to measure how severe a person's depression is, and target more precisely where the electrodes are placed to optimize the effect on the patient's mood. So far, they have analyzed the results of three volunteers. What they have found is extremely promising, says Sameer Sheth, a neurosurgeon based at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, who is leading the trial. Not only have he and his colleagues been able to link volunteers' specific brain activity with their mood, but they have also found a way to stimulate a positive mood. "This is the first demonstration of successful and consistent mood decoding of humans in these brain regions," says Sheth. His colleague Jiayang Xiao presented the findings at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in San Diego in November.

Walking like John Cleese's character, Mr. Teabag, in Monty Python's famous "Ministry of Silly Walks" skit requires considerably more energy expenditure than a normal walking gait because the movement is so inefficient, according to a new paper published in the annual Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal. From a report: In fact, just 11 minutes a day of walking like Mr. Teabag was equivalent to 75 minutes of vigorously intense physical activity per week, presenting a novel means of boosting cardiovascular fitness. "Half a century ago, the [Ministry of Silly Walks] skit might have unwittingly touched on a powerful way to enhance cardiovascular fitness in adults," the authors wrote. "Had an initiative to promote inefficient movement been adopted in the early 1970s, we might now be living among a healthier society."

The BMJ's Christmas issue is typically more lighthearted, though the journal maintains that the papers published therein still "adhere to the same high standards of novelty, methodological rigor, reporting transparency, and readability as apply in the regular issue." Past years have included papers on such topics as why 27 is not a dangerous age for musicians, the side effects of sword swallowing, and measuring the toxicity of the concoction brewed in Roald Dahl's 1981 book George's Marvelous Medicine. (It's very toxic indeed.) The most widely read was 1999's infamous "Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal."

An anonymous reader shares a report: A large number of doctors write medicine prescriptions in haste, making it nearly impossible for their patients to understand what they scribbled. This problem has been around for decades and many tech firms have attempted to solve it with little to no success. Now Google is having a go at translating those unfathomable texts.

The search giant announced at its annual conference in India Monday that it is working with pharmacists to work out the handwriting of doctors. The feature, which will be rolled out on Google Lens, will allow users to either take a picture of the prescription or upload one from the photo library. Once the image is processed, the app detects and highlights the medicines mentioned in the note, a Google executive demonstrated.

A new study published in the journal PLoS ONE has reported on the first human tests of an experimental therapy using sound and light to treat Alzheimer's disease (AD). New Atlas reports: Over the last seven years, Li-Huei Tsai and colleagues at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have been investigating an unusual hypothesis. The researchers found toxic proteins associated with Alzheimer's disease could be eliminated from mouse brains following exposure to flickering lights. Further research found the magic frequency was 40 Hz. When animals were exposed to both sound and light at that frequency, improvements in brain health were detected. Of course, these kinds of animal tests don't mean much if they can't be replicated in humans, so after further investigations revealed how this sensory therapy could be affecting a mouse brain, the researchers started preliminary human experiments. Working with colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital, two clinical trials set out to test the therapy in humans.

The first Phase 1 study recruited 43 participants to test whether this kind of light and sound exposure was safe, and did anything to the human brain. Each subject was monitored using EEG measures while experiencing a short exposure to what has been dubbed by the researchers as GENUS (Gamma ENtrainment Using Sensory stimulation). This preliminary study comprised both healthy and cognitively impaired subjects, as well as participants with epilepsy in order to evaluate the seizure potential of the treatment. After a short exposure to the sensory stimulation, the researchers found a number of brain regions synchronize with the 40-Hz frequency.

The second trial recruited 15 participants with early-stage Alzheimer's disease. Each participant was given a device to take home and use for around an hour a day. The device was essentially a small LED white board with an iPad in the middle and a soundbar underneath. While watching videos on the iPad, the LED light panel on the white board would flicker at a rate of 40 Hz and the soundbar would play a 40-Hz tone. Half the cohort was randomized to a sham control condition, exposed to a constant white light and white noise. Compliance was relatively high between both the GENUS and the sham groups, with participants completing the daily requirement of exposure around 90 percent of the time. After around three months of use the researchers could detect statistically significant differences between the two groups, both on brain imaging and memory tests. The researchers are cautious not to overstate their initial findings, the report says. "It's early days for human studies [...], larger cohorts of patients are needed to better understand the impacts of this sensory stimulation and longer trials will hopefully establish more prominent beneficial effects."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The company said a possible melanoma vaccine it is studying with pharmaceutical giant Merck fared well in a small study of patients who had the cancer surgically removed. The drugmakers said a combination of the vaccine and Merck's immunotherapy Keytruda led to a statistically significant improvement in survival before the cancer returned in patients with advanced melanoma. [...] Like Spikevax (the vaccine used to help protect against COVID-19), the potential skin cancer vaccine uses mRNA technology. It trains a patient's immune system to recognize and respond specifically to mutations in the DNA of the patient's tumor.

In a mid-stage clinical trial involving 157 patients, researchers compared the vaccine-Keytruda combination with Keytruda alone. Keytruda, Merck's top seller, primes the body's immune system to detect and fight tumor cells. Regulators have approved it to treat several types of cancer. The patient group that took the potential vaccine and Keytruda saw a 44% reduction in the risk of death or the cancer returning, the companies said. The treatments continued for about a year in both groups unless the disease came back or side effects became too severe. Merck and Moderna expect to start a phase 3 study next year, and the companies say they intend to expand their approach to other tumor types.

"A teenage girl's incurable cancer has been cleared from her body," reports the BBC, "in the first use of a revolutionary new type of medicine...." Doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital used "base editing" to perform a feat of biological engineering to build her a new living drug. Six months later the cancer is undetectable, but Alyssa is still being monitored in case it comes back.

Alyssa, who is 13 and from Leicester, was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in May last year.... Her cancer was aggressive. Chemotherapy, and then a bone-marrow transplant, were unable to rid it from her body.... The team at Great Ormond Street used a technology called base editing, which was invented only six years ago [which] allows scientists to zoom to a precise part of the genetic code and then alter the molecular structure of just one base, converting it into another and changing the genetic instructions. The large team of doctors and scientists used this tool to engineer a new type of T-cell that was capable of hunting down and killing Alyssa's cancerous T-cells....

After a month, Alyssa was in remission and was given a second bone-marrow transplant to regrow her immune system.... Alyssa is just the first of 10 people to be given the drug as part of a clinical trial.
Her mother said that a year ago she'd been dreading Christmas, "thinking this is our last with her". But it wasn't.

And the BBC adds that applying the technology to cancer "only scratches the surface of what base editing could achieve.... There are already trials of base editing under way in sickle-cell disease, as well as high cholesterol that runs in families and the blood disorder beta-thalassemia."

This week the Atlantic published its list of "the 10 Most Promising Breakthrough Innovations of 2022."

"We didn't just get one 'unheard-of' cancer breakthrough; we got several in one year...." Is death reversible? It was this year for several pigs (or, at least, for their organs). By pumping an experimental substance into the veins and arteries of animals that had been lying deceased for an hour, Yale researchers got their hearts to start beating again. The technology is "very far away from use in humans," Stephen Latham, a bioethicist at Yale University, told The New York Times. In the short term, scientists said, they hope that their research could help doctors preserve the organs of the recently deceased for use in transplants. But the longer-term implications of the experiment can't be ignored: If we have the power to reanimate the heart or other organs of the recently deceased, at what point might we be able to reverse sudden deaths? Could we revive soldiers who bleed out on the battlefield? Could we stock hospitals and nursing homes with buckets of the stuff to resuscitate patients? Should every future American household keep some on hand in the event of a terrible accident?

These questions thrust us into the ethical realm and invoke spooky references to "The Monkey's Paw," Pet Sematary, and any number of stories about the dark side of trying to design an escape hatch from mortality. Perhaps, as this technology improves, that debate is on its way. But for millions of people who have lost loved ones to, say, a sudden heart attack or stroke, it's not remotely dystopian to imagine an injection that could reverse tragedies long considered irreversible....

The Power to Synthesize Life (Kind Of)
This summer, scientists grew an embryo in a lab without the use of sperm, or eggs, or a womb. It happened to be that of a mouse. But the species is of secondary importance.... Some scientists I consulted for this project said that the results, which were published this year in the science journal Cell, were the most important scientific breakthrough of 2022.

Scientists are not close to turning stem cells into human babies that make their first gasping cries in antiseptic laboratories. But this work does suggest a major leap forward in our ability to grow synthetic organs and more closely research the relationship between embryonic mutations and developmental diseases. As Paul Tesar, a developmental biologist at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, told Stat, "As soon as the science starts to move into a place where it's feasible to go from a stem cell population in a Petri dish all the way through to organ development, it's a pretty wild and remarkable time."
The article also notes that NuScale's small nuclear reactors received approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and "could be running by the end of the decade." Meanwhile, the start-up Quaise is working on drilling technology "that can vaporize granite with a highly concentrated beam of radio-frequency power. If such a technology became widely available, deep drilling would be commonplace and geothermal energy would be accessible on just about any patch of land. It would be as though humankind conceived of a magic wand that, waved across the Earth, makes any square mile as energy-rich as an oil-gushing stretch of Texas or Saudi Arabia."

The article also suggests one more possibility for the future. "Decades from now, millions of people may actually prefer the consistency and taste of meat that didn't come from an animal, because they'll know what they're buying when a cultivated rib eye is as consistent as an electrical gadget."

"After decades in the shadow of the reigning model for Alzheimer's disease, alternative explanations are finally getting the attention they deserve," writes Quanta magazine — in a 10,000-word update on where we are now: Three decades ago, scientists thought they had cracked the medical mystery of what causes Alzheimer's disease with an idea known as the amyloid cascade hypothesis. It accused a protein called amyloid-beta of forming sticky, toxic plaques between neurons, killing them and triggering a series of events that made the brain waste away.... Decades of work and billions of dollars went into funding clinical trials of dozens of drug compounds that targeted amyloid plaques. Yet almost none of the trials showed meaningful benefits to patients with the disease....

A stream of recent findings has made it clear that other mechanisms may be at least as important as the amyloid cascade as causes of Alzheimer's disease.... The emerging new models of the disease are more complex than the amyloid explanation, and because they are still taking shape, it's not clear yet how some of them may eventually translate into therapies. But because they focus on fundamental mechanisms affecting the health of cells, what's being learned about them might someday pay off in new treatments for a wide variety of medical problems, possibly including some key effects of aging.... While these alternate ideas were once hushed and thrown under the rug, now the field has broadened its attention.
The article explores the theory — derived from research on genetically-engineered mice — that neurons bulging with toxic accumulations of proteins and molecules could be mistaken for classic amyloid plaques outside cells. (But in fact "the extracellular amyloid plaques weren't killing the cells — because the cells were already dead.") Scientists are now also investigating lysosomes, cholesterol metabolism, and even the immune system.

To say that the amyloid hypothesis is dead would be overstating it, said Donald Weaver, a co-director of the Krembil Brain Institute in Toronto, but "I would say that the amyloid hypothesis is insufficient...."

By 2017, 146 drug candidates for treating Alzheimer's disease had been deemed unsuccessful. Only four drugs had been approved, and they treated the symptoms of the disease, not its underlying pathology. The results were so disappointing that in 2018, Pfizer pulled out of Alzheimer's research. A 2021 review that compared the results of 14 of the major trials confirmed that reducing extracellular amyloid did not greatly improve cognition....

The hypothesis took another hit last July when a bombshell article in Science revealed that data in the influential 2006 Nature paper linking amyloid plaques to cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer's disease may have been fabricated. The connection claimed by the paper had convinced many researchers to keep pursuing amyloid theories at the time.

Two studies published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications found a link between several types of bacteria in the gut and depressive symptoms. The first study, titled "Gut microbiome-wide association study of depressive symptoms," reports: Here we investigate the relation of fecal microbiome diversity and composition with depressive symptoms in 1,054 participants from the Rotterdam Study cohort and validate these findings in the Amsterdam HELIUS cohort in 1,539 subjects. We identify association of thirteen microbial taxa, including genera Eggerthella, Subdoligranulum, Coprococcus, Sellimonas, Lachnoclostridium, Hungatella, Ruminococcaceae (UCG002, UCG003 and UCG005), LachnospiraceaeUCG001, Eubacterium ventriosum and Ruminococcusgauvreauiigroup, and family Ruminococcaceae with depressive symptoms. These bacteria are known to be involved in the synthesis of glutamate, butyrate, serotonin and gamma amino butyric acid (GABA), which are key neurotransmitters for depression. Our study suggests that the gut microbiome composition may play a key role in depression. The second study, titled "The gut microbiota and depressive symptoms across ethnic groups," reports: Both the microbiome and depressive symptom levels vary substantially across ethnic groups. Thus, any intervention for depression targeting the microbiome requires understanding of microbiome-depression associations across ethnicities. Analyzing data from the HELIUS cohort, we characterize the gut microbiota and its associations with depressive symptoms in 6 ethnic groups (Dutch, South-Asian Surinamese, African Surinamese, Ghanaian, Turkish, Moroccan; N=3211), living in the same urban area. Diversity of the gut microbiota, both within (a-diversity) and between individuals (B-diversity), predicts depressive symptom levels, taking into account demographic, behavioural, and medical differences. These associations do not differ between ethnic groups. Further, B-diversity explains 29%-18% of the ethnic differences in depressive symptoms. Bacterial genera associated with depressive symptoms belong to mulitple families, prominently including the families Christensenellaceae, Lachnospiraceae, and Ruminococcaceae. In summary, the results show that the gut microbiota are linked to depressive symptom levels and that this association generalizes across ethnic groups. Moreover, the results suggest that ethnic differences in the gut microbiota may partly explain parallel disparities in depression. The Wall Street Journal shared (paywalled) the findings.

Axios reports: As Amazon prepares to debut its long-delayed Prime Air drone delivery service, it's also showing off a smaller, quieter drone that will be ready in 2024 and could be making regular deliveries in major cities by the end of the decade.

The 80-pound hexagon-shaped aircraft, about 5 and a half feet in diameter, is nimble enough to make deliveries in highly populated areas such as Boston, Atlanta and Seattle. It'll be more capable and less intrusive than the model Amazon is using in its Prime Air service, which will begin in two markets — Lockeford, California, and College Station, Texas — in the coming weeks.... Thousands of items could be eligible for drone delivery as long as they fit in one box and weigh less than 5 pounds total.
The drones fly 50 miles per hour (80 km), according to the article, and "Upon arrival, the drone descends, scans the area to make sure it's clear, then drops the box from a height of about 12 feet." (With sturdy packaging to eliminate the need for parachutes or lines.) This drone can even fly in light rain, according to Axios, and has "sense-and-avoid" safety features "that allow it to operate at greater distances while skirting other aircraft, people, pets and obstacles." One Amazon executive estimates that by 2030 Amazon will be delivering 500 million packages by drone each year.

But Axios also suggests Amazon may be lagging its competitors. Walmart already has $3.99 drone delivery in six states — for up to 100,000 different products, weighing up to 10 pounds. And there's also other drone delivery services from Zipline and Google-owned Wing that have already launched limited-area commercial services.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The brains of teenagers who lived through the Covid pandemic show signs of premature aging, research suggests. The researchers compared MRI scans of 81 teens in the US taken before the pandemic, between November 2016 and November 2019, with those of 82 teens collected between October 2020 and March 2022, during the pandemic but after lockdowns were lifted. After matching 64 participants in each group for factors including age and sex, the team found that physical changes in the brain that occurred during adolescence -- such as thinning of the cortex and growth of the hippocampus and the amygdala -- were greater in the post-lockdown group than in the pre-pandemic group, suggesting such processes had sped up. In other words, their brains had aged faster.

"Brain age difference was about three years -- we hadn't expected that large an increase given that the lockdown was less than a year [long]," said Ian Gotlib, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and first author of the study. Writing in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, the team report that the participants -- a representative sample of adolescents in the Bay Area in California -- originally agreed to take part in a study looking at the impact of early life stress on mental health across puberty. As a result, participants were also assessed for symptoms of depression and anxiety. The post-lockdown group self-reported greater mental health difficulties, including more severe symptoms of anxiety, depression and internalizing problems. "Deterioration in mental health is accompanied by physical changes in the brain for teens, likely due to the stress of the pandemic," said Gotlib.

"In older adults, these brain changes are often association with reduced cognitive functioning. It's not clear yet what they mean in adolescents. But this is the first demonstration that difficulties in mental health during the pandemic are accompanied by what seem to be stress-related changes in brain structure."

Andrew Tarantola writes via Engadget: It's been six years since Tesla, SpaceX (and now Twitter) CEO Elon Musk co-founded brain-control interfaces (BCI) startup, Neuralink. It's been three years since the company first demonstrated its "sewing machine-like" implantation robot, two years since the company stuck its technology into the heads of pigs -- and just over 19 months since they did the same to primates, an effort that allegedly killed 15 out of 23 test subjects. After a month-long delay in October, Neuralink held its third "show and tell" event on Wednesday where CEO Elon Musk announced, "we think probably in about six months, we should be able to have a Neuralink installed in a human."

Neuralink has seen tumultuous times in the previous April 2021 status update: The company's co-founder, Max Hodak, quietly quit just after that event, though he said was still a "huge cheerleader" for Neuralink's success. That show of confidence was subsequently shattered this past August after Musk reportedly approached Neuralink's main rival, Synchron, as an investment opportunity. Earlier in February, Neuralink confirmed that monkeys had died during prototype testing of its BCI implants at the University of California, Davis Primate Center but rejected accusations by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine of animal cruelty. Musk responded indirectly to those charges on Wednesday. "Before we would even think of putting a device in an animal, we do everything possible we with rigorous benchtop testing, We're not cavalier about putting these devices into animals," he said. "We're extremely careful and we always want the device, whenever we do the implant -- whether into a sheep, pig or monkey -- to be confirmatory, not exploratory."

Neuralink is still working towards gaining FDA approval for its implant, though the company was awarded the agency's Breakthrough Device Designation in July 2020. This program allows patients and caregivers more "timely access" to promising treatments and medical devices by fast tracking their development and regulatory testing. As of September, 2022 the FDA has granted that designation to 728 medical devices. The FDA has also updated its best practices guidance regarding clinical and nonclinical BCI testing in 2021. "The field of implanted BCI devices is progressing rapidly from fundamental neuroscience discoveries to translational applications and market access," the agency asserted in its May guidance. "Implanted BCI devices have the potential to bring benefit to people with severe disabilities by increasing their ability to interact with their environment, and consequently, providing new independence in daily life."

Longtime Slashdot reader Amiga Trombone shares a report from Phys.Org: A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with a colleague from Syngenta Jealott's Hill International Research Centre in the U.K., has developed a way to synthesize cocaine using a tobacco plant. The group describes how they synthesized the notorious drug and possible uses for their process in their paper published in Journal of the American Chemical Society.

In studying the coca plant, the researchers discovered that the cocaine that winds up in its leaves is not produced by elements in the plant converting 4-(1-methyl-2-pyrrolidinyl)-3-oxobutanoic acid to hyoscyamine, as has been thought. They found that it is instead produced by the two enzymes, EnMT4 and EnCYP81AN15. To prove their discovery, the group genetically engineered a tobacco plant to produce the two enzymes in its leaves, which resulted in the production of small amounts of cocaine (with assistance from a substance also produced in the plant called ornithine, which is similar to the precursor in the coca plant). [...] Not mentioned in the paper is the possibility of synthesizing the two enzymes produced by both the coca and engineered tobacco plant as a more direct way to synthesize cocaine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The first drug to slow the destruction of the brain in Alzheimer's has been heralded as momentous and historic. The research breakthrough ends decades of failure and shows a new era of drugs to treat Alzheimer's -- the most common form of dementia -- is possible. Yet the medicine, lecanemab, has only a small effect and its impact on people's daily lives is debated. And the drug works in the early stages of the disease, so most would miss out without a revolution in spotting it. [...] Lecanemab is an antibody -- like those the body makes to attack viruses or bacteria -- that has been engineered to tell the immune system to clear amyloid from the brain. Amyloid is a protein that clumps together in the spaces between neurons in the brain and forms distinctive plaques that are one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's.

The large-scale trial involved 1,795 volunteers with early stage Alzheimer's. Infusions of lecanemab were given every fortnight. The results, presented at the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer's Disease conference in San Francisco and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, are not a miracle cure. The disease continued to rob people of their brain power, but that decline was slowed by around a quarter over the course of the 18 months of treatment. The data is already being assessed by regulators in the US who will soon decide whether lecanemab can be approved for wider use. The developers -- the pharmaceutical companies Eisai and Biogen -- plan to begin the approval process in other countries next year.

There is debate among scientists and doctors about the "real world" impact of lecanemab. The slower decline with the drug was noticed using ratings of a person's symptoms. It's an 18-point scale, ranging from normal through to severe dementia. Those getting the drug were 0.45 points better off. [Prof Tara Spires-Jones, from the University of Edinburgh] said that was a "small effect" on the disease, but "even though it is not dramatic, I would take it." Dr Susan Kohlhaas, from Alzheimer's Research UK, said it was a "modest effect... but it gives us a little bit of a foothold" and the next generation of drugs would be better. There are also risks. Brain scans showed a risk of brain bleeds (17% of participants) and brain swelling (13%). Overall, 7% of people given the drug had to stop because of side effects. A crucial question is what happens after the 18 months of the trial, and the answers are still speculation. [Dr Elizabeth Coulthard, who treats patients at North Bristol NHS Trust] says that people have, on average, six years of living independently once mild cognitive impairment starts. Slow that decline by a quarter and it could equate to an extra 19 months of independent life, "but we don't know that yet", she says. It is even scientifically plausible that the effectiveness could be greater in longer trials.