Remember those 43 monkeys that escaped from a U.S. research lab? They've caught 35 of them — but haven't yet caught the other eight.

But even worse... The Independent reports that now another animal escape has led to "reports of two large emus running riot..." The birds' owner, Sam Morace, took to social media to plead with locals for their patience, saying: "For everyone that keeps seeing an emu, yes it is mine. There are 2 of them out." Morace said their two flightless birds broke loose three months ago.... "They are feral and not trained like the ones we have at the house."
This provoked some discussion on Facebook. ("Does nobody learn to lasso anymore?") But Morace responded that you "can't lasso a bird you have to grab them by their feet. Their necks are super long and fragile." In another post Morace detailed efforts to capture their birds. "Local law enforcement has already been at my house, we are trying to get a tranquilizer approved so we can bring them home.

"Thank you for all the concerns and questions. But if the emus were that easy to catch they would be home already.

If you're wondering how the escaped monkeys are doing out in the wild, someone who photographed them earlier this week said they appeared "playful, curious and jumping from tree to tree." The Guardian reports local officials have now "requested that the public avoid using drones near the facility. Earlier in the week, they reported that a drone incident 'spooked' the monkeys, increasing their stress levels and complicating efforts to recapture them."

Their article also notes reports that the facility houses 7,000 monkeys. And this isn't the first time some have escaped... In 2016, 19 monkeys escaped from the same facility, according to the Post and Courier newspaper, but were returned after six hours. Earlier, in 2014, 26 macaques reportedly escaped and were captured within two days. Documents from federal regulators from previous years revealed other incidents at the facility, as reported by the New York Times. One involved a primate escaping while being transported to the medical clinic and subsequently disappearing into the woods. Another involved two monkeys breaking out of their outdoor chain-link enclosure, which reportedly resulted in one monkey being lured back inside and the other dying shortly after being recaptured. In 2017, the Department of Agriculture fined the company more than $12,000 partly due to failures to contain the animals, according to the New York Times.
The Guardian also links to a related read from February: "Plan for US 'mini-city' of 30,000 monkeys for medical research faces backlash." Over the next 20 years, the facility will assemble a mega-troop of about 30,000 long-tailed macaques, a species native to south-east Asia, in vast barn-like structures in Bainbridge, Georgia, which has a human population of just 14,000... But the plan faces fierce opposition, with some Bainbridge residents calling on local authorities to block the construction of the proposed primate manse. "They're an invasive species and 30,000 of them, we'd just be overrun with monkeys," claimed Ted Lee, a local man. "I don't think anybody would want 30,000 monkeys next door," added David Barber, who would live just 400ft from the new facility.

A University of Zagreb virologist treated her own recurring breast cancer by injecting laboratory-grown viruses into her tumor, sparking debate about self-experimentation in medical research. Beata Halassy discovered her stage 3 breast cancer in 2020 at age 49, recurring at the site of a previous mastectomy. Rather than undergo another round of chemotherapy, she developed an experimental treatment using oncolytic virotherapy (OVT).

Over two months, Halassy administered measles and vesicular stomatitis viruses directly into the tumor. The treatment caused the tumor to shrink and detach from surrounding tissue before surgical removal. Post-surgery analysis showed immune cell infiltration, suggesting the viruses had triggered an immune response against the cancer. Halassy has been cancer-free for four years. OVT remains unapproved for breast cancer treatment worldwide. Nature adds: Halassy felt a responsibility to publish her findings. But she received more than a dozen rejections from journals -- mainly, she says, because the paper, co-authored with colleagues, involved self-experimentation. "The major concern was always ethical issues," says Halassy. She was particularly determined to persevere after she came across a review highlighting the value of self-experimentation.

That journals had concerns doesn't surprise Jacob Sherkow, a law and medicine researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who has examined the ethics of researcher self-experimentation in relation to COVID-19 vaccines. The problem is not that Halassy used self-experimentation as such, but that publishing her results could encourage others to reject conventional treatment and try something similar, says Sherkow. People with cancer can be particularly susceptible to trying unproven treatments. Yet, he notes, it's also important to ensure that the knowledge that comes from self-experimentation isn't lost. The paper emphasizes that self-medicating with cancer-fighting viruses "should not be the first approach" in the case of a cancer diagnosis.

"The majority of strokes could be prevented," reports the Associated Press, according to the first new guidelines in 10 years from the American Stroke Association, which are "aimed at helping people and their doctors do just that." Stroke was the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and more than half a million Americans have a stroke every year. But up to 80% of strokes may be preventable with better nutrition, exercise and identification of risk factors... The good news is that the best way to reduce your risk for stroke is also the best way to reduce your risk for a whole host of health problems — eat a healthy diet, move your body and don't smoke...

Eating healthy can help control several factors that increase your risk for stroke, including high cholesterol, high blood sugar, and obesity, according to the heart association. The group recommends foods in the so-called Mediterranean diet such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains and olive oil, which can help keep cholesterol levels down. It suggests limiting red meat and other sources of saturated fat. Instead, get your protein from beans, nuts, poultry, fish and seafood. Limit highly processed foods and foods and drinks with a lot of added sugar. This can also reduce your calorie intake, which helps keep weight in check.

Getting up and walking around for at least 10 minutes a day can "drastically" reduce your risk, said Dr. Cheryl Bushnell, a neurologist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine who was part of the group that came up with the new guidelines. Among the many benefits: Regular exercise can help reduce blood pressure, a major risk factor for stroke. Of course, more is better: The heart association recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic or 75 minutes of vigorous activity — or some combination — per week. How you do it doesn't matter so much, experts said: Go to the gym, take a walk or run in your neighborhood or use treadmills or stepper machines at home. Diet and exercise can help control weight, another important risk factor for strokes.
But in addition, the guidelines now recommend that doctors consider new weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound for people with obesity or diabetes. (Though "people still need to eat well and get exercise, cautions Dr. Fadi Nahab, a stroke expert at Emory University Hospital.")

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Police are on the hunt for 43 monkeys who escaped from a research facility in South Carolina, after a keeper left their pen open. The rhesus macaque fugitives broke out of Alpha Genesis, a company that breeds primates for medical testing and research, and are on the loose in a part of the state known as the Lowcountry. Authorities have urged residents to keep their doors and windows securely closed and to report any sightings immediately. The escaped monkeys are young females, weighing about 7lbs (3.2kg) each, according to the Yemassee Police Department. Police said on Thursday that the company had located the "skittish" group, and "are working to entice them with food."

"Please do not attempt to approach these animals under any circumstances," police said. The statement added that traps had been set in the area, and police were on-site "utilizing thermal-imaging cameras in an attempt to locate the animals". Police say the research company has told them that because of their size, the monkeys have not yet been tested on and "are too young to carry disease." In an update Friday, the local police department said the monkeys are still staying around the perimeter of the facility. "The primates are exhibiting calm and playful behavior, which is a positive indication," the department noted.

"They're just being goofy monkeys jumping back and forth playing with each other," Alpha Genesis CEO Greg Westergaard told CBS News Thursday. "It's kind of like a playground situation here."

The article points out that all the escaped monkeys "carry no contagious viruses because they were too young to test, according to the lab. "

Our bodies divest themselves of 60 billion cells every day through a natural process called "apoptosis". So Stanford medicine researchers are developing a new approach to cancer therapy that could "trick cancer cells into disposing of themselves," according to announcement from Stanford's medical school: Their method accomplishes this by artificially bringing together two proteins in such a way that the new compound switches on a set of cell death genes... One of these proteins, BCL6, when mutated, drives the blood cancer known as diffuse large cell B-cell lymphoma... [It] sits on DNA near apoptosis-promoting genes and keeps them switched off, helping the cancer cells retain their signature immortality.

The researchers developed a molecule that tethers BCL6 to a protein known as CDK9, which acts as an enzyme that catalyzes gene activation, in this case, switching on the set of apoptosis genes that BCL6 normally keeps off. "The idea is, Can you turn a cancer dependency into a cancer-killing signal?" asked Nathanael Gray, PhD, co-senior author with Crabtree, the Krishnan-Shah Family Professor and a chemical and systems biology professor. "You take something that the cancer is addicted to for its survival and you flip the script and make that be the very thing that kills it...."

When the team tested the molecule in diffuse large cell B-cell lymphoma cells in the lab, they found that it indeed killed the cancer cells with high potency. They also tested the molecule in healthy mice and found no obvious toxic side effects, even though the molecule killed off a specific category of of the animals' healthy B cells, a kind of immune cell, which also depend on BCL6. They're now testing the compound in mice with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma to gauge its ability to kill cancer in a living animal. Because the technique relies on the cells' natural supply of BCL6 and CDK9 proteins, it seems to be very specific for the lymphoma cells — the BCL6 protein is found only in this kind of lymphoma cell and in one specific kind of B cell. The researchers tested the molecule in 859 different kinds of cancer cells in the lab; the chimeric compound killed only diffuse large cell B-cell lymphoma cells.
Scientists have been trying to shut down cancer-driving proteins, one of the researchers says, but instead, "we're trying to use them to turn signaling on that, we hope, will prove beneficial for treatment."

The two researchers have co-founded the biotech startup Shenandoah Therapeutics, which "aims to further test this molecule and a similar, previously developed molecule," according to the article, "in hopes of gathering enough pre-clinical data to support launching clinical trials of the compounds.

"They also plan to build similar molecules that could target other cancer-driving proteins..."

Slashdot reader samleecole shared this report from 404 Media: Northwell Health, New York State's largest healthcare provider, recently launched a large language model tool that it is encouraging doctors and clinicians to use for translation, sensitive patient data, and has suggested it can be used for diagnostic purposes, 404 Media has learned. Northwell Health has more than 85,000 employees.

An internal presentation and employee chats obtained by 404 Media shows how healthcare professionals are using LLMs and chatbots to edit writing, make hiring decisions, do administrative tasks, and handle patient data. In the presentation given in August, Rebecca Kaul, senior vice president and chief of digital innovation and transformation at Northwell, along with a senior engineer, discussed the launch of the tool, called AI Hub, and gave a demonstration of how clinicians and researchers—or anyone with a Northwell email address—can use it... AI Hub can be used for "clinical or clinical adjacent" tasks, as well as answering questions about hospital policies and billing, writing job descriptions and editing writing, and summarizing electronic medical record excerpts and inputting patients' personally identifying and protected health information.

The demonstration also showed potential capabilities that included "detect pancreas cancer," and "parse HL7," a health data standard used to share electronic health records.

The leaked presentation shows that hospitals are increasingly using AI and LLMs to streamlining administrative tasks, and shows that some are experimenting with or at least considering how LLMs would be used in clinical settings or in interactions with patients.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: More than 50 US lawmakers are calling on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to join dozens of other countries in banning a widely used weedkiller linked to Parkinson's disease and other health dangers. In a October 31 letter (PDF) to the agency, seven US senators said that paraquat, a weedkiller commonly applied on US farms, was a "highly toxic pesticide whose continued use cannot be justified given its harms to farmworkers and rural communities". The call for a ban from the senators came after 47 members of the US House of Representatives sent a similar letter (PDF) to the EPA calling for a ban earlier in October.

The lawmakers cite scientific links between paraquat use and development of Parkinson's and other "life threatening diseases" as well as "grave impacts on the environment". "Health risks include a higher risk of Parkinson's disease, with some studies finding a 64% increase in the likelihood of developing Parkinson's, non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, thyroid cancer, and other thyroid issues," they wrote. The New Jersey senator Cory Booker, organizer of the Senate letter, said the risks of paraquat exposure were "well documented" and that it was "irresponsible" for the EPA to continue to allow its use. "I hope the EPA will follow the science and ban paraquat," Booker said. The EPA has long maintained that there is no "clear link" between paraquat exposure and Parkinson's disease, though the agency does have a number of restrictions on use of the chemical due to its acute toxicity. The agency issued a draft report earlier this year affirming its position. Still, the agency said at that time that it would be reviewing more scientific studies and would issue a final report by January 17, 2025.

A new study examining a large sample of privately insured patients with obesity found that use of drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy as anti-obesity medications more than doubled from 2022 to 2023. During that same period, there was a 25.6% decrease in patients undergoing metabolic bariatric surgery to treat obesity. From a report: The study, by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital, in collaboration with researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Brown School of Public Health, is published in JAMA Network Open. "Our study provides one of the first national estimates of the decline in utilization of bariatric metabolic surgery among privately insured patients corresponding to the rising use of blockbuster GLP-1 RA drugs," said senior author Thomas C. Tsai, a metabolic bariatric surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Using a national sample of medical insurance claims data from more than 17 million privately insured adults, the researchers identified patients with a diagnosis of obesity without diabetes in 2022-2023. The study found a sharp increase in the share of patients who received glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, or GLP-1 RAs, during the study period, with GLP-1 RA use increasing 132.6% from the last six months of 2022 to the last six months of 2023 (from 1.89 to 4.41 patients per 1,000 patients).

Meanwhile, there was a 25.6% decrease in use of bariatric metabolic surgery during the same period (from 0.22 to 0.16 patients per 1,000 patients). Among the sample of patients with obesity, 94.7% received neither form of treatment during the study period (while 5% received GLP-1 RAs and 0.3% received surgery). Compared to patients who were prescribed GLP-1 RAs, patients who underwent surgery tended to be more medically complex.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Associated Press: Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near "human level robustness and accuracy." But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text -- known in the industry as hallucinations -- can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments. Experts said that such fabrications are problematic because Whisper is being used in a slew of industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos.

The full extent of the problem is difficult to discern, but researchers and engineers said they frequently have come across Whisper's hallucinations in their work. A University of Michigan researcher conducting a study of public meetings, for example, said he found hallucinations in eight out of every 10 audio transcriptions he inspected, before he started trying to improve the model. A machine learning engineer said he initially discovered hallucinations in about half of the over 100 hours of Whisper transcriptions he analyzed. A third developer said he found hallucinations in nearly every one of the 26,000 transcripts he created with Whisper. The problems persist even in well-recorded, short audio samples. A recent study by computer scientists uncovered 187 hallucinations in more than 13,000 clear audio snippets they examined. That trend would lead to tens of thousands of faulty transcriptions over millions of recordings, researchers said. Further reading: AI Tool Cuts Unexpected Deaths In Hospital By 26%, Canadian Study Finds

The Financial Times: In the paediatric centre at one of London's largest hospitals, doctors are confounded each day by a ward computer that is not connected to a printer. The computer is used for managing the daily list of patients. Doctors can only access and update the list, using one shared account. So twice a day, two doctors on the ward said one of them had to log in to this computer, update the patient list, send the list to themselves via NHS email, and then log in to another nearby computer to print it off for the team. "I am at a top London hospital and yet at times I feel as though we are operating in the Stone Age," said one paediatrician on the ward.

Tackling the frustrating delays caused by outdated technology [Editor's note: non-paywalled link] is one of health secretary Wes Streeting and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer's core missions, having vowed to shift the service "from an analogue to a digital NHS." The monumental task of moving the world's largest publicly funded health service into the digital age is not lost on doctors working on the frontline of the NHS. While many sectors of the economy have been "radically reshaped" by technology in recent years, a landmark report into the state of the health service in England last month concluded that the NHS stood "in the foothills of digital transformation."

But doctors and nurses point out that the basic infrastructure needs to be brought up to a minimum standard, given significant regional variations between hospitals, before politicians extol the virtues of cutting-edge tech. "Some of us just want the printers to work," noted one NHS hospital doctor. "The complete flip-a-coin nature of how equipped your hospital is is mind-boggling," they added. "I have worked in hospitals that are at least 12 years behind others." A report published in 2022 by the British Medical Association, the UK's main doctors' union, estimated that doctors in England lost 13.5mn working hours a year as a consequence of "inadequate IT systems and equipment." One reason for the outdated infrastructure is that the country has spent almost $48bn less than its peers -- such as Germany, France, Australia -- on health assets since the 2010s, according to a government-commissioned study by Lord Ara Darzi last month.

Egypt was declared malaria-free by the World Health Organization, after nearly a century of work to eradicate the disease in the country. From a report: Egypt saw 3 million cases a year in the 1940s, and the Aswan Dam's development in the 1960s created new bodies of standing water for the mosquitoes to breed in, but by 2001 the disease was "firmly under control," according to the WHO. "The disease that plagued pharaohs now belongs to [Egypt's] history," the WHO's chief said. It's the 44th country to be certified, but the wider battle against malaria goes on: The mosquito-borne disease still kills around 600,000 people a year, the large majority of them children in sub-Saharan Africa.

"Getting sick feels bad in the moment," reports the Washington Post, "and may affect your brain in the longer term." A new study published in Nature Aging adds to growing evidence that severe infections, including flu, herpes and respiratory tract infections, are linked to accelerated brain atrophy and increased risk of dementia years later. It also hints at the biological drivers that may contribute to neurodegenerative disease.

The current research is a "leap beyond previous studies that had already associated infection with susceptibility to Alzheimer's disease" and provides a "useful dataset," said Rudy Tanzi, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and the director of the McCance Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital. Other recent studies have found that the flu shot and the shingles vaccine reduce the risk of subsequent dementia in those who get them. Severe infections have also been linked to subsequent strokes and heart attacks.
"Big infection, big immune response — not good for the brain," said one of the study's co-authors (Keenan Walker, a tenure-track investigator and the director of the Multimodal Imaging of Neurodegenerative Disease Unit at the National Institute on Aging).

And the article also includes this quote from Kristen Funk, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (who studies neuroinflammation in neuroinfectious and neurodegenerative diseases). "They really found that there's a range of infections that are associated with this brain atrophy, associated with this cognitive decline." In turn, most of these infections associated with brain atrophy seem to be risk factors for dementia, according to the researchers' analyses of the UK Biobank data of 495,896 subjects and a Finnish dataset of 273,132 subjects. They found that having a history of infections was associated with an increased risk for Alzheimer's disease years later. The increased risk was even higher for vascular dementia, which is the second-most-common dementia diagnosis after Alzheimer's disease and caused by restriction of blood to the brain...

More-minor infections are not cause for alarm since the data was drawn from patients who had a hospital record of their infections, indicating more-severe cases, experts say.
And speaking of infections, the Post also published an interesting guest column by Dr. Mikkael A. Sekeres, division chief for hematology and medicine professor at the University of Miami's cancer center: A recent report from the American Association for Cancer Research attributed 13 percent of cancer cases worldwide to infections. Some estimates run as high as 20 percent, with particularly high rates of infection-related cancers in developing countries. Infectious agents linked to cancer include bacteria, such as Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori), and viruses, such as human papillomavirus (HPV), Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), and hepatitis B and C.

But keep in mind that an exceedingly small percentage of infected people develop cancer...

In a press release today, the FCC said it is requiring all mobile phones sold in the U.S. to be compatible with hearing aids. TechCrunch reports: The FCC has not yet issued a specific timeline for compliance, only noting that the rules will be fully in effect "after a transition period." The rules discourage handset makers from instituting proprietary Bluetooth coupling, which could limit device compatibility with over-the-counter hearing aids. Under the new rules, companies will be required to note on their website if a given handset is compatible with hearing aids. Two years ago, the FDA announced that hearing aids would no longer require a prescription. The agency also recently approved Apple AirPods as hearing aids.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Real-time video deepfakes are a growing threat for governments, businesses, and individuals. Recently, the chairman of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations mistakenly took a video call with someone pretending to be a Ukrainian official. An international engineering company lost millions of dollars earlier in 2024 when one employee was tricked by a deepfake video call. Also, romance scams targeting everyday individuals have employed similar techniques. "It's probably only a matter of months before we're going to start seeing an explosion of deepfake video, face-to-face fraud," says Ben Colman, CEO and cofounder at Reality Defender. When it comes to video calls, especially in high-stakes situations, seeing should not be believing.

The startup is laser-focused on partnering with business and government clients to help thwart AI-powered deepfakes. Even with this core mission, Colman doesn't want his company to be seen as more broadly standing against artificial intelligence developments. "We're very pro-AI," he says. "We think that 99.999 percent of use cases are transformational -- for medicine, for productivity, for creativity -- but in these kinds of very, very small edge cases the risks are disproportionately bad." Reality Defender's plan for the real-time detector is to start with a plug-in for Zoom that can make active predictions about whether others on a video call are real or AI-powered impersonations. The company is currently working on benchmarking the tool to determine how accurately it discerns real video participants from fake ones. Unfortunately, it's not something you'll likely be able to try out soon. The new software feature will only be available in beta for some of the startup's clients.

As Reality Defender works to improve the detection accuracy of its models, Colman says that access to more data is a critical challenge to overcome -- a common refrain from the current batch of AI-focused startups. He's hopeful more partnerships will fill in these gaps, and without specifics, hints at multiple new deals likely coming next year. After ElevenLabs was tied to a deepfake voice call of US president Joe Biden, the AI-audio startup struck a deal with Reality Defender to mitigate potential misuse. [...] "We don't ask my 80-year-old mother to flag ransomware in an email," says Colman. "Because she's not a computer science expert." In the future, it's possible real-time video authentication, if AI detection continues to improve and shows to be reliably accurate, will be as taken for granted as that malware scanner quietly humming along in the background of your email inbox.

A new study counters the widely held belief that standing desks are good for your health, discovering that it does not reduce the risk of diseases such as stroke and heart failure. In fact, it "found that being on your feet for more than two hours a day may increase the risk of developing problems such as deep vein thrombosis and varicose veins," reports The Guardian. The findings have been published in the International Journal of Epidemiology. From the report: To establish if standing provided any health benefits, the researchers studied data from 83,013 adults who are part of the UK Biobank health records database. These people did not have heart disease at the start of the study and wore devices on their wrists to track movement. The team found that for every extra 30 minutes spent standing beyond two hours, the risk of circulatory disease increased by 11%. Standing was not found to reduce the risk of heart conditions such as stroke, heart failure and coronary heart disease, the researchers said. "The key takeaway is that standing for too long will not offset an otherwise sedentary lifestyle and could be risky for some people in terms of circulatory health," said Dr Matthew Ahmadi, of the University of Sydney's faculty of medicine and health. "We found that standing more does not improve cardiovascular health over the long-term and increases the risk of circulatory issues."

A new study reveals that the human sense of smell is far more sensitive than previously thought, capable of distinguishing odors and their sequences within just 60 milliseconds. CNN reports: In a single sniff, the human sense of smell can distinguish odors within a fraction of a second, working at a level of sensitivity that is "on par" with how our brains perceive color, "refuting the widely held belief that olfaction is our slow sense," a new study finds. Humans also can discern between various sequences of odors -- distinguishing a sequence of "A" before "B" from sequence "B" before "A" -- when the interval between odorant A and odorant B is merely 60 milliseconds, according to the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior. [...]

The new findings challenge previous research in which the timing it took to discriminate between odor sequences was around 1,200 milliseconds, Dr. Dmitry Rinberg, a professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Physiology at NYU Langone Health in New York, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study in Nature Human Behavior. "The timing of individual notes in music is essential for conveying meaning and beauty in a melody, and the human ear is very sensitive to this. However, temporal sensitivity is not limited to hearing: our sense of smell can also perceive small temporal changes in odor presentations," he wrote. "Similar to how timing affects the perception of notes in a melody, the timing of individual components in a complex odor mixture that reaches the nose may be crucial for our perception of the olfactory world."

The ability to tell apart odors within a single sniff might be an important way in which animals detect both what a smell is and where it might be in space, said Dr. Sandeep Robert Datta, a professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the new study. "The demonstration that humans can tell apart smells as they change within a sniff is a powerful demonstration that timing is important for smell across species, and therefore is a general principle underlying olfactory function. In addition, this study sheds important light on the mysterious mechanisms that support human odor perception," Datta wrote in an email. "The study of human olfaction has historically lagged that of vision and hearing, because as humans we think of ourselves as visual creatures that largely use speech to communicate," he said, adding that the new study helps "fill a critical gap in our understanding of how we as humans smell."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neuroscience News: Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder -- also known as ADHD -- is typically thought of as a childhood condition. But more adults are realizing that their struggles with attention, focus and restlessness could in fact be undiagnosed ADHD, thanks in large part to trending social media videos racking up millions of views. A new national survey of 1,000 American adults commissioned by The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and College of Medicine finds that 25% of adults now suspect they may have undiagnosed ADHD. But what worries mental health experts is that only 13% of survey respondents have shared their suspicions with their doctor. That's raising concerns about the consequences of self-diagnosis leading to incorrect treatment.

"Anxiety, depression and ADHD -- all these things can look a lot alike, but the wrong treatment can make things worse instead of helping that person feel better and improving their functioning," said psychologist Justin Barterian, PhD, clinical assistant professor in Ohio State's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health. An estimated 4.4% of people ages 18 to 44 have ADHD, and some people aren't diagnosed until they're older, Barterian said. "There's definitely more awareness of how it can continue to affect folks into adulthood and a lot of people who are realizing, once their kids have been diagnosed, that they fit these symptoms as well, given that it's a genetic disorder," Barterian said. The survey found that younger adults are more likely to believe they have undiagnosed ADHD than older generations, and they're also more likely to do something about it. Barterian said that should include seeing a medical professional, usually their primary care provider, to receive a referral to a mental health expert to be thoroughly evaluated, accurately diagnosed and effectively treated.

Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are leading efforts to curb the sale of compounded GLP-1 medications. Lilly has issued hundreds of cease-and-desist letters to entities selling compounded tirzepatide, following the end of its FDA-declared shortage. Novo Nordisk, whose semaglutide drugs remain in shortage, is taking a different approach. The company published a peer-reviewed study in Pharmaceutical Research, highlighting quality concerns in compounded semaglutide samples, including lower-than-claimed strength and banned ingredients. These actions signal a broader industry pushback against compounders who entered the market during drug shortages. Wired adds: With mounting evidence that GLP-1s like tirzepatide are an effective treatment for other ailments beyond obesity and diabetes -- including addiction and Parkinson's disease -- demand is only expected to increase. It remains to be seen whether the pharmaceutical companies will be able to keep pace with the demand or if the meds will go back into shortage and compounders will be able to bound back into the market.

The rapid increases in life expectancy seen in the 20th century have slowed significantly, according to a new analysis published in the journal Nature. The Guardian reports: According to the study, children born recently in regions with the oldest people are far from likely to become centenarians. At best, the researchers predict 15% of females and 5% of males in the oldest-living areas will reach 100 this century. "If you're planning for retirement, it's probably not a good idea to assume you're going to make it to 100," said Jay Olshansky, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "You'd probably have to work for at least 10 years longer than you'd think. And you want to enjoy the last phase of your life, you don't necessarily want to spend it working to save for time you're not going to experience."

Advances in public health and medicine sparked a longevity revolution in the 20th century. In the previous 2,000 years, life expectancy crept up, on average, one year every century or two. In the 20th century, average life expectancy rocketed, with people gaining an extra three years every decade. For the latest study, Olshansky delved into national statistics from the US and nine regions with the highest life expectancies, focusing on 1990 to 2019, before the Covid pandemic struck. The data from Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Australia, France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain showed that rises in life expectancy had slowed dramatically. In the US, life expectancy fell [T]he researchers describe how on average, life expectancy in the longest-living regions rose only 6.5 years between 1990 and 2019. They predict that girls born recently in the regions have only a 5.3% chance of reaching 100 years old, while boys have a 1.8% chance.

"In the modern era we have, through public health and medicine, manufactured decades of life that otherwise would not exist," Olshansky said. "These gains must slow down. The longevity game we're playing today is different to the longevity game we played a century ago when we were saving infants and children and women of child-bearing age and the gains in life expectancy were large. Now the gains are small because we're saving people in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s." Olshansky said it would take radical new treatments that slow ageing, the greatest risk factor for many diseases, to achieve another longevity revolution. Research in the field is afoot with a dozen or so drugs shown to increase the lifespan of mice.

Three scientists won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for their groundbreaking work in predicting and designing protein structures, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm. David Baker of the University of Washington shares the prize with Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind. Baker pioneered the creation of novel proteins, while Hassabis and Jumper developed AlphaFold, an AI model that predicts protein structures from amino acid sequences.

The laureates will split the 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) award for their contributions to computational protein design and structure prediction. Baker's team has produced proteins with applications in medicine and materials science since his initial breakthrough in 2003. Hassabis and Jumper's AlphaFold, announced in 2020, has predicted structures for nearly all 200 million known proteins. "We glimpsed at the beginning that it might be possible to create a whole new world of proteins that address a lot of the problems faced by humans in the 21st century," Baker said at a press briefing.

"Now it's becoming possible," Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel chemistry committee, called the discoveries "spectacular," noting they fulfilled a 50-year-old dream of predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences. The breakthroughs have wide-ranging implications, from understanding antibiotic resistance to developing enzymes that decompose plastic. Over 2 million researchers worldwide have already utilized AlphaFold in various applications.