In the Italian city of Naples, some climate change solutions may be as ancient as the coastal outpost itself, according to researchers who are studying how the area's historic waterways could bring relief from extreme heat as the world warms. From a report: Architects and design students in Italy and the United States are collaborating on an initiative to map ancient aqueducts and water systems in Naples. Known as the Cool City Project, the goal is to assess how this existing infrastructure -- in some cases, centuries old and hidden underground -- could combat life-threatening heat waves in one of the most densely populated parts of Europe and one of the oldest cities in the world. "Naples is sometimes called the capital of the midday sun because of where it's located in the south of Italy," said Nick De Pace, an architect and professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. "It's a dense city in an area that is already dealing with geothermal heating. And then on top of that, you have climate change." [...] To start, the researchers are using laser-scanning technology to map Naples' extensive aqueduct system and underground canals. The idea is to examine if reviving these ancient waterways, or resurfacing them, could counter the urban heat island effect. "Daylighting portions of a canal could have a cooling effect in the summer, just like how you can feel a cooling effect from basements," De Pace said. "Then, you can also divert some of that water to new green spaces in the city where you have plants and other things to cool things down." Naples is a compelling place to test such ideas because the city already has a rich history with water, said Alexander Valentino, an architect and Cool City collaborator who is based in Naples.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chris Baraniuk, reporting for Wired: The unborn baby was in trouble. Its mother's doctors, at a UK hospital, knew there was something wrong with the fetus's blood, so they decided to perform an emergency C-section many weeks before the baby was due. But despite this, and subsequent blood transfusions, the baby suffered a brain hemorrhage with devastating consequences. It sadly passed away. It wasn't clear why the bleeding had happened. But there was a clue in the mother's blood, where doctors had noticed some strange antibodies. Some time later, as the medics tried to find out more about them, a sample of the mother's blood arrived at a lab in Bristol run by researchers who study blood groups. They made a startling discovery: The woman's blood was of an ultrarare type, which may have made her baby's blood incompatible with her own. It's possible that this prompted her immune system to produce antibodies against her baby's blood -- antibodies that then crossed the placenta and harmed her child, ultimately leading to its loss. It may seem implausible that such a thing could happen, but many decades ago, before doctors had a better understanding of blood groups, it was much more common. Through studying the mother's blood sample, along with a number of others, scientists were able to unpick exactly what made her blood different, and in the process confirmed a new set of blood grouping -- the "Er" system, the 44th to be described. You're probably familiar with the four main blood types -- A, B, O, and AB. But this isn't the only blood classification system. There are many ways of grouping red blood cells based on differences in the sugars or proteins that coat their surface, known as antigens. The grouping systems run concurrently, so your blood can be classified in each -- it might, for instance, be type O in the ABO system, positive (rather than negative) under the Rhesus system, and so on. Thanks to differences in antigens, if someone receives incompatible blood from a donor, for example, the recipient's immune system may detect those antigens as foreign and react against them. This can be highly dangerous, and is why donated blood needs to be a suitable match if someone is having a transfusion. On average, one new blood classification system has been described by researchers each year during the past decade. These newer systems tend to involve blood types that are mind-bogglingly rare but, for those touched by them, just knowing that they have such blood could be lifesaving. This is the story of how scientists unraveled the mystery of the latest blood system -- and why it matters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless on Wednesday for the development of click chemistry and bio-orthogonal chemistry -- work that has "led to a revolution in how chemists think about linking molecules together," the Nobel committee said. The New York Times: Dr. Bertozzi is the eighth woman to be awarded the prize, and Dr. Sharpless is the fifth scientist to be honored with two Nobels, the committee noted. Johan Aqvist, the chair of the chemistry committee, said that this year's prize dealt with "not overcomplicating matters, instead working with what is easy and simple." "Click chemistry is almost like it sounds," he said of a field whose name Dr. Sharpless coined in 2000. "It's all about snapping molecules together. Imagine that you could attach small chemical buckles to different types of building blocks. Then you could link these buckles together and produce molecules of greater complexity and variation." Shortly after Dr. Sharpless coined the concept, both he and Dr. Meldal independently discovered a chemical reaction called copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition, known today as the crown jewel of click chemistry. "When this reaction was discovered, it was like opening the floodgates," Olof Ramstrom, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a briefing after the laureates were announced. "We were using it everywhere, to build everything." Dr. Bertozzi, a chemist and professor at Stanford, was able to apply this reaction to biomolecules, often found on cell surfaces, in living organisms without affecting the chemistry of the cells she was observing. Before her extensive research with glycans, or sugar chains, scientists' understanding of this subfield of glycobiology had been hampered by an inability to see molecules in action in living cells.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Enzymes that rapidly break down plastic bags have been discovered in the saliva of wax worms, which are moth larvae that infest beehives. From a report: The enzymes are the first reported to break down polyethylene within hours at room temperature and could lead to cost-effective ways of recycling the plastic. The discovery came after one scientist, an amateur beekeeper, cleaned out an infested hive and found the larvae started eating holes in a plastic refuse bag. The researchers said the study showed insect saliva may be "a depository of degrading enzymes which could revolutionise [the cleanup of polluting waste]." Polyethylene makes up 30% of all plastic production and is used in bags and other packaging that make up a significant part of worldwide plastic pollution. The only recycling at scale today uses mechanical processes and creates lower-value products. Chemical breakdown could create valuable chemicals or, with some further processing, new plastic, thereby avoiding the need for new virgin plastic made from oil. The enzymes can be easily synthesised and overcome a bottleneck in plastic degradation, the researchers said, which is the initial breaking of the polymer chains. That usually requires a lot of heating, but the enzymes work at normal temperatures, in water and at neutral pH.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Drinking two to three cups of coffee a day could be linked to a longer lifespan, new research suggests. When compared with avoiding coffee, it was also associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, the study found. From a report: The findings applied to ground, instant and decaffeinated varieties of the drink, and researchers say they suggest coffee consumption should be considered part of a healthy lifestyle. According to the study, the greatest risk reduction was seen with two to three cups per day. Compared with no coffee drinking, this was associated with a 14%, 27% and 11% lower likelihood of death for decaffeinated, ground and instant preparations, respectively. Study author Professor Peter Kistler of the Baker Heart and Diabetes Research Institute, Australia, said: "In this large, observational study ground, instant and decaffeinated coffee were associated with equivalent reductions in the incidence of cardiovascular disease and death from cardiovascular disease or any cause. "The results suggest that mild to moderate intake of ground, instant and decaffeinated coffee should be considered part of a healthy lifestyle." The study examined the links between types of coffee and heart rhythms, cardiovascular disease and death using data from the UK Biobank study, which recruited adults between 40 and 69 years of age. Cardiovascular disease was made up of coronary heart disease, congestive heart failure and ischaemic stroke.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger on Tuesday for work that has "laid the foundation for a new era of quantum technology," the Nobel Committee for Physics said. The scientists have each conducted "groundbreaking experiments using entangled quantum states, where two particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated," the committee said in a briefing. From a report: Their results, it said, cleared the way for "new technology based upon quantum information." The laureates' research builds on the work of John Stewart Bell, a physicist who strove in the 1960s to understand whether particles, having flown too far apart for there to be normal communication between them, can still function in concert, also known as quantum entanglement. According to quantum mechanics, particles can exist simultaneously in two or more places. They do not take on formal properties until they are measured or observed in some way. By taking measurements of one particle, like its position or "spin," a change is observed in its partner, no matter how far away it has traveled from its pair. Working independently, the three laureates did experiments that helped clarify a fundamental claim about quantum entanglement, which concerns the behavior of tiny particles, like electrons, that interacted in the past and then moved apart. Dr. Clauser, an American, was the first in 1972. Using duct tape and spare parts at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., he endeavored to measure quantum entanglement by firing thousands of photons in opposite directions to investigate a property known as polarization. When he measured the polarizations of photon pairs, they showed a correlation, proving that a principle called Bell's inequality had been violated and that the photon pairs were entangled, or acting in concert. The research was taken up 10 years later by Dr. Aspect, a French scientist, and his team at the University of Paris. And in 1998, Dr. Zeilinger, an Austrian physicist, led another experiment that considered entanglement among three or more particles. Eva Olsson, a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, noted that quantum information science had broad implications in areas like secure information transfer and quantum computing. Quantum information science is a "vibrant and rapidly developing field," she said. "Its predictions have opened doors to another world, and it has also shaken the very foundation of how we interpret measurements." The Nobel committee said the three scientists were being honored for their experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The pharmaceutical companies Biogen and Eisai said this week that a drug they are developing for Alzheimer's disease had slowed the rate of cognitive decline in a large late-stage clinical trial. From a report: The strong results boost the drug's chances of winning approval and offer renewed hope for a class of Alzheimer's drugs that have repeatedly failed or generated mixed results. The positive data also offer Biogen a second chance after the company's disastrous rollout of another Alzheimer's drug, Aduhelm. That medication won regulatory approval last year despite little evidence that it could slow cognitive decline, received only sharply limited coverage by Medicare and has proved to be a commercial failure. The results appear stronger for the new medication, lecanemab. Cognitive decline in the group of volunteers who received lecanemab was reduced by 27 percent compared with the group who received a placebo in the clinical trial, which enrolled nearly 1,800 participants with mild cognitive impairment or mild Alzheimer's disease, the companies said. The trial of lecanemab, which is administered via intravenous infusion, was the largest to date to test whether clearing the brain of plaques formed by the accumulation of a protein called amyloid could slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease. Aduhelm is designed to work in a similar way.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: In 2020, Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester, and his colleagues published a sensational result in Nature, featured on its cover. They claimed to have discovered a room-temperature superconductor: a material in which electric current flows frictionlessly without any need for special cooling systems. Although it was just a speck of carbon, sulfur, and hydrogen forged under extreme pressures, the hope was that someday the material would lead to variants that would enable lossless electricity grids and inexpensive magnets for MRI machines, maglev railways, atom smashers, and fusion reactors. Faith in the result is now evaporating. On Monday Nature retracted the study, citing data issues other scientists have raised over the past 2 years that have undermined confidence in one of two key signs of superconductivity Dias's team had claimed. "There have been a lot of questions about this result for a while," says James Hamlin, an experimental condensed matter physicist at the University of Florida. But Jorge Hirsch, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and longtime critic of the study, says the retraction does not go far enough. He believes it glosses over what he says is evidence of scientific misconduct. "I think this is a real problem," he says. "You cannot leave it as, 'Oh, it's a difference of opinion.'" The retraction was unusual in that Nature editors took the step over the objection of all nine authors of the paper. "We stand by our work, and it's been verified experimentally and theoretically," Dias says. Ashkan Salamat, a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and another senior member of the collaboration, points out the retraction does not question the drop in electric resistance -- the most important part of any superconductivity claim. He adds, "We're confused and disappointed in the decision-making by the Nature editorial board." The retraction comes even as excitement builds for the class of superconducting materials called hydrides, which includes the carbonaceous sulfur hydride (CSH) developed by Dias's team. Under pressures greater than at the center of the Earth, hydrogen is thought to behave like a superconducting metal. Adding other elements to the hydrogen -- creating a hydride structure -- can increase the "chemical pressure," reducing the need for external pressure and making superconductivity reachable in small laboratory vises called diamond anvil cells. As Lilia Boeri, a theoretical physicist at the Sapienza University of Rome, puts it, "These hydrides are a sort of realization of metallic hydrogen at slightly lower pressure." In 2015, Mikhail Eremets, an experimental physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, and colleagues reported the first superconducting hydride: a mix of hydrogen and sulfur that, under enormous pressures, exhibited a sharp drop in electrical resistance at a critical temperature (Tc) of 203 K (-70C). That was nowhere near room temperature, but warmer than the Tc for most superconducting materials. Some theorists thought adding a third element to the mix would give researchers a new variable to play with, enabling them to get closer to ambient pressures -- or room temperatures. For the 2020 Nature paper, Dias and colleagues added carbon, crushed the mix in a diamond anvil cell, and heated it with a laser to create a new substance. They reported that tests showed a sharp drop in resistance at a Tc of 288 K (15C) -- roughly room temperature -- and a pressure of 267 gigapascals, about 75% of the pressure at the center of the Earth. But in a field that has seen many superconducting claims come and go, a drop in resistance alone is not considered sufficient. The gold standard is to provide evidence of another key attribute of superconductors: their ability to expel an applied magnetic field when they cross Tc and become superconducting. Measuring that effect in a diamond anvil cell is impractical, so experimentalists working with hydrides often measure a related quantity called "magnetic susceptibility." Even then they must contend with tiny wires and samples, immense pressures, and a background magnetic signal from metallic gaskets and other experimental components. "It's like you're trying to see a star when the Sun is out," Hamlin says. "The study's magnetic susceptibility data were what led to the retraction," reports Science. "The team members reported that a susceptibility signal emerged after they had subtracted a background signal, but they did not include raw data. The omission frustrated critics, who also complained that the team relied on a 'user-defined' background -- an assumed background rather than a measured one. But Salamat says relying on a user-defined background is customary in high-pressure physics because the background is so hard to measure experimentally." Dias and Salamat posted a paper to arXiv in 2021 containing the raw susceptibility data and purported to explain how the background was subtracted, but it "raised more questions than it answered," says Brad Ramshaw, a quantum materials physicist at Cornell University. "The process of going from the raw data to the published data was incredibly opaque." Hirsch accused the data of being "fabricated," noting suspicious similarities to data in a 2009 paper on superconductivity in europium under high pressures. It too was later retracted.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

People who experience frequent bad dreams in middle age may experience a faster rate of cognitive decline and be at higher risk of dementia as they get older, data suggests. If confirmed, the research could eventually lead to new ways of screening for dementia and intervention to slow the rate of decline. From a report: Most people experience bad dreams from time to time, but approximately 5% of adults experience nightmares -- dreams distressing enough to wake them up -- at least once a week. Stress, anxiety, and sleep deprivation are all potential triggers, but previous research in people with Parkinson's disease has also linked frequent distressing dreams to faster rates of cognitive decline, and an increased risk of developing dementia in the future. To investigate whether the same might be true of healthy adults, Dr Abidemi Otaiku at the University of Birmingham turned to data from three previous studies that have examined people's sleep quality and then followed them over many years, assessing their brain health as well as other outcomes. This included more than 600 middle-aged adults (aged 35 to 64), and 2,600 people aged 79 and older. Their data was analysed using statistical software to find out whether those who experienced a higher frequency of distressing dreams were more likely to go on to experience cognitive decline and be diagnosed with dementia. The research, published in eClinicalMedicine, found that middle-aged people who experienced bad dreams at least once a week were four times more likely to experience cognitive decline over the following decade than those who rarely had nightmares. Among elderly participants, those who frequently reported distressing dreams were twice as likely to be diagnosed with dementia in subsequent years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Doctors have told health services to prepare for a new era of cancer screening after a study found a simple blood test could spot multiple cancer types in patients before they develop clear symptoms. From a report: The Pathfinder study offered the blood test to more than 6,600 adults aged 50 and over, and detected dozens of new cases of disease. Many cancers were at an early stage and nearly three-quarters were forms not routinely screened for. It is the first time results from the Galleri test, which looks for cancer DNA in the blood, have been returned to patients and their doctors, to guide cancer investigations and any necessary treatment. The Galleri test has been described as a potential "gamechanger" by NHS England, which is due to report results from a major trial involving 165,000 people next year. Doctors hope the test will save lives by detecting cancer early enough for surgery and treatment to be more effective, but the technology is still in development. "I think what's exciting about this new paradigm and concept is that many of these were cancers for which we do not have any standard screening," Dr Deb Schrag, a senior researcher on the study at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, told the European Society for Medical Oncology meeting in Paris on Sunday.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The global obesity epidemic is getting worse, especially among children, with rates of obesity rising over the past decade and shifting to earlier ages. In the US, roughly 40% of today's high school students were overweight by the time they started high school. Globally, the incidence of obesity has tripled since the 1970s, with fully one billion people expected to be obese by 2030. The consequences are grave, as obesity correlates closely with high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease and other serious health problems. Despite the magnitude of the problem, there is still no consensus on the cause, although scientists do recognize many contributing factors, including genetics, stress, viruses and changes in sleeping habits. Of course, the popularity of heavily processed foods -- high in sugar, salt and fat -- has also played a role, especially in Western nations, where people on average consume more calories per day now than 50 years ago. Even so, recent reviews of the science conclude that much of the huge rise in obesity globally over the past four decades remains unexplained. An emerging view among scientists is that one major overlooked component in obesity is almost certainly our environment -- in particular, the pervasive presence within it of chemicals which, even at very low doses, act to disturb the normal functioning of human metabolism, upsetting the body's ability to regulate its intake and expenditure of energy. Some of these chemicals, known as "obesogens," directly boost the production of specific cell types and fatty tissues associated with obesity. Unfortunately, these chemicals are used in many of the most basic products of modern life including plastic packaging, clothes and furniture, cosmetics, food additives, herbicides and pesticides. Ten years ago the idea of chemically induced obesity was something of a fringe hypothesis, but not anymore.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To better understand how microbes affect our health, researchers combined 119 species of bacteria naturally found in the human body. From a report: Our bodies are home to hundreds or thousands of species of microbes -- nobody is sure quite how many. That's just one of many mysteries about the so-called human microbiome. Our inner ecosystem fends off pathogens, helps digest food and may even influence behavior. But scientists have yet to figure out exactly which microbes do what or how. Many studies suggest that many species have to work together to do each of the microbiome's jobs. To better understand how microbes affect our health, scientists have for the first time created a synthetic human microbiome, combining 119 species of bacteria naturally found in the human body. When the researchers gave the concoction to mice that did not have a microbiome of their own, the bacterial strains established themselves and remained stable -- even when the scientists introduced other microbes. The new synthetic microbiome can even withstand aggressive pathogens and cause mice to develop a healthy immune system, as a full microbiome does. The findings were published on Tuesday in the journal Cell. A better understanding of the microbiome could potentially lead to a powerful way to treat a host of diseases. Already, doctors can use the microbiome to treat life-threatening gut infections of the bacteria Clostridium difficile. They just have to transplant stool from a healthy donor, and the infection usually goes away.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader swell shared Scientific American's report on the quest for neuromorphic chips: The human brain is an amazing computing machine. Weighing only three pounds or so, it can process information a thousand times faster than the fastest supercomputer, store a thousand times more information than a powerful laptop, and do it all using no more energy than a 20-watt lightbulb. Researchers are trying to replicate this success using soft, flexible organic materials that can operate like biological neurons and someday might even be able to interconnect with them. Eventually, soft "neuromorphic" computer chips could be implanted directly into the brain, allowing people to control an artificial arm or a computer monitor simply by thinking about it. Like real neurons — but unlike conventional computer chips — these new devices can send and receive both chemical and electrical signals. "Your brain works with chemicals, with neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. Our materials are able to interact electrochemically with them," says Alberto Salleo, a materials scientist at Stanford University who wrote about the potential for organic neuromorphic devices in the 2021 Annual Review of Materials Research. Salleo and other researchers have created electronic devices using these soft organic materials that can act like transistors (which amplify and switch electrical signals) and memory cells (which store information) and other basic electronic components. The work grows out of an increasing interest in neuromorphic computer circuits that mimic how human neural connections, or synapses, work. These circuits, whether made of silicon, metal or organic materials, work less like those in digital computers and more like the networks of neurons in the human brain.... An individual neuron receives signals from many other neurons, and all these signals together add up to affect the electrical state of the receiving neuron. In effect, each neuron serves as both a calculating device — integrating the value of all the signals it has received — and a memory device: storing the value of all of those combined signals as an infinitely variable analog value, rather than the zero-or-one of digital computers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: More than a billion miles away from Earth, on the ice giants of Neptune and Uranus, diamonds are forever. This isn't cosmic poetry, but a reasonable scientific conclusion: We know that under extreme pressures and high temperatures miles beneath a planet's surface, hydrocarbons are pummeled into a crystalline bling coveted by the affianced. But on far-flung Neptune and Uranus, the Universe's diamond-making process is a bit more curious. Since the 1970s, scientists believed that diamonds might actually rain down toward the mostly slushy planets' rocky interiors -- a diamond rain, if you will. In 2017, researchers in Germany and California found a way to replicate those planetary conditions, fabricating teeny tiny diamonds called nanodiamonds in the lab using polystyrene (aka Styrofoam). Five years later and they're back at it again, this time using some good ol' polyethylene terephthalate (PET), according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances. The research has implications not only for our understanding of space, but paves a path toward creating nanodiamonds that are used in a range of contexts out of waste plastic. So, why in the world are we making diamonds out of the same plastic that things like food containers and water bottles are made of? There's a good reason for this, Dominik Kraus, a scientist at the German research laboratory Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf and lead author of the study, said in an email. When Kraus and his colleagues first attempted making nanodiamonds with polystyrene -- which contains the same elements of carbon and hydrogen found on Neptune and Uranus -- they did so by bombarding the material with the Linac Coherent Light Source, a high-powered X-ray laser at the SLAC National Acceleratory Laboratory in California. This process rapidly heated the polystyrene to 5,000 Kelvin (around 8,540 degrees Fahrenheit) and compressed it by 150 gigapascals, similar to conditions found about 6,000 miles into the interior of the icy planets. While the researchers were able to make the microscopic bling with two quick hits from the laser, they later realized one vital chemical ingredient was missing: oxygen. So they turned to PET, which has a good balance of not only carbon and hydrogen but also oxygen, making it a closer chemical proxy to the ice giants than polystyrene. "The chemistry at these conditions is very complex and modeling extremely difficult. 'Anything can happen' is a typical phrase when discussing such scenarios with theorists," said Kraus. "Indeed, there were some predictions showing that the presence of oxygen is helping [carbon separate from hydrogen] and diamond formation, but also ideas that it may be the other way around." To put the theoretical pedal to the metal, Kraus and his colleagues took a piece of PET, put it through the same 2017 experimental motions, but also included something called small angle X-ray diffraction to see how quickly and how large the diamonds grow. "We found that the presence of oxygen enhances diamond formation instead of preventing it, making 'diamond rain' inside those planets a more likely scenario," said Kraus. "We [also] see that diamonds grow larger for higher pressures and with progressing time in the experiments." They were also able to squeeze out a lot of tiny diamonds from just one shot of X-ray, on the order of a few billion crystallites (or a few micrograms if you're talking total weight). But Kraus said this isn't enough, at least right now, for application purposes like diamond quantum sensors, which are used to detect magnetic flow, or chemical catalysts, which need a couple of milligrams at minimum. However, it could eventually be scaled up to serve those purposes, and be the first step to a more ritzy way of plastic recycling. Kraus and his team also believe they found more evidence for superionic water, a bizarre type of water that acts like a weird cross between solid and liquid. "Kraus said that the finding that nanodiamonds indeed form inside ice giants makes it more likely for the conditions for superionic water to arise," reports Motherboard. Kraus said: "[O]ur experiments show that carbon is separating from hydrogen and oxygen allowing pure water regions to form inside the planets. Thus, by making diamond precipitation a more realistic scenario inside those planets, also the formation of superionic water becomes more likely."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cannabis users are often depicted as lazy "stoners" whose life ambitions span little further than lying on the sofa eating crisps. But research from the University of Cambridge challenges this stereotype, showing that regular users appear no more likely to lack motivation compared with non-users. From a report: The research also found no difference in motivation for rewards, pleasure taken from rewards, or the brain's response when seeking rewards, compared with non-users. "We're so used to seeing 'lazy stoners' on our screens that we don't stop to ask whether they're an accurate representation," said Martine Skumlien, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge and the research's first author. "Our work implies that ... people who use cannabis are no more likely to lack motivation or be lazier than people who don't." Skumlien said smoking cannabis could be associated with other downsides, but that the stoner stereotype is "stigmatising" and could make messages around harm reduction less effective. "We need to be honest and frank about what are and are not the harmful consequences of drug use," she added. Cannabis is the third most commonly used controlled substance worldwide, after alcohol and nicotine, with a 2018 NHS report finding that almost one in five (19%) of 15-year-olds in England had used cannabis in the previous 12 months.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world's largest offshore wind farm is now fully operational, 55 miles off the coast of Yorkshire. The Hornsea 2 project can generate enough electricity to power about 1.3 million homes - that's enough for a city the size of Manchester. From a report: A decade ago renewables made up just 11% of the UK's energy mix. By 2021 it was 40%, with offshore wind the largest component. Hornsea 2 is part of a huge wind farm development by energy firm Orsted. "The UK is one of the world leaders in offshore wind," Patrick Harnett, programme director for the Hornsea 2 wind farm told BBC News. "This is very exciting after five years of work to have full commercial operations at the world's largest offshore wind farm."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study looks at interactions between microscopic neurons in salamanders to understand how the "arrow of time" is biologically generated. Motherboard reports: The second law of thermodynamics says that everything tends to move from order to disorder, a process known as entropy that defines the arrow of time. A stronger arrow of time means it would be harder for a system to go back to a more ordered state. "Everything that we perceive as a difference between the past and the future stems fundamentally from that one principle about the universe," said Christopher Lynn, the lead author of the study. Lynn said that his motivation for the study was "to understand how the arrows of time we see in life" fit into this larger idea of entropy on the scale of the entire universe. Using previously done research on salamanders, Lynne and colleagues at City University of New York and Princeton examined how the arrow of time is represented in interactions between the amphibians' neurons in response to watching a movie. Their research is soon to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters. On one hand, it's somewhat obvious that an arrow of time would be biologically produced. "To be alive, almost, you have to have an arrow of time because you develop from a baby to an adult, and you're constantly moving and taking in stimuli," Lynne said. Indeed, entropy here is irreversible -- you cannot go back. What the team found was anything but intuitive, however. Lynne and colleagues looked at a separate 2015 study where researchers had salamanders watch two different movies. One depicted a scene of fish swimming around, similar to what a salamander might experience in everyday life. As in the real world, the video had a clear arrow of time -- that is, if you watched it in reverse, it would look different than if you played it forwards. The other video contained only a gray screen with a black, horizontal bar in the middle of the screen, which moved quickly up and down in a random, jittery way. This video didn't have an obvious arrow of time. A major question for the researchers was if they could pick out signs of "local irreversibility" in interactions between small groups of retinal neurons in response to this stimulus. Would interactions with irreversibility -- they would look different if played in reverse, having an "arrow of time" -- present in simpler or more complex interactions between neurons? "You can go look at a system and you can ask: are the more complicated interactions strongly producing the arrow of time, or is it the simpler dynamics?" said Lynn. The researchers found that the interactions between simple pairs of neurons primarily determined the arrow of time, no matter which movie the salamanders watched. In fact, the authors found a stronger arrow of time for the neurons when salamanders watched the video with the gray screen and black bar -- in other words, the video without an arrow of time in its content elicited a greater arrow of time in the neurons. "We naively thought that if the stimulus has a stronger arrow of time, that would show up on your retina," said Lynn. "But it was the opposite. So that's why it was surprising to us." While the researchers can't say for sure why this is, Lynn said that it might be because salamanders are more used to seeing something like the fish movie, and processing the more artificial movie took greater energy. In a more disordered system, which would have a greater arrow of time, more energy is consumed. "Being alive will still define an arrow of time," Lynne said, no matter the stimulus.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader Beeftopia writes: All living cells power themselves by coaxing protons from one side of a membrane to the other. A place where this occurs naturally outside of cells are alkaline hydrothermal vents on the deep seafloor, inside highly porous rock formations that are almost like mineralized sponges. "Carbon and energy metabolism are driven by proton gradients, exactly what the vents provided for free," wrote biochemist Nick Lane. In Lane's view, metabolism came first, and genetic information emerged naturally from it rather than the other way around. Quanta magazine asks Lane the big question: How did these first proto-cells become independent from the proton gradients they got for free in the hydrothermal vents? LANE: We've shown that theoretically, if you introduce random sequences of RNA and assume that the nucleotides in there can polymerize, you get little chains of nucleotides. Let's say seven or eight random letters long, with no information encoded in there whatsoever.... [H]ydrophobic amino acids are more likely to interact with hydrophobic bases. So you have a random sequence of RNA that generates a nonrandom peptide. And that nonrandom peptide could by chance have some function in a growing proto-cell. It could make the cell grow better or grow worse; it could help the RNA replicate itself; it could bind to cofactors. Then you have selection for that peptide and the RNA sequence that gave rise to it. Although it's a very rudimentary system, this means we've just entered the world of genes, information and natural selection. Quanta summarizes Lane's next idea: that these vent environments "favored the beginnings of what we call the Krebs cycle, the metabolic process that derives energy from carbohydrates, fats and proteins." Lane himself has said that metabolism "conjures genes into existence." But if genes are conjured into existence by metabolism, then what else might be true? Lane ultimately concludes that cancer may be a metabolic disease rather than a "genomic" one: LANE: About 10 years ago, the cancer community was amazed by the discovery that in some cancers, mutations can lead to parts of the Krebs cycle running backward. It came as quite a shock because the Krebs cycle is usually taught as only spinning forward to generate energy. But it turns out that while a cancer cell does need energy, what it really needs even more is carbon-based building blocks for growth. So the whole field of oncology began to see this reversal of the Krebs cycle as a kind of metabolic rewiring that helps cancer cells grow.... [C]ancers aren't caused simply by some genetically deterministic mutation that forces cells to go on growing without stopping. Metabolism is important too, for providing a permissive environment for growth. Growth comes before genes in this sense. Or, as Slashdot reader Beeftopia puts it, "In Lane's view, metabolism came first, and genetic information emerged naturally from it rather than the other way around. Lane believes that the implications of this reversal touch almost every big mystery in biology, including the nature of cancer and aging."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A small study on the therapeutic effects of using psychedelics to treat alcohol use disorder found that just two doses of psilocybin magic mushrooms paired with psychotherapy led to an 83 percent decline in heavy drinking among the participants. Those given a placebo reduced their alcohol intake by 51 percent. From a report: By the end of the eight-month trial, nearly half of those who received psilocybin had stopped drinking entirely compared with about a quarter of those given the placebo, according to the researchers. The study, published Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry, is the latest in a cascade of new research exploring the benefits of mind-altering compounds to treat a range of mental health problems, from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder to the existential dread experienced by the terminally ill. Although most psychedelics remain illegal under federal law, the Food and Drug Administration is weighing potential therapeutic uses for compounds like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA, the drug better known as Ecstasy. Dr. Michael Bogenschutz, director at NYU Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine and the study's lead investigator, said the findings offered hope for the nearly 15 million Americans who struggle with excessive drinking -- roughly 5 percent of all adults. Excessive alcohol use kills an estimated 140,000 people each year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: In a monumental leap in stem cell research, an experiment led by researchers from the University of Cambridge in the UK has developed a living model of a mouse embryo complete with fluttering heart tissues and the beginnings of a brain. The research advances the recent success of a team comprised of some of the same scientists who pushed the limits on mimicking the embryonic development of mice using stem cells that had never seen the inside of a mouse womb. In the past, researchers in embryology have focused largely on plucking choice stem cells from parts of an embryo that would grow into an animal and encouraging them to proliferate in glassware full of specially selected nutrients. Over the years, this method has resulted in clumps of cells containing the basic starting structures of a gut and a fold of tissues called the neural tube. What the so-called 'gastruloid' model contains in form, however, it lacks in function. Many features expected to develop alongside these tissues aren't present, making it harder to draw parallels between the model and an authentic growing embryo. There are ways to encourage brain-like structures to appear, as well as functioning heart tissue and a more complex gut tube. Yet workarounds based on comparatively simple hormonal soups can only go so far. Mixing stem cells representative from these three major tissue groups and improving on previous methods for their development in vitro (that means in a dish) into an embryoid, the team found their model could progress under its own steam to develop a nervous system equivalent to a natural mouse embryo at 8.5 days post-conception. The step is a small one, equivalent to just a single day of development for an unborn mouse. But a lot can happen in that 24 hours of gestation. The synthetic embryoid also contained foundational heart tissue that twitched out a beat and the beginnings of a gut, as well as the start of structures that in an actual embryo could build parts of the skeleton, muscles, and other tissues beneath the skin. On its own, the model wouldn't continue to develop into anything like a thriving baby mouse. Science is far from able to produce anything so advanced as a functional organ from stem cells alone, let alone an entire animal. While the resemblance is quite significant in research, it is -- so to speak -- only skin deep, lacking the signals that would see it transform into the fully-formed organism it models. Having a collection of tissues that authentically reflects development outside of a body provides researchers with the opportunity to not only observe, but ethically test genetic changes that could help improve our understanding of how our bodies grow. The findings appear in a study published in the journal Nature.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.