In 2008, two psychiatrists theorized that disruptions in the normal functioning of the CSTC loop was largely responsible for the altered states of consciousness experienced by people who take LSD, psilocybin, and other classical psychedelics. In particular, this CSTC model focused on the thalamus, a region of the brain that processes sensory information, regulates the information that gets passed to the cortex, which is responsible for consciousness, attention, memory, and other major brain functions. LSD targets many of the receptors that regulate the CSTC loop, so by imaging the brains of their subjects when they were on LSD and when they were sober, the researchers could see how LSD affects the normal functioning of the CSTC loop.

China’s recent scientific achievements – including its embryo gene-editing research and historic moon landing – appear to be surrounded by secrecy. In fact, China later condemned the research, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal – blaming the scientist. But my research on China’s life sciences over the last 14 years suggests that the culture actually stems from something else: a sense of sociopolitical insecurity.

Using brain-scanning technology, artificial intelligence, and speech synthesizers, scientists have converted brain patterns into intelligible verbal speech—an advance that could eventually give voice to those without. New research published today in Scientific Advances takes us an important step closer to that goal, but instead of capturing an individual’s internal thoughts to reconstruct speech, it uses the brain patterns produced while listening to speech. “Since the goal of this work is to restore speech communication in those who have lost the ability to talk, we aimed to learn the direct mapping from the brain signal to the speech sound itself,” he told Gizmodo.

Patterns in cases of IBD have led researchers to find out if air pollution is one of these environmental triggers, including data showing that they are more common in urban than rural areas, and that more developed nations have higher rates of IBD. It’s thought that air pollution plays a part in the development of IBD by changing the gut microbiome, which causes an immune response and inflammation. While he didn’t find an association between newly diagnosed cases of IBD and levels of air pollution on the whole, he found that Crohn’s disease was more commonly found in young people with higher exposures to nitrogen dioxide.

After ten years of puzzling over this unexpected imbalance between polar auroras, researchers led by Anders Ohma, a graduate student at the University of Bergen in Norway, think the answer could be the tilted pressure that the solar wind exerts on Earth’s magnetic field. First, a quick refresher on auroras: These lights are caused when the solar wind, which carries charged particles and plasma from the Sun, slams into Earth’s magnetosphere. Solar particles are funneled into Earth’s magnetic field lines, which run from pole to pole, until they run out of energy in the atmosphere.

With hundreds of candidates in hand, both had to then filter the field: Webb created a sophisticated spreadsheet, and McKinlay went on 88 dates. Inspired by Webb, Aurora developed a spreadsheet for ranking candidates with positive and negative attributes, including flaws that were so bad they were “dealbreakers.” There is no perfect solution, but there is a reasonable formula: Figure out your parameters, like how soon you want to be in a relationship and how many dates you want to go on in search of the right person.

A few years ago, Peak began to wonder whether it would be possible to offer children and young people like Joseph bespoke tablets — sized to suit them and containing the exact dosage they require. And in July 2018, Peak’s team at Alder Hey became the first in the world to administer 3D-printed tablets to children as part of a research trial. This approach squeezes in more of the active ingredients than standard manufacturing, which compresses the drug and other components by stamping the preparation into a mold using a machine called a tablet press.

He and his colleagues gave antibiotics to mice prone to develop a version of Alzheimer’s disease, in order to kill off much of the gut bacteria in the mice. Young mice given antibiotics for a week had fewer clumps in their brains when they grew old, too. Following a string of similar experiments, he now suspects that just a few species in the gut — perhaps even one — influence the course of Alzheimer’s disease, perhaps by releasing chemical that alters how immune cells work in the brain.

A few years ago, Peak began to wonder whether it would be possible to offer children and young people like Joseph bespoke tablets — sized to suit them and containing the exact dosage they require. And in July 2018, Peak’s team at Alder Hey became the first in the world to administer 3D-printed tablets to children as part of a research trial. This approach squeezes in more of the active ingredients than standard manufacturing, which compresses the drug and other components by stamping the preparation into a mold using a machine called a tablet press.

The fertility tech firm is collaborating with the Institute of Life to conduct the first known human trial of the procedure, called mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT), for treating infertility. Fertility doctors first started messing around with the idea for MRT in the late ’90s in clinics in New York and New Jersey on a hunch that some people struggle to get pregnant because of defects in the jelly-like cytoplasm of their eggs. In February, British authorities granted doctors at Newcastle University the go-ahead to begin a study assessing how well MRT could help two women affected by mitochondrial diseases conceive healthy children.