MDMA’s therapeutic power may come from strengthening the bond between therapist and patient

For many at the meeting and in the reemerging field of what some call psychedelic medicine, there’s no reason to look further than MDMA. MDMA’s therapeutic power may come from strengthening the bond between therapist and patient by enhancing feelings of trust, emotional openness, and empathy, Heifets told the audience, pointing to the commentary he and his mentor, Robert Malenka, published in the journal Cell. Heifets was just seven years old in the summer of 1984 when the Drug Enforcement Administration proposed new rules to ban MDMA under Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, citing “illicit trafficking,” high abuse potential and “no legitimate medical use.”

“Mutant” implies that a change has occurred to a particular gene, but over the last 20 years, our understanding of human genomics has advanced to the point that we realize most of these “mutations”  are naturally occurring variation in the population. But with the issue of “othering” in mind, the use of “mutant” specifically is thorny because there are actual human beings walking around with genetic conditions that inherently “other” them in the eyes of many people. Given these specific features are so widely represented among the “mutants” in Rage 2, I looked into the (relatively sparse) story attached to the game.

Years after John Young commanded Apollo 16, he still believed that “dust is the number one concern in returning to the moon.” Named the Dust Detector Experiment, or DDE, it was perhaps the least impressive component of the Apollo 11 science package; NASA didn’t even bother to mention it in press releases. To O’Brien, there was only one logical explanation: The DDE had been blanketed in dust, which, like blackout blinds, kept light out and heat in.

And it may happen again: In 2016, the Niagara Frontier State Park Commission announced that it hoped to shut off the American Falls within the next few years. In response, Canada and the U.S. asked the International Joint Commission, the bilateral body that oversees U.S.-Canada border waters, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to investigate and report on measures necessary to preserve or enhance the beauty of the American Falls, specifically with regard to the talus. The decision to leave the American Falls mostly alone was tied to the fact that the International Joint Commission wasn’t sure whether most tourists would really notice a major difference even if the talus was gone, plus the local interests that had initially pushed for the dewatering in hopes of stimulating tourism now thought that a dried waterfall would actually be bad for business.

With a new model for volcano-making in hand, Bermuda may not be alone: Other volcanoes could exist in the Atlantic Ocean that formed by the same or similar processes, says study coauthor Sarah Mazza, a geochemist at the University of Münster. And Aurélie Germa, a volcanologist and geochemist at the University of South Florida, says that the team’s model for building Bermuda “will probably help solve some geochemical inconsistencies” at other volcanoes in similar tectonic settings “that nobody could have really explained before.” This study finds compelling evidence for a reservoir of these materials in the middle of the mantle for the first time, and in doing so, it describes a new way to make a volcano.

Astronomers have used TESS to find hundreds of possible planets around the nearest stars since its launch in April 2018, including 24 confirmed worlds so far. In an April paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team led by Diana Dragomir, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who works with TESS data, reported the discovery of a star system harboring two planets on either side of the gap, for instance. Akash Gupta and Hilke Schlichting of the University of California, Los Angeles demonstrated in research last year that as planets of certain sizes radiate heat from within into space, their atmosphere is blown away, which could send them to the other side of the radius gap.

When Oscar Nilsson, an archaeological facial reconstructor, was commissioned to reconstruct the face of Adelasius Ebalchus, he was struck not only by the quality of the 3D-printed skull he had to work with, but also the state of his historical model’s dental work. Nilsson knew that he wanted to highlight Adelasius’ teeth and decided that the reconstructed face would smile—a decision he doesn’t take lightly. Adelasius will be exhibited at Grenchen’s Kultur-Historischen Museum through early June, and then in November be put on permanent display at Solothurn’s state museum of archaeology in Olten.

Balé was telling the mother that Maria was eligible to participate in a clinical trial to test whether an extra dose of measles vaccine prevented not just the measles but many childhood infections that cause serious illness and death. The WHO estimates that in 1980, only 6 percent of African children received the first dose of live measles vaccine, and 8 percent got the first inactivated DTP vaccine, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. The before-and-after numbers he saw were staggering: In 1979, the first year of the outbreak, 13 percent of local children between the ages of six months and three years died; in 1980, when the measles vaccine was available, only 5 percent did.

The lead author, Jennifer Lavers from the University of Tasmania’s Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies, said remote islands without large populations were the most effective indicator of the amount of plastic debris floating in the oceans. Plastic pollution is now ubiquitous in our oceans, and remote islands are an ideal place to get an objective view of the volume of plastic debris now circling the globe,” Lavers said. While most of the debris found on Henderson Island was fishing-related, on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, the plastic was mostly single-use items such as bottles, plastic cutlery, bags and straws.

That year, biologists Linda Buck and Richard Axel published a seminal paper; they discovered about 1,000 genes that code for about 1,000 olfactory receptors in mice, and they showed that those receptors are the beginning of a mammal’s sense of smell. Each receptor, their research showed, is uniquely primed to react to a few different molecules, and our noses sense distinct odors when many receptors fire at the same time. Inspired by Buck and Axel, who won the Nobel Prize in 2004 for their work, Mershin and other scientists conceived of odors as simply lists of molecules.