Here's the Guardian's report on new cryptographic techniques where "you can share data while keeping that data private" — known by the umbrella term "privacy-enhancing technologies" (or "Pets). They offer opportunities for data holders to pool their data in new and useful ways. In the health sector, for example, strict rules prohibit hospitals from sharing patients' medical data. Yet if hospitals were able to combine their data into larger datasets, doctors would have more information, which would enable them to make better decisions on treatments. Indeed, a project in Switzerland using Pets has since June allowed medical researchers at four independent teaching hospitals to conduct analysis on their combined data of about 250,000 patients, with no loss of privacy between institutions. Juan Troncoso, co-founder and CEO of Tune Insight, which runs the project, says: "The dream of personalised medicine relies on larger and higher-quality datasets. Pets can make this dream come true while complying with regulations and protecting people's privacy rights. This technology will be transformative for precision medicine and beyond."

The past couple of years have seen the emergence of dozens of Pet startups in advertising, insurance, marketing, machine learning, cybersecurity, fintech and cryptocurrencies. According to research firm Everest Group, the market for Pets was $2bn last year and will grow to more than $50bn in 2026. Governments are also getting interested. Last year, the United Nations launched its "Pet Lab", which was nothing to do with the welfare of domestic animals, but instead a forum for national statistical offices to find ways to share their data across borders while protecting the privacy of their citizens.

Jack Fitzsimons, founder of the UN Pet Lab, says: "Pets are one of the most important technologies of our generation. They have fundamentally changed the game, because they offer the promise that private data is only used for its intended purposes...." The emergence of applications has driven the theory, which is now sufficiently well developed to be commercially viable. Microsoft, for example, uses fully homomorphic encryption when you register a new password: the password is encrypted and then sent to a server who checks whether or not that password is in a list of passwords that have been discovered in data breaches, without the server being able to identify your password. Meta, Google and Apple have also over the last year or so been introducing similar tools to some of their products.
The article offers quick explanations of zero-knowledge proofs, secure multiparty computation, and fully homomorphic encryption (which allows the performance of analytics on data by a second party who never reads the data or learns the result).

And "In addition to new cryptographic techniques, Pets also include advances in computational statistics such as 'differential privacy', an idea from 2006 in which noise is added to results in order to preserve the privacy of individuals."

"Google is giving Apple a taste of its own medicine," reports Business Insider, arguing that the latest update to Android's messaging app "is going to make texting between iPhone and Androids even more annoying than it already is." [Alternate URL] The updates are great if you're an Android user. Google Messages' new features include the ability to reply to individual messages, star them, and set reminders on texts. But these features and some other updates to Messages are RCS-enabled, meaning they're not going to be very compatible with SMS, which is the texting standard that iMessage switches to when messaging someone without an iPhone. iPhones exchange messages using iMessage, Apple's proprietary messaging system, but revert to SMS when texting an Android.

One feature that's part of Google's payback to Apple is that now, when Messages users react to an SMS text with an emoji, iPhone users will get a text saying the other person reacted to their text with a description of whatever emoji the person used. It's similar to when iMessage users react to an SMS text, with the recipient getting a "so and so loved" message instead of seeing the heart emoji reaction.... In August, Android launched a page on its website calling Apple out for refusing "to adopt modern texting standards when people with iPhones and Android phones text each other." The page has buttons that take users to Twitter to tweet at Apple to "stop breaking my texting experience. #GetTheMessage" with a link to Android's page urging Apple to "fix texting."

"We would much prefer that everybody adopts RCS which has the capability to support proper reactions," Jan Jedrzejowicz, Google Messages product manager, said in a briefing before the Messages updates were announced. "But in the event that's not possible or hasn't happened yet, this feels like the next best thing." Recently, Apple CEO Tim Cook said he doesn't get a lot of feedback from iPhone users that Apple needs to fix messaging between iPhones and Androids. Apple doesn't have much incentive to do so, either. In legal documents from a 2021 lawsuit between Epic Games and Apple, an Apple executive said "Moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us."

The deaths of nearly 100 children in Indonesia have prompted the country to suspend sales of all syrup and liquid medication. From a report: It comes just weeks after a cough syrup in The Gambia was linked to the deaths of nearly 70 children. Indonesia said some syrup medicine was found to contain ingredients linked to acute kidney injuries (AKI), which have killed 99 young children this year. It is not clear if the medicine were imported or locally produced. On Thursday, Indonesian health officials said they had reported around 200 cases of AKI in children, most of who were aged under five. Earlier this month, the The World Health Organization (WHO) issued a global alert over four cough syrups that were linked to the deaths of almost 70 children in The Gambia. The WHO found the syrups used there - made by an Indian pharmaceutical company - contained "unacceptable amounts" of diethylene glycol and ethylene glycol. The syrups have been "potentially linked with acute kidney injuries", said the organisation. Indonesia's Health Minister on Thursday said the same chemical compounds were also found in some medicines used locally.

At least five hours sleep a night may cut the over-50s' chances of multiple chronic health problems, researchers say. The BBC reports: The PLoS Medicine study tracked the health and sleep of UK civil servants. All of the about 8,000 participants were asked: How many hours of sleep do you have on an average weeknight?" Some also wore a wrist-watch sleep tracker. And they were checked for chronic conditions, including diabetes, cancer and heart disease, over two decades of follow-up:

- Those who slept five hours or less around the age of 50 had a 30% greater risk of multiple ailments than those who slept seven hours
- Shorter sleep at 50 was also associated with a higher risk of death during the study period, mainly linked to the increased risk of chronic disease

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: UNDARK has an interesting interview with NYU professor emeritus Gary Marcus (PhD in brain and cognitive sciences, MIT) about Why Mastering Language Is So Difficult for AI. Marcus, who has had a front-row seat for many of the developments in AI, says we need to take AI advances with a grain of salt.

Starting with GPT-3, Marcus begins, "I think it's an interesting experiment. But I think that people are led to believe that this system actually understands human language, which it certainly does not. What it really is, is an autocomplete system that predicts next words and sentences. Just like with your phone, where you type in something and it continues. It doesn't really understand the world around it.

"And a lot of people are confused by that. They're confused by that because what these systems are ultimately doing is mimicry. They're mimicking vast databases of text. And I think the average person doesn't understand the difference between mimicking 100 words, 1,000 words, a billion words, a trillion words — when you start approaching a trillion words, almost anything you can think of is already talked about there. And so when you're mimicking something, you can do that to a high degree, but it's still kind of like being a parrot, or a plagiarist, or something like that. A parrot's not a bad metaphor, because we don't think parrots actually understand what they're talking about. And GPT-3 certainly does not understand what it's talking about."

Marcus also has cautionary words about Google's LaMDA ("It's not sentient, it has no idea of the things that it is talking about."), driverless cars ("Merely memorizing a lot of traffic situations that you've seen doesn't convey what you really need to understand about the world in order to drive well"), OpenAI's DALL-E ("A lot of AI right now leverages the not-necessarily-intended contributions by human beings, who have maybe signed off on a 'terms of service' agreement, but don't recognize where this is all leading to"), and what's motivating the use of AI at corporations ("They want to solve advertisements. That's not the same as understanding natural language for the purpose of improving medicine. So there's an incentive issue.").

Still, Marcus says he's heartened by some recent AI developments: "People are finally daring to step out of the deep-learning orthodoxy, and finally willing to consider "hybrid" models that put deep learning together with more classical approaches to AI. The more the different sides start to throw down their rhetorical arms and start working together, the better."

Long-time Slashdot reader mspohr shares a report from the Boston Globe's health-news site STAT: The scientist flicked on a laser, filling the rat's brain with blue light. The rodent, true to its past two weeks of training, scampered across its glass box to a tiny spout, where it was duly rewarded with a drink of water. From the outside, this would appear to be a pretty run-of-the-mill neuroscience experiment, except for the fact that the neurons directing the rat to its thirst-quenching reward didn't contain any rat DNA. Instead, they came from a human "mini-brain" — a ball of human tissue called an organoid — that researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine had grown in a lab and implanted in the rodent's cortex months before.

The experiment — part of a study published Wednesday in Nature — is the first describing human neurons influencing another species' behavior. The study also showed that signals could go the other way; tendrils of human neurons mingled with the rodent brain cells and fired in response to air rustling the rats' whiskers.

The advance opens the door to using such human-rodent chimeras to better understand how the human brain develops and what goes wrong in neurological and psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, autism, and epilepsy. When the Stanford scientists implanted organoids grown from the cells of patients with a severe genetic brain disorder, they could watch the neurons develop abnormally with unprecedented clarity.

"This paper really pushes the envelope," said neuroscientist Tomasz Nowakowski, of the University of California, San Francisco, who uses brain organoids in his research on neurodevelopmental disorders but was not involved in the new work. "The field is desperate for more experimental models. And what's really important about this study is it demonstrates that brain organoids can complete their maturation trajectory when transplanted. So it really expands our toolkit for asking more nuanced questions about how genetic mutations lead to behavioral disorders."
It's an example of how stem cells have revolutionized brain research. By "doing their experiments in very young rats whose cortexes are not yet saturated with synapses," the article points out, the researchers "found that the human neurons easily integrated into the animals' rapidly expanding circuitry, which provided them with the stimulation they needed to push past previous developmental barriers."

Angus Chen, reporting for StatNews: For a while, scientists thought the trillions of microbes on our bodies lived in landscapes connected to the outside world -- our skin, hair, and gut -- but research in the last few years has shown that's not so. When Ravid Straussman, a cancer biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, looked deeper, he and several other research groups around the world found bacteria in the milieu of tumors. Then, he and other scientists began wondering: if tumors are home to bacteria, then what about another major resident of our microbiome, fungi? Now, two new papers published in Cell, one from Straussman's lab and collaborators at the University of California San Diego and another from researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and Duke University, have found genetic footprints of fungi in tumors across the human body.

Together, the studies provide a "nice, rigorous association" between fungi and cancer, said Ami Bhatt, an associate professor of medicine and genetics at Stanford University who did not work on either paper. "It provides pretty compelling evidence there may be rare fungi within tumors," she said. But the work raises far more questions than it answers. "Are they alive or not? And assuming they really are there, then why are they there? And how did they get there?"

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Svante Paabo on Monday for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution. From a report: It was the first of several prizes to be given over the next week. The Nobel Prizes, among the highest honors in science, recognize groundbreaking contributions in a variety of fields. "Through his pioneering research, Svante Paabo -- this year's Nobel Prize laureate in physiology or medicine -- accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans," the Nobel committee said in a statement. "Paabo's discoveries have generated new understanding of our evolutionary history," the statement said, adding that this research had helped establish the burgeoning science of "paleogenomics," or the study of genetic material from ancient pathogens.

Nils-Goran Larsson, a professor in medical biochemistry for the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, said that Dr. Paabo had used existing technology and his own methods to extract and analyze the ancient DNA. "It was certainly considered to be impossible to recover DNA from 40,000-year-old bones," Dr. Larsson said, adding later that the discoveries would "allow us to compare changes between contemporary Homo sapiens and ancient hominins. And this, over the years to come, will give us huge insights into human physiology."

Already the world's biggest gambling nation in terms of loss per person, Australia has seen a shift in betting behavior since the pandemic-forced closure of public venues. From a report: Gamblers' losses on poker machines shrank for the first time during the pandemic, but at a rate far slower than an unprecedented increase in money lost on apps, data showed. That means more players are being exposed to an industry that is harder to regulate than traditional gambling. Australia's gambling industry has been in the spotlight in recent years, with public inquiries lashing its biggest casino operators due to lapses in money laundering protections. Online gambling has also been the focus of inquiries, but with its increasing prevalence, the government has answered consumer advocates with a pledge to take a deeper look.

App providers are mostly foreign such as London-listed Flutter Entertainment -- owner of the most popular betting app in Australia, Sportsbet -- and Entain, owner of third-ranked app Ladbrokes. Unlike venues, they benefit from marketing methods such as text message-based promotions falling outside the scope of gambling advertising restrictions. Gamblers' loss on poker machines was A$11.4 billion ($7.3 billion USD) in 2021, shrinking A$1.1 billion or 17% from 2019, the year before lockdowns began, showed data from Monash University's School of Public Health & Preventive Medicine. But gamblers' loss in online sports betting swelled A$3.2 billion or 80% to A$7.1 billion in the same period, showed figures supplied by industry consultancy H2 Gambling Capital, which excluded credit often rewarded in promotions.

Psychiatrists in Brussels can now prescribe free visits to cultural venues to people suffering from depression, stress or anxiety. The Guardian reports: Delphine Houba, a Brussels deputy mayor in charge of culture, believes the project is the first of its kind in Europe. The first objective is to reinforce access to culture after the pressured days of lockdown, she told the Observer. "I want everybody back in our cultural institutions... but we know that, even before Covid, for some people it [was] not easy to open the door of a museum, they don't feel at ease, they don't think that it's for them. And I really want to show that cultural venues are for everybody." The second goal, she said, is to give doctors "a new tool in the healing process." The young socialist politician was inspired by a similar project in Canada, where doctors have been issuing prescriptions to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts since 2018.

In Brussels, the pilot project is running for six months, involving five museums that are directly under the control of city authorities. These include the city's history museum, a centre for contemporary art, and the fashion and lace museum. Patients may also discover the sewer museum, which allows them to stroll 10 meters underground along the banks of the Senne, the hidden river of Brussels, largely paved over in the 19th century. Or they could explore the collection of outfits belonging to the Manneken Pis, the statue of a peeing boy that has become a symbol of Belgium's self-deprecating humor

"Anything could have therapeutic value if it helps people get a good feeling and get in touch with themselves," said Dr Johan Newell, a psychiatrist at Brugmann University Hospital, which is taking part in the pilot scheme. He expects museum prescriptions would suit people suffering from depression, anxiety, autism spectrum disorders, psychosis and bipolar disorder. "I think almost anyone could benefit from it," he said. "It would probably be more adapted for people who are already a little bit further on in the recovery process," rather than those who are severely ill, he said. Museum prescriptions, Newell stressed, were a voluntary addition to medication, psychotherapy, individual or group therapy, as well as exercise, healthy eating and other forms of relaxation. "It's just one extra tool that could help people get out of the house: to resocialize, reconnect with society." Newell suggests that the pilot could eventually be expanded to include other museums, cinemas, hospitals and groups of patients.

Saul Kripke, a math prodigy and pioneering logician whose revolutionary theories on language qualified him as one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers, died on Sept. 15 in Plainsboro, N.J. He was 81. The New York Times reports: His death, at Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center, was caused by pancreatic cancer, according to Romina Padro, director of the Saul Kripke Center at the City University of New York, where Professor Kripke had been a distinguished professor of philosophy and computer science since 2003 and had capped a career exploring how people communicate. Professor Kripke's classic work, "Naming and Necessity," first published in 1972 and drawn from three lectures he delivered at Princeton University in 1970 before he was 30, was considered one of the century's most evocative philosophical books.

"Kripke challenged the notion that anyone who uses terms, especially proper names, must be able to correctly identify what the terms refer to," said Michael Devitt, a distinguished professor of philosophy who recruited Professor Kripke to the City University Graduate Center in Manhattan. "Rather, people can use terms like 'Einstein,' 'springbok,' perhaps even 'computer,' despite being too ignorant or wrong to provide identifying descriptions of their referents," Professor Devitt said. "We can use terms successfully not because we know much about the referent but because we're linked to the referent by a great social chain of communication."

The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch, writing in The New York Times Magazine in 1977, said Professor Kripke had "introduced ways to distinguish kinds of true statements -- between statements that are 'possibly' true and those that are 'necessarily' true." "In Professor Kripke's analysis," he continued, "a statement is possibly true if and only if it is true in some possible world -- for example, 'The sky is blue' is a possible truth, because there is some world in which the sky could be red. A statement is necessarily true if it is true in all possible worlds, as in 'The bachelor is an unmarried man.'"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Daily Beast: Luis Eduardo Garrido couldn't wait to test out his colleague's newest creation. Garrido, a psychology and methodology researcher at Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra in the Dominican Republic, drove two hours between his university's campuses to try a virtual reality experience that was designed to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder and different types of phobias. But a couple of minutes after he put on the headset, he could tell something was wrong. "I started feeling bad," Garrido told The Daily Beast. He was experiencing an unsettling bout of dizziness and nausea. He tried to push through but ultimately had to abort the simulation almost as soon as he started. "Honestly, I don't think I lasted five minutes trying out the application," he said.

Garrido had contracted cybersickness, a form of motion sickness that can affect users of VR technology. It was so severe that he worried about his ability to drive home, and it took hours for him to recover from the five-minute simulation. Though motion sickness has afflicted humans for thousands of years, cybersickness is a much newer condition. While this means that many of its causes and symptoms are understood, other basic questions -- like how common cybersickness is, and whether there are ways to fully prevent it -- are only just starting to be studied. After Garrido's experience, a colleague told him that only around 2 percent of people feel cybersickness. But at a presentation for prospective students, Garrido watched as volunteers from the audience walked to the front of an auditorium to demo a VR headset -- only to return shakily to their seats. "I could see from afar that they were getting sweaty and kind of uncomfortable," he recalled. "I said to myself, 'Maybe I'm not the only one.'"

As companies like Meta (nee Facebook) make big bets that augmented reality and virtual reality technology will go mainstream, the tech industry is still trying to figure out how to better recruit users to the metaverse, and get them to stay once there. But experts worry that cybersickness could derail these plans for good unless developers find some remedies soon. "The issue is actually something of a catch-22: In order to make VR more accessible and affordable, companies are making devices smaller and running them on less powerful processors," adds the report. "But these changes introduce dizzying graphics -- which inevitably causes more people to experience cybersickness."

"At the same time, a growing body of research suggests cybersickness is vastly more pervasive than previously thought -- perhaps afflicting more than half of all potential users." When Garrido conducted his own study of 92 people, the results indicated that more than 65 percent of people experienced symptoms of cybersickness -- a sharp contrast to the 2 percent estimate Garrido had been told.

He says that these results should be concerning for developers. "If people have this type of bad experience with something, they're not going to try it again," Garrido said.

The Food and Drug Administration is warning people not to abuse nonprescription drugs as part of social-media challenges, including cooking chicken in NyQuil. From a report: The regulator issued a warning cautioning the public that social-media challenges where people misuse nonprescription medications can be dangerous or even fatal. It pointed to a recent challenge where people cook chicken in NyQuil or similar medications. The agency says that boiling a medication can make the drug more concentrated and that inhaling a medicine's vapors while cooking with it could cause a person to ingest a high amount of the drug. In the case of the NyQuil-chicken challenge, the FDA says a person could hurt their lungs. "The challenge sounds silly and unappetizing -- and it is," the FDA said. "But it could also be very unsafe."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: It's well known that weightlifting can strengthen our biceps and quads. Now, there's accumulating evidence that strengthening the muscles we use to breathe is beneficial too. New research shows that a daily dose of muscle training for the diaphragm and other breathing muscles helps promote heart health and reduces high blood pressure. "The muscles we use to breathe atrophy, just like the rest of our muscles tend to do as we get older," explains researcher Daniel Craighead, an integrative physiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. To test what happens when these muscles are given a good workout, he and his colleagues recruited healthy volunteers ages 18 to 82 to try a daily five-minute technique using a resistance-breathing training device called PowerBreathe. The hand-held machine -- one of several on the market -- looks like an inhaler. When people breathe into it, the device provides resistance, making it harder to inhale.

"We found that doing 30 breaths per day for six weeks lowers systolic blood pressure by about 9 millimeters of mercury," Craighead says. And those reductions are about what could be expected with conventional aerobic exercise, he says -- such as walking, running or cycling. A normal blood pressure reading is less than about 120/80 mmHg, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These days, some health care professionals diagnose patients with high blood pressure if their average reading is consistently 130/80 mmHg or higher, the CDC notes. The impact of a sustained 9 mmHg reduction in systolic blood pressure (the first number in the ratio) is significant, says Michael Joyner, a physician at the Mayo Clinic who studies how the nervous system regulates blood pressure. "That's the type of reduction you see with a blood pressure drug," Joyner says. Research has shown many common blood pressure medications lead to about a 9 mmHg reduction. The reductions are higher when people combine multiple medications, but a 10 mmHg reduction correlates with a 35% drop in the risk of stroke and a 25% drop in the risk of heart disease.

So, how exactly does breath training lower blood pressure? Craighead points to the role of endothelial cells, which line our blood vessels and promote the production of nitric oxide -- a key compound that protects the heart. Nitric oxide helps widen our blood vessels, promoting good blood flow, which prevents the buildup of plaque in arteries. "What we found was that six weeks of IMST [inspiratory-muscle strength training] will increase endothelial function by about 45%," Craighead explains. [...] There may also be benefits for elite cyclists, runners and other endurance athletes, he says, citing data that six weeks of IMST increased aerobic exercise tolerance by 12% in middle-aged and older adults. "So we suspect that IMST consisting of only 30 breaths per day would be very helpful in endurance exercise events," Craighead says. It's a technique that athletes could add to their training regimens. Craighead, whose personal marathon best is 2 hours, 21 minutes, says he has incorporated IMST as part of his own training.

When they examined decades-old blood samples from 14 NASA astronauts who flew Space Shuttle missions between 1998 and 2001, researchers found that samples from all 14 astronauts showed mutations in their DNA. Futurism reports: While these mutations are likely low enough not to represent a serious threat to the astronauts' long term health, the research underlines the importance of regular health screenings for astronauts, especially as they embark on longer missions to the Moon and beyond in coming years. The specific mutations, as identified in a new study published in the journal Nature Communications Biology, were marked by a high proportion of blood cells that came from a single clone, a phenomenon called clonal hematopoiesis. Mutations like this can be caused by exposure to excess ultraviolet radiation, and other forms of radiation including chemotherapy. In this case, researchers are suspicious that the mutations may have been the result of space radiation.

"Astronauts work in an extreme environment where many factors can result in somatic mutations, most importantly space radiation, which means there is a risk that these mutations could develop into clonal hematopoiesis," said lead author David Goukassian, professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in a statement. The blood samples for this latest study were collected from 12 male and two female astronauts ten days before their flight and on the day of their landing. The samples were then cryogenically stored at -112 degrees Fahrenheit for around two decades. The mutations observed in the blood samples resemble the kind of somatic mutations we see in older individuals -- which is interesting on its own, considering the median age of the astronauts was only 42.

"Although the clonal hematopoiesis we observed was of a relatively small size, the fact that we observed these mutations was surprising given the relatively young age and health of these astronauts," Goukassian said. "The presence of these mutations does not necessarily mean that the astronauts will develop cardiovascular disease or cancer," he added, "but there is the risk that, over time, this could happen through ongoing and prolonged exposure to the extreme environment of deep space." Therefore, Goukassian and his team are recommending that NASA should regularly screen astronauts for these kinds of mutations.

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.

A combination of psychedelics and therapy appears to help people with alcoholism cut down on the number of days per month they drink heavily, according to a new study. The Verge reports: Researchers used psilocybin, the psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms, to treat patients over eight months and saw a dramatic improvement in participants' drinking habits. Using psychedelics as treatments for alcoholism was a popular idea in the 1960s and 1970s, and studies on LSD found that it reduced alcohol misuse. But the approach went quiet in the decades after, according to an editorial published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry alongside the new study.

The new research marks a "rekindling of interest," the authors of the editorial wrote. The study included 93 people with alcohol dependence. In the 12 weeks leading up to the study, the participants drank alcohol an average of around 60 days. Of those 60 drinking days, about half were heavy drinking days -- defined as five or more drinks a day for a man and four or more drinks in a day for a woman. People in the trial were randomly assigned to either take a capsule of psilocybin or an antihistamine twice over the course of the 36-week-long study. They had four sessions with therapists before the first time they took the drug, four sessions between the two drug doses, and four sessions after the second drug dose.

Everyone in the study started drinking less after the first four weeks of therapy -- the percentage of heavy drinking days dropped from around half of all drinking days to around a quarter. But that number kept falling for the people who took psilocybin. After the end of the full study, they drank heavily on around 10 percent of the days when they drank. People who took the antihistamine were still drinking heavily on around a quarter of drinking days. The effects lasted for months after the second dose of the psilocybin, study author Michael Bogenschutz, a psychiatrist and director of the NYU Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine, stressed during a press briefing. "This suggests that psilocybin is treating the underlying disorder of alcohol addiction rather than merely treating symptoms," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT News: Parkinson's disease is notoriously difficult to diagnose as it relies primarily on the appearance of motor symptoms such as tremors, stiffness, and slowness, but these symptoms often appear several years after the disease onset. Now, Dina Katabi, the Thuan (1990) and Nicole Pham Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT and principal investigator at MIT Jameel Clinic, and her team have developed an artificial intelligence model that can detect Parkinson's just from reading a person's breathing patterns. The tool in question is a neural network, a series of connected algorithms that mimic the way a human brain works, capable of assessing whether someone has Parkinson's from their nocturnal breathing -- i.e., breathing patterns that occur while sleeping. The neural network, which was trained by MIT PhD student Yuzhe Yang and postdoc Yuan Yuan, is also able to discern the severity of someone's Parkinson's disease and track the progression of their disease over time.

The MIT researchers demonstrated that the artificial intelligence assessment of Parkinson's can be done every night at home while the person is asleep and without touching their body. To do so, the team developed a device with the appearance of a home Wi-Fi router, but instead of providing internet access, the device emits radio signals, analyzes their reflections off the surrounding environment, and extracts the subject's breathing patterns without any bodily contact. The breathing signal is then fed to the neural network to assess Parkinson's in a passive manner, and there is zero effort needed from the patient and caregiver. "A relationship between Parkinson's and breathing was noted as early as 1817, in the work of Dr. James Parkinson. This motivated us to consider the potential of detecting the disease from one's breathing without looking at movements," Katabi says. "Some medical studies have shown that respiratory symptoms manifest years before motor symptoms, meaning that breathing attributes could be promising for risk assessment prior to Parkinson's diagnosis." The research has been published in the journal Nature Medicine.

Several readers have shared a report: The ads are everywhere -1 and so are the inflated claims: Special shampoos and treatments, sometimes costing thousands of dollars, will make hair grow. But many dermatologists who specialize in hair loss say that most of these products don't work. [...] But there is a cheap treatment, he and other dermatologists say, costing pennies a day, that restores hair in many patients. It is minoxidil, an old and well-known hair-loss treatment drug used in a very different way. Rather than being applied directly to the scalp, it is being prescribed in very low-dose pills.

Although a growing group of dermatologists is offering low-dose minoxidil pills, the treatment remains relatively unknown to most patients and many doctors. It has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for this purpose and so is prescribed off-label -- a common practice in dermatology. "I call us the off-label bandits -- a title I am proud to bear," said Dr. Adam Friedman, professor and chair of dermatology at George Washington University. He explained that dermatologists have been trained to understand how medicines work, which allows them to try drugs off-label.

This week the New England Journal of Medicine published results from a one year, randomized, placebo-controlled study on whether Ivermectin (or the drugs metformin and fluvoxamine) helped patients when administered at the beginning of a COVID-19 infection. Here's how MarketWatch summarized the results:

Ivermectin "failed to prevent the kind of severe COVID-19 that leads to an emergency-room visit or hospitalization." "None of the medications showed any impact on the primary outcome, which included experiencing low oxygen as measured on an home oxygen monitor," said Dr. Carolyn Bramonte, principal investigator of the study and an assistant professor of internal medicine and pediatrics at the University of Minnesota Medical School. Having low blood oxygen levels, or hypoxemia, is a common reason why COVID-19 patients end up seeking care in an ER, being hospitalized, or dying....

Each of the three generic medications has been held up as a possible COVID-19 drug, particularly ivermectin, which gained a cult following over the course of the pandemic despite well-documented issues with the flawed science that in some cases fraudulently touted the drug's benefits. Yet none so far have demonstrated in robust clinical trials that they actually help treat people with COVID-19.

A long-awaited double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study conducted by Duke University School of Medicine and funded by the U.S. concluded in June that ivermectin did not improve symptom duration among COVID-19 patients with mild-to-moderate forms of the disease. The same research found that the drug did not reduce hospitalizations or death.