New research from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London, in partnership with COMPASS Pathways, has established that psilocybin can be safely administered at doses of either 10mg or 25mg to up to six participants simultaneously. The research, published in The Journal of Psychopharmacology, is an essential first step in demonstrating the safety and feasibility of psilocybin – a psychedelic drug isolated from the Psilocybe mushroom – for use within controlled settings alongside talking therapy as a potential treatment for a range of mental health conditions, including treatment-resistant depression (TRD) and PTSD....

Arts and cultural organizations swiftly switched from fixed buildings to the Internet during the first COVID-19 outbreak. Digital museums and online art galleries attracted public attention for the first time. Two things happened as a result of this. First, people all over the world could access works of art and other cultural items from their couches. Second, a far larger audience than previously now had the chance to experience art....

Radio colors The use of “radio colors” led to the breakthrough. In optical light, colors are how the eye distinguishes each wavelength. Our rainbow goes from shorter-wavelength blue optical light, to longer-wavelength red optical light. But electromagnetic radiation that the human eye cannot see, because the wavelength is too long or short, is equally real. Astronomers call this “ultra-violet light” or “radio light.” The radio-light extends the rainbow beyond the red edge we see....

Quantum entanglement was discovered by Schrödinger and later studied by Einstein and other scientists in the last century. It is a quantum phenomenon that has no counterparts in classical physics. The groups of entangled particles lose their individuality and behave as a single entity. Any change in one of the particles leads to an immediate response in the other, even if they are spatially separated. “Quantum entanglement is essential in applications such as quantum computing, since it enables certain tasks to be performed much faster than in classical computing,” explained the leader of the Quantum Information Theory and Quantum Metrology group Géza Toth....

Computer simulations explain how electrons with wide-ranging energies rain into Earth’s upper and middle atmosphere during a phenomenon known as the pulsating aurora. The findings, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, suggest that the higher-energy electrons resulting from this process could cause destruction of the part of the ozone in the mesosphere, about 60 kilometers above Earth’s surface. The study was a collaboration between scientists in Japan, including at Nagoya University, and colleagues in the US, including from NASA....

A study led by researchers at the University of Toronto highlights the extensive damage that can be caused by common teeth-whitening agents. Published recently in Nature Scientific Reports, the study assessed the dental cell damage caused by the use of carbamide peroxide teeth-whitening treatments. It found that a recommended application of just 10 percent carbamide peroxide gel on teeth (35 percent carbamide peroxide gel can be purchased online) reduces the enamel protein content by up to 50 percent....

By eliminating the need to convert mechanical energy to electrical energy for charging a battery, a new hybrid generator-storage cell utilizes mechanical energy more efficiently than systems using separate generators and batteries. At the heart of the self-charging power cell is a piezoelectric membrane that drives lithium ions from one side of the cell to the other when the membrane is deformed by mechanical stress. The lithium ions driven through the polarized membrane by the piezoelectric potential are directly stored as chemical energy using an electrochemical process....

Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), small objects that orbit the sun beyond Neptune, are fossils from the early days of the solar system which can tell us a lot about its formation and evolution. A new study led by Mohamad Ali-Dib, a research scientist at the NYU Abu Dhabi Center for Astro, Particle, and Planetary Physics, reports the significant discovery that two groups of TNOs with different surface colors also have very different orbital patterns....

A new study by researchers at the University of Nottingham has revealed that our ancient ancestors were more complex than originally thought, solving an important piece of the animal evolution puzzle. In the distant past, animals underwent a significant evolution by developing bilateral symmetry and two gut openings. This allowed them to move faster through the early seas, find food and extract nutrients more efficiently, and protect themselves from predators....

Coronary artery disease is linked with fatty deposits of plaque that build up inside the artery walls. Large, lipid-rich plaques are vulnerable to rupture. The rupture of these plaques causes most heart attacks. However, predicting which plaques will rupture is challenging. Researchers in China developed a radiomics model that uses information from coronary CT angiography images to assess plaque vulnerability. They developed the model in 299 patients. They then studied the approach in 708 patients with suspected coronary artery disease....

The findings were reported in the journal Nature Microbiology. “We capture the most complete, high-resolution, quantitative picture of how SARS-CoV-2 replicates and sheds in people during natural infection. There are no other data like this,” said U. of I. microbiology professor Christopher B. Brooke, who led the research with microbiology and statistics professor Pamela P. Martinez and pathobiology professor Rebecca L. Smith. “The study sheds light on several aspects of infection that were poorly understood, that are important for both public health purposes as well as just fundamental biology....

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for respirators and masks has been urgent. Our team has worked to develop a respirator platform that not only fits comfortably and snugly but can also be sterilized and re-sterilized,” said corresponding author Giovanni Traverso, MB, BChir, PhD, a gastroenterologist and biomedical engineer in the Division of Gastroenterology at the Brigham and assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. “In this study, we looked at up to 100 re-sterilization cycles and found that the TEAL respirator we’ve designed can withstand that....

Silicon semiconductor technology has done marvels for the advancement of our society, which has benefited tremendously from its versatile use and amazing capabilities. The development of electronics, automation, computers, digital cameras, and recent smartphones based on this material and its underpinning technology has reached skyrocket limits, downscaling the physical size of devices and wires to the nanometer regime. Although this technology has been developing since the late 1960s, the miniaturization of circuits seems to have reached a possible halt, since transistors can only be shrunk down to a certain size and not further beyond....

In Samuel Arbesman’s new book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date, the applied mathematician examines why in the modern world, facts change all of the time. Arbesman is a senior scholar at the Kaufmann Foundation and an expert in scientometrics. He also writes for Wired Science’s Social Dimension and in this new book, he examines how facts are made and remade. As fact-making speeds up, he’s concerned that most of us don’t keep updated and therefore won’t make decisions on the new truths....

New research published today (December 6, 2019) in Environmental Research Letters has revealed that thanks to the Protocol, today’s global temperatures are considerably lower. And by mid-century, the Earth will be – on average – at least 1°C (1.8°F) cooler than it would have been without the agreement. Mitigation is even greater in regions such as the Arctic, where the avoided warming will be as much as 3°C – 4°C (5....

“Nobody had looked at this before because we were so locked into this way of thinking; the assumption was that one mitochondrion meant one battery,” said Dr. Orian Shirihai, a professor of medicine in endocrinology and pharmacology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and senior author of the study published on October 14, 2019, in EMBO Journal. It is also not a coincidence that this has taken place in California, where an electric vehicle revolution has made its impact everywhere on the University of California, Los Angeles campus....

The World Bank refers to water quality issues as an “invisible crisis” since they are under-monitored, difficult to identify, and frequently unnoticeable to the naked eye. Nevertheless, population expansion, economic development, and climate change are all putting pressure on the quality of the world’s water resources. However, access to clean water is essential for maintaining the health of our ecosystems as well as meeting societal needs including public health, energy production, and food production....

This device is different than the invisibility cloaks that work in the microwave, infrared, and optical parts of the spectrum that other scientists have been working on. Their device scatters light from the object and distorts it, while producing two “ghost” images on each side of the original object and can be achieved with today’s technology. Reference: “Creation of Ghost Illusions Using Wave Dynamics in Metamaterials” by Wei Xiang Jiang, Cheng-Wei Qiu, Tiancheng Han, Shuang Zhang and Tie Jun Cui, 12 March 2013, Advanced Functional Materials....

A team of international scientists, led by University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) paleontologist Professor Jonah Choiniere, described the new species in the journal Current Biology today. The dinosaur’s name is Sesotho for “a giant thunderclap at dawn” (Sesotho is one of South Africa’s 11 official languages and an indigenous language in the area where the dinosaur was found). “The name reflects the great size of the animal as well as the fact that its lineage appeared at the origins of sauropod dinosaurs,” said Choiniere....

A recent discovery, reported in the journal Science, describes a previously undiscovered component of brain anatomy. This new component serves both as a protective barrier and a base from which immune cells can keep an eye out for any signs of infection or inflammation within the brain. The new study comes from the labs of Maiken Nedergaard, co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at University of Rochester and the University of Copenhagen and Kjeld Møllgård, M....