Lifeboat Foundation

During her chemistry Nobel Prize lecture in 2018, Frances Arnold said, “Today we can for all practical purposes read, write and edit any sequence of DNA, but we cannot compose it.” That isn’t true anymore.

What if symptoms of chronic pain were sometimes just echoes of a past injury, and your brain could “snap out of it” with the help of psychedelics? It’s a surprising theory that several labs around the world are beginning to investigate. While there have been few double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trials evaluating the efficacy of psychedelics for treating chronic pain, preliminary evidence is beginning to emerge — with promising results.

Chronic pain is defined as pain that persists beyond the usual recovery period or occurs with another condition. It may occur continuously or happen off and on. The most common manifestations of chronic pain are lower back pain, headache disorders, fibromyalgia, and neuropathic pain. People treated for chronic pain often undergo “pain management programs” that combine approaches from different fields to customize treatments.

Although it may be a reflection of ongoing physical health issues, chronic pain can also have deeply psychosomatic origins, reflecting the close relationship between mind and body.

Advanced technologies enable the controlled release of medicine to specific cells in the body. Scientists argue these same technologies must be applied to agriculture if growers are to meet increasing global food demands.

Listen to this episode from Carboncopies Podcast on Spotify. In the third episode of the Carboncopies Podcast Series, Professor Tony Zador presents his work in DNA barcoding and projectome mapping. This technique has already been utilized by the well known Allen Brain Atlas. Zador further presented a nascent extension of this work that offers the possibility of using the same basic technique to map connectomes.

The big question is whether the wealth boom of the past decade, initially fueled by low interest rates and liquidity, and more recently by Covid-19 pandemic stimulus and artificial intelligence, can continue. Global conflicts, elections, interest rates and a potential economic slowdown could all slow the pace of wealth creation, said Elias Ghanem, global head of the Capgemini Research Institute for Financial Services.

“The last 10 years were exceptional,” Ghanem said. “We now have inflation, a potential recession and geopolitical problems and elections. The environment is completely different.”

Indeed, globally, the wealth picture looks more mixed than in the U.S. The number of millionaires worldwide grew 5.1% last year, to 22.8 million, according to the report. Their combined fortunes grew to a record $86.8 trillion.

Nautilus provides a ‘James Webb telescope’ for tau analysis, enabling a deeper understanding of Alzheimer’s disease biology.

Ancient vessels, discovered by accident on the Mongolian steppe, have given us new insight into how the land’s ancient inhabitants ate.

Archeologists have scraped caked residue from the insides of two Bronze Age cauldrons dating back 2,750 years, revealing that the vessels were once used for collecting the blood of ruminants, such as sheep and goats, as well as the milk of wild yaks (Bos mutus).

What did they do with the blood, you ask? Well, we can’t know for certain, but it was likely used for dietary purposes, such as the production of blood sausage, similar to sausage-making techniques still used in rural Mongolia today.

Nanocarrier delivery has huge potential in agriculture; however, there are significant scientific and societal barriers to overcome. In this Review, the authors explore the state of the field, what lessons can be learned from nanomedicine, and discuss what scientific and societal issues need to be addressed.

How often should patients be screened for cannabis use? This is what a recent study published in JAMA Network Open hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) investigated how primary care patients who recognize themselves as recreational cannabis users could potentially be at risk for—or suffering from—cannabis use disorder. This study holds the potential to raise awareness about healthcare providers conducting cannabis screening that could help identify early signs of cannabis use disorder in primary care patients.

For the study, the researchers analyzed surveys completed by 175,734 patients prior to a primary care appointment to assess their cannabis use and was conducted between January 2021 and March 2023. In the end, the researchers found that 17 percent indicated cannabis use in their surveys, of which 34.7 percent of those individuals demonstrated potentially high risk for cannabis use disorder based on their survey results. Additionally, 76.1 percent of patients indicated they used cannabis for medical reasons while not identifying as medical cannabis users. The researchers note these results indicate steps should be taken to conduct routine cannabis screenings of primary care patents by healthcare professionals.

“Patients may not tell their primary care providers about their cannabis use, and their doctors may not ask about it,” said Dr. Lillian Gelberg, MD, who is Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and lead author of the study. “Not asking patients about their cannabis use results in a missed opportunity for opening up doctor-patient communication regarding use of cannabis generally and for management of their symptoms. ”