Clinical Trial Finds Substantial Antidepressant Effects From Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy

 When psilocybin - the hallucinogenic compound in magic mushrooms - is employed during supportive psychotherapy, there appear to be rapid, substantial, and enduring antidepressant effects, per a replacement trial. 

The randomized study is tiny and there was no traditional control group, but lead researcher Alan Davis from Johns Hopkins University says he and his team are "really excited about the results."

"We found a statistically significant and extremely large effect," Davis said during a recent podcast.

Among 24 volunteers with major major affective disorder, researchers found psilocybin-assisted therapy was a minimum of twice as effective as psychotherapy on its own, and over fourfold as effective as available antidepressant drugs.

The drug also doesn't require taking a pill every single day, nor does it include nearly as many side effects as antidepressants or ketamine. but occasional mild to moderate headaches and some emotional moments, volunteers within the study tolerated psilocybin quite well and there have been no serious dangers.

The research included two therapy sessions on the drug with 8 hours of prep and a pair of hours of follow-up with a therapist. During the sessions, a pill of psilocybin was administered and participants extended on a couch in a very living room-like space with headphones on for musical stimulation and eyeshades on to spur inward reflection.

During the trial, roughly half the volunteers began psilocybin therapy right away, while the opposite half was placed on a 'waiting list' for eight weeks with regular mental state check-ups.

This served as a kind of control group, with the immediate treatment group faring significantly better than those within the delayed group who weren't receiving the other sorts of treatment.

By the purpose of 4 weeks into the trial, 71 percent of the volunteers showed an improvement, with 50 percent come by depressive symptoms.

A month later, over half the group was considered 'in remission', and therefore the average depression score dropped from 23 to eight. 

"The present trial showed that psilocybin administered within the context of supportive psychotherapy (approximately 11 hours) produced large, rapid, and sustained antidepressant effects," the authors conclude.

Up to a year after the trial, patients were still being checked abreast of, and researchers arrange to publish those ends up in the long run.

Even what we have got up to now looks promising. The findings support other recent studies, which suggest psilocybin-assisted therapy can produce significant and lasting antidepressant effects in precisely one or two sessions.

One prior clinical test found a high-dose and a low-dose session decreased depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer. Six months later, 80 percent of the patients were still reaping the advantages. 

Another trial among people who weren't responding to other depression and anxiety treatments found similar benefits with two doses that lasted for up to 3 months.

While it's still not clear how psilocybin improves depressive symptoms, the hallucinogen has been tied to several of the identical neural networks as current antidepressant drugs, although it appears to act in a different way. 

Brain imaging studies on those with treatment-resistant depression suggest psilocybin has the alternative effect of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), increasing emotional connection rather than blunting it like SSRIs tend to try and do.

In the current trial, for example, researchers say their volunteers reported mystical, personally meaningful, and insightful experiences that were related to a decrease in depression at 4 weeks.

Major clinical depression impacts over 300 million people worldwide and lots of them don't respond easily to existing styles of treatment. Finding better ways to treat this mental disease could bring relief to such a lot of.

Twice last year, the United States' Food and Drug Advisory (FDA) designated psilocybin a "breakthrough therapy" within the hopes it might speed up research, and one in every one of these clinical trials is looking specifically at major depression.

The results are just beginning to are available in, and that we will verify them amongst much larger cohorts and with stronger control groups, but the findings to this point are strong and researchers remain optimistic.

"This is that the first of what's visiting be, over the following number of years, many clinical trials on this subject in depressed populations," says Davis.

"It's looking like within the next four to 6 years that it's possible the FDA might need enough evidence to work out if this treatment is often made available to the general public."

In some areas, the therapy might arrive even sooner. only in the near past, Oregon became the primary state within the US to legalize psilocybin therapy, given its promising results among those with PTSD, addiction, and also depression.

You might be hearing about psychedelic therapy lots more within the future.

World's Biggest Iceberg Is on a Collision Course With a Remote Penguin Sanctuary

 The world's biggest iceberg is on a collision course with an overseas South Atlantic island that's home to thousands of penguins and seals, and will impede their ability to collect food, scientists told AFP Wednesday.

Icebergs naturally break removed from Antarctica into the ocean, but temperature change has accelerated the method - during this case, with potentially devastating consequences for abundant wildlife within the British Overseas Territory of South Georgia.

Shaped sort of a closed hand with a pointing finger, the iceberg called A68a split off in 2017 from Larsen ice on the western peninsula, which has warmed faster than the other a part of Earth's southernmost continent.

At its current rate of travel, it'll take the large cube - which is several times the world of the national capital - 20 to 30 days to run aground into the island's shallow waters.

A NASA photo showing the iceberg A68a drifting in the South Atlantic between Antarctica and South Georgia (NASA/ESA)

A68a is 160 kilometres (93 miles) long and 48 kilometres (30 miles) across at its widest point, but the iceberg is a smaller amount than 200 metres deep, which implies it could park dangerously near the island.

"We put the percentages of collision at 50/50," Andrew Fleming from Brits Antarctic Survey told AFP.

Many thousands of King penguins - a species with a bright splash of yellow on their heads - continue to exist the island, alongside Macaroni, Chinstrap and Gentoo penguins.

Seals also populate South Georgia, as do wandering albatrosses, the most important bird species that may fly.

If the iceberg runs aground next to South Georgia, foraging routes might be blocked, hampering the flexibility of penguin parents to feed their young, and thus threatening the survival of seal pups and penguin chicks.

Release of stored carbon

"Global numbers of penguins and seals would visit an oversized margin," Geraint Tarling, also from land Antarctic Survey, told AFP in an interview.

The incoming iceberg would also crush organisms and their seafloor ecosystem, which might need decades or centuries to recover.

(Martin Wettstein/Unsplash)

Carbon stored by these organisms would be released into the ocean and atmosphere, adding to carbon emissions caused by an act, the researchers said.

As A68a drifted with currents across the Atlantic Ocean, the iceberg did an excellent job of distributing microscopic edibles for the ocean's tiniest creatures, said Tarling.

"Over many years, this iceberg has accumulated plenty of nutrients and mud, and that they are setting out to leach out and fertilise the oceans."

Up to a kilometre thick, icebergs are the solid-ice extension of land-bound glaciers. They naturally break faraway from ice shelves as snow-laden glaciers push toward the ocean.

But warming has increased the frequency of this process, referred to as calving.

"The amount of ice going from the centre of the continent out towards the sides is increasing in speed," Tarling said.

Up to the tip of the 20th century, the Larsen ice had been stable for over 10,000 years. In 1995, however, a large chunk broke off, followed by another in 2002.

This was followed by the breakup of the nearby Wilkins shelf ice in 2008 and 2009, and A68a in 2017.

Hydrofracturing - when water seeps into cracks at the surface, splitting the ice farther down - was almost certainly the most culprit in each case.

Scientists Just Successfully Regenerated Mouse Optic Nerve Cells in The Lab

 Scientists have found a brand new thanks to regenerate damaged nervus opticus cells taken from mice and grown during a dish. This exciting development could lead to potential disease treatments within the future.

Damage to full-grown nerve cells causes irreversible and life-altering consequences because once nerve fibers mature, they lose their ability to regenerate after injury or disease. The new experiments show how activating a part of a nerve cell's regenerative machinery, a protein referred to as protrudin could stimulate nerves within the eye to regrow after injury. 

With more research, the achievement could be a step towards future treatments for glaucoma, a bunch of eye diseases that cause vision loss by damaging the cranial nerve (that links the attention to the brain).

"What we have seen is that the strongest regeneration of any technique we've used before,'' said ophthalmologist Keith Martin from the University of Melbourne in Australia.

"In the past, it seemed impossible we might be able to regenerate the nervus opticus but this research shows the potential of gene therapy to try and do this." 

We have seen similar attempts to revive vision in mice and a few promising results before.

In 2016, scientists were ready to regrow a tiny low fraction of retinal ganglion cells in adult mice by turning on a dormant growth switch and showed these new nerve cells at the rear of the attention reconnected to the proper part of the brain in addition.

And before that, a 2012 study also partially restored 'simple' vision to adult mice after regenerating nerves along the complete length of the optic pathway.

This latest research remains in its early stages and has focused on understanding precisely how protrudin, a scaffolding molecule present in sprouting neurons, works to support cell growth. 

It's always good to possess some options because there is no guarantee that promising leads to mouse studies translate to safe and effective treatments for people.

In this study, scientists stimulated nerve cells of the attention to supply more protrudin, to determine if this could help protect the cells from damage and even repair after injury.

First, in optical nerve cells cultured in a very dish, the researchers showed that ramping up protrudin production stimulated regeneration of nerve cells that had been cut by a laser. Their spindly axons regenerated over longer distances, and in less time than untreated cells. 

(Petrova et al., Nature Communications, 2020)

Above: A regenerating and a non-regenerating axon over 14 hours after laser axotomy. Red arrows at 0 h post-injury show the purpose of injury; white arrows trace the trail of a regenerating axon.

Next, adult mice were administered gene therapy - an injection straight into the attention - carrying instructions for nerve cells to raise protrudin production. As painful as that sounds, this procedure can actually be done safely in people (the injection, that is, not yet the gene therapy).

A few weeks and one-second cranial nerve injury later, these mice had more surviving nerve cells in their retinas than the control group did.

In one final experiment, the scientists used whole retinas from mice removed a fortnight after giving them a protrudin boost, to determine if this treatment could prevent nerve cells from dying in the first place.

The researchers found, three days later, that stimulating protrudin production had been almost "entirely neuroprotective, with these retinas exhibiting no loss of [retinal] neurons," the researchers wrote in their paper. Usually, about 1/2 retinal neurons removed during this way die within a pair of days.

"Our strategy relies on using gene therapy – an approach already in clinical use – to deliver protruding into the attention," said Veselina Petrova, a neuroscience student at the University of Cambridge.

"It's possible our treatment may be further developed as the simplest way of protecting retinal neurons from death, also as stimulating their axons to regrow." 

It's important to notice that we're a protracted way from restoring vision during a person: Regenerating cells in an exceeding dish is great, but we do not know from these experiments if giving a mouse more protrudin would restore its sight. 

One of the following steps is to appear at whether protrudin has an identical protective effect in cultured human retinal cells.

The scientists publishing this work also plan on studying whether the identical technique may well be wont to repair damaged neurons after neural structure injury.

"Treatments identified this fashion often show promise within the injured neural structure," said Petrova. "It's possible that increased or activated protrudin can be wont to boost regeneration within the injured neural structure."

NASA Finally Makes Contact With Voyager 2 After Longest Radio Silence in 30 Years

 There's never been a radio silence quite like this one. After long months with no way of constructing contact with Voyager 2, NASA has finally reestablished communications with the record-setting interstellar spacecraft.

The breakdown in communications – lasting since March, almost eight months and a full pandemic ago – wasn't because of some rogue malfunction, nor any run-in with part weirdness (although there's that too).

In this instance, it absolutely was more a case of routine maintenance. And yet, when you're one in every of the farthest-flying spacecraft in history – leaving Earth and even the whole scheme behind you – nothing much is ever truly routine.

In March, NASA announced that region Station 43 (DSS-43) in Australia, the sole antenna on Earth that may send commands to Voyager 2, required critical upgrades and would want to close up for roughly 11 months for the work to be completed.

During this window, Voyager 2, which is currently over 18.7 billion kilometers (11.6 billion miles) faraway from Earth and getting farther all the time, wouldn't be ready to receive any communications from Earth, although its own broadcasts back to us would still be received by scientists.

As it stands, DSS-43's renovation remains underway and on course to be finalized in February 2021, but enough of the upgrades are installed for preliminary testing to start out.

Last week, mission operators sent their first communications to Voyager 2 since March, issuing a series of commands, and NASA reports that Voyager 2 returned a sign confirming it had received the instructions and executed the commands without issue.

Successful pings between radio antennas and spacecraft aren't usually newsworthy events, but Voyager 2 is such a storied and historic probe (NASA's longest-running space mission in fact), it rightfully gets special attention – especially in situations like this, involving a period of one-way radio silence ciao, it's effectively unprecedented.

According to NASA, DSS-43 hasn't been offline for this long in over 30 years. The old radio aerial that needed replacing – the sole one within the world capable of broadcasting to Voyager 2 – had been in use for over 47 years.

As a part of the refurb, DSS-43 is getting two new antennas, upgraded heating, and cooling equipment, power supply equipment, and other electronics to support the new transmitters. When the work is complete, the upgrades will provide longevity to a cornerstone of a facility that's already legendary.

"What makes this task unique is that we're doing work all levels of the antenna, from the pedestal at ground level all the high to the feedcones at the center of the dish that reaches above the rim," says NASA part Network project manager Brad Arnold.

"This test communication with Voyager 2 definitely tells us that things are on course with the work we're doing."

As for why DSS-43 is that the only dish within the world that may reach Voyager 2, the rationale isn't purely technological. As a result of the probe's flyby of Neptune's moon Triton in 1989, Voyager 2's trajectory steered significantly southward relative to the Solar System's plane of planets, meaning earthbound antennas within the hemisphere don't have any way of reaching it.

For antennas Down Under, though, it's no biggie – unless you get taken offline for nearly a year of critical upgrades. Even then, though, scientists never stopped brooding about Voyager 2, and kept a detailed eye on its vitals.

"We've always been reprehension the spacecraft. We've been doing that daily," Suzanne Dodd, the project manager for the Voyager Interstellar Mission, told CNN.

"We can see the health of it. If it wasn't healthy, we might have known."

Tireless Volunteers And Navy in Sri Lanka Just Saved 120 Whales From Stranding

 Sri Lanka's navy and volunteers rescued 120 pilot whales stranded within the country's biggest mass beaching, but a minimum of two injured animals was found dead, officials said.

Sailors from the navy and therefore the coastguard together with local volunteers pushed back a minimum of 120 whales by dawn Tuesday after a gruelling overnight rescue, navy spokesman Indika de Silva said.

The school of short-finned pilot whales washed ashore at Panadura, 25 kilometres (15 miles) south of Colombo, since Monday afternoon within the biggest-ever mass stranding of whales on the island.

"We used our small inshore patrol craft to drag the whales one by one into deeper waters," de Silva told AFP.

"Sadly, two whales have died of the injuries sustained once they beached."

Local authorities were braced for mass deaths as seen in Tasmania in September when about 470 pilot whales were stranded and only about 110 of them may well be saved after days of rescue efforts.

Sri Lanka's Marine Environment Protection Authority (MEPA) confirmed that Panadura saw the biggest single pod of whales stranded within the South country.

"It is extremely unusual for such an oversized number to succeed in our shores," MEPA chief Dharshani Lahandapura told AFP, adding that the explanation for the stranding wasn't known.

"We think this is often almost like the mass stranding in Tasmania in September."

Pilot whales - which may develop to 6 metres (20 feet) long and weigh a tonne - are highly social.

The causes of mass strandings remain unknown despite scientists studying the phenomenon for many years.

An Asteroid Trailing After Mars Could Actually Be The Stolen Twin of Our Moon

 A distant asteroid trailing within the gravitational wake of Mars has been observed in greater detail than ever before, and therefore the close-up reveals a surprising resemblance – one that raises some interesting questions about the object's ancient origins.

The asteroid in question, called (101429) 1998 VF31, is a component of a bunch of trojan asteroids sharing the orbit of Mars.

Trojans are celestial bodies that constitute gravitationally balanced regions of space within the vicinity of other planets, located 60 degrees before and behind the world.

Most of the trojan asteroids we all know about share Jupiter's orbit, but other planets have them too, including Mars and Earth too.

What makes (101429) 1998 VF31 (hereafter '101429') interesting is that among the Red Planet's trailing trojans (the ones that follow behind Mars because it orbits the Sun), 101429 appears to be unique.

Depiction of Mars and trojans; 101429 is the blue point circling L5. (AOP)

The rest of the group, called the L5 Martian Trojans, all belong to what's called the Eureka family, consisting of 5261 Eureka – the primary Mars trojan discovered – and a bunch of small fragments believed to own come loose from their parent space rock.

101429 is different, though, and in an exceedingly new study led by astronomers from the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium (AOP) in European countries, researchers wanted to look at why.

Using a spectrograph called X-SHOOTER on the EU Southern Observatory's 8-m Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, the team examined how sunlight reflects off 101429 and its L5 kin within the Eureka family. Only, it's like 101429 and also the Eureka clan aren't kin in spite of everything, with the analysis revealing 101429 shows a spectral match for a satellite much closer to home.

"The spectrum of this particular asteroid seems to be almost a dead-ringer for parts of the Moon where there's exposed bedrock like crater interiors and mountains," explains AOP astrochemist Galin Borisov.

While we won't make certain yet why that's, the researchers say it's plausible that this Martian trojan's origins began somewhere far from Mars, with 101429 representing a "relic fragment of the Moon's original solid crust".

If that's true, how did the Moon's long-lost twin find yourself as a trojan bound along with Mars?

Spectral comparison of 101429 and the Moon's surface. (AOP

"The early system was very different from the place we see today," explains lead author of the study, AOP astronomer Apostolos Christou.

"The space between the newly-formed planets was filled with debris and collisions were commonplace. Large asteroids [planetesimals] were constantly hitting the Moon and therefore the other planets. A shard from such a collision could have reached the orbit of Mars when the earth was still forming and was trapped in its Trojan clouds."

It's a captivating idea, but the researchers say it is not the sole explanation for 101429's past. it is also possible, and maybe more likely, that the trojan instead represents a fraction of Mars chipped off by an identical quite incident impacting the Red Planet; or it would just be a commonplace asteroid that, through the weathering processes of radiation, ended up looking a bit like the Moon.

Further observations with even more powerful spectrographs may be able to shed more light on this question of space parentage, as could a future spacecraft visit, the team says, "which could, on the way to the Trojans, obtain spectra at Mars or the Moon for direct comparison with the asteroid data".

Astronomers Confirm a Rogue Earth-Sized Planet Careening Through Our Galaxy

 Earth orbits the sun sort of a ship sailing in a circle around its anchor. But what if someone - or something - cut that ship loose?

Unbound from any star or system, what would become of a little world flying helplessly and heedlessly through interstellar space? What happens when a planet goes rogue?

Scientists suspect that billions of free-floating or "rogue" planets may exist within the Milky Way, but to this point, only some of the candidates have turned up among the 4,000-or-so worlds discovered beyond our scheme.

Most of those potential rogue planets appear to be enormous, measuring anywhere from two to 40 times the mass of Jupiter (one Jupiter is such as about 300 Earths). But now, astronomers believe they've detected a rogue world like no other: a small, free-floating planet, roughly the mass of Earth, gallivanting through the gut of the extragalactic nebula.

This discovery, reported on October 29 within the Astrophysical Journal Letters, may mark the littlest rogue planet ever detected, and it could help prove a long-standing cosmic theory.

According to the study authors, this small world may well be the primary real evidence that free-floating, Earth-sized planets could also be a number of the foremost common objects within the galaxy.

"The odds of detecting such a low-mass object are extremely low," lead study author Przemek Mroz, a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology, told Live Science in an email.

"Either we were very lucky, or such objects are quite common within the galaxy. they'll be as common as stars."

Einstein's hand glass

Most exoplanets in our galaxy are visible only due to their host stars. in a very literal sense, stars provide the sunshine that enables astronomers to directly observe alien worlds.

When a planet is simply too small or too distant to be seen directly, scientists can still detect it from the slight gravitational pull it exerts on its host star (called the velocity method) or by the flickering that happens when a planet passes ahead of the star's Earth-facing side (the transit method).

Rogue planets, by definition, don't have any star to light their way - or to light a telescope's thanks to them. Instead, detecting rogue planets involves a facet of Einstein's theory of relativity referred to as gravitational lensing.

Through this phenomenon, a planet (or even more massive object) acts as a cosmic hand glass that temporarily bends the sunshine of objects behind it from Earth's perspective.

"If a large object passes between an Earth-based observer and an overseas source star, its gravity may deflect and focus light from the source," Mroz explained in an exceeding statement. "The observer will measure a brief brightening of the source star."

The smaller that light-bending object is, the briefer the star's perceived brightening is going to be. While a planet several times the mass of Jupiter might create a brightening effect that lasts some days, a measly planet the mass of Earth will brighten the source star for under some hours or less, the researchers said. This exceptionally rare occurrence is termed "microlensing."

"Chances of observing microlensing are extremely slim," Mroz added within the statement. "If we observed just one source star, we might wait almost 1,000,000 years to work out the source being microlensed."

Fortunately, Mroz and his colleagues weren't observing only 1 star for his or her study - they were watching many several them. Using observations from the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), a star survey based at the University of Warsaw in Poland that has turned up a minimum of 17 exoplanets since 1992, the team stared into the middle of the extragalactic nebula, searching for any signs of microlensing.

In June 2016, they witnessed the shortest microlensing event ever seen. The star in question, located roughly 27,000 light-years away within the densest part of the galaxy, brightened for just 42 minutes.

Calculations showed that the offending object wasn't sure to any star within 8 astronomical units (AU, or eight times the typical distance from Earth to the Sun), suggesting it had been almost certainly a little planet on the run, ejected from its home system after a brush with a far more massive object.

Depending on how far-flung the earth is from the source star (it's impossible to inform with current technology), the rogue world is probably going between one-half and one Earth mass. In either case, this roaming world would be the lowest-mass rogue planet ever detected. consistent with Mroz, that's a "huge milestone" for the science of planet formation.

"Theories of planet formation have predicted that the bulk of free-floating planets should be of Earth-mass or smaller, but this can be the primary time that we could find such a low-mass planet," Mroz said.

"It's really amazing that Einstein's theory allows us to detect a small piece of rock floating within the galaxy."

Many more tiny pieces of rock may soon follow, study co-author Radek Poleski of the University of Warsaw told Live Science.

Future planet-hunting telescopes, like NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (slated to launch within the mid-2020s), are rather more sensitive to the galaxy's teensiest microlensing events than the nearly 30-year-old OGLE experiment is, Poleski said. If orphan planets of roughly Earth's mass are indeed a number of the foremost common denizens of the galaxy, it should not be long before more of the surface.