Astronomers just solved a 50-year-old mystery about the Milky Way’s black hole
A breeze is emanating from Sagittarius A* at the heart of our galaxy
By Jeanna Bryner edited by Clara Moskowitz
At the heart of our home galaxy lurks a gigantic black hole that’s more than a trillion times heavier than Earth, with all that mass stuffed into a region that is about 2,000 times wider than our planet. Now scientists have discovered the behemoth is throwing off a hot breeze.
The findings, detailed today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggest not only that all black holes emit such a wind but also that these beasts are not total loners that are isolated from their environments.
“We have never seen a breeze from a black hole,” says study co-author Elena Murchikova of Northwestern University. “We usually see the consequences of outbursts or other violent activities. Seeing the black hole sitting there, being quiet but still dumping energy all over the region without doing anything violent, is terribly cute,” adds Murchikova, an assistant professor in Northwestern’s department of physics and astronomy.
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Supermassive black holes are suspected to lurk at the centers of all galaxies. Despite plenty of investigations of our home galaxy’s monstrous resident, called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short, scientists have yet to detect gassy winds blowing from it—which they’ve long theorized to exist.
“To observe our own black hole, we have to look through the plane of our galaxy,” Murchikova said in a statement . “That means we have to peer through gas, dust and ionized structures, and you can’t really see through all of that easily.”
Murchikova and Northwestern’s Mark Gorski led a team that compiled five years of data captured by a …
Vetenskapsnyheter
<p>A blip of light in the outer reaches of the Milky Way might be a bizarre black hole born at the beginning of time itself—and the long-sought solution to the mystery of dark matter. Astronomers are calling it “Phoebe”</p>
Humans conquered the planet 300 times faster than genetic evolution can explain
Culture is humanity’s secret for world domination. This calculation shows just how powerful it is
By Cody Cottier edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier
Just under 300,000 years from the moment Homo sapiens appeared in Africa, the species had encircled Earth, mastering desolate deserts and frozen wastelands and all the temperate climes in between. Throughout this staggering expansion, we seem to have relied surprisingly little on genetic adaptation to fuel our globe-conquering—all eight billion of us together remain less genetically diverse than individual populations of chimpanzees. So how did we do it?
Many scientists point to cultural evolution, the process by which knowledge, customs and technology spread over time. But according to Alex Mesoudi, who studies cultural evolution at the University of Exeter in England, “it’s always been just a vague claim.”
No longer. A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA by Arizona State University evolutionary anthropologist Charles Perreault calculates just how big a boost our capacity for culture might have given the great human takeover. Had we been a typical mammal, forced to adapt primarily through sluggish genetic evolution, Perreault concludes, we would’ve needed 88 million years to attain our current geographic footprint—and we would have split into some 2,200 distinct species in that time.
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To arrive at those figures, Perreault compiled range maps for nearly 6,000 mammal species and charted how geographic spread relates to three proxies of evolutionary change for a group with a common ancestor, called a lineage: a lineage’s age, its number of species, and its spectrum …
Search for alien technology on interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS comes up empty
Even though astronomers didn’t detect alien tech signals from a rare interstellar visitor, the results are worthwhile, they say
By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Jeanna Bryner
When Comet 3I/ATLAS entered our solar system last year—only the third known interstellar object to do so—astronomers took notice . And so did scientists involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). These researchers were curious whether this particular interloper may have been linked to aliens.
When astronomers first discovered 3I/ATLAS in July 2025, the icy body was traveling at an impressive speed of about 137,000 miles per hour. Researchers later discovered that it was “ bursting with methanol ” and that its coma—the vapor envelope that formed as the icy object neared the sun—was full of frozen carbon dioxide . Both observations provided astronomers with clues about the comet’s cosmic origin. All signs suggested the interstellar object was natural, but some astronomers took the opportunity to look for so-called technosignatures, particularly radio signals that could be produced by something artificial.
“Eventually, our own Voyager spacecraft will be extraterrestrial artifacts in other stellar systems,” said Sofia Sheikh, a research scientist at the SETI Institute, in a statement , referring to the twin interstellar probes that NASA launched in 1977. “Given that, it is important that we understand the natural distribution of interstellar objects so that we will be able to identify any anomalies that could one day be signs of an artificial interstellar object.”
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To help rule out the possibility that 3I/ATLAS contained some kind of alien technology, She…
White House reclassifies federal epidemiologists and other scientists from civil servants to ‘at-will’ hires
The long-anticipated “Schedule F” order strips job protections meant to safeguard federal employees from political interference
On Wednesday the White House moved to strip civil service protections from about 8,000 federal workers , including many working at public health agencies.
The executive order effectively transforms these jobs—which include “epidemiologist,” “health scientist” and “toxicologist”—into “at-will” positions, meaning people in such roles can be readily fired without cause. The job category, initially called Schedule F and now called Schedule Policy/Career, strips these federal workers of protections meant to prevent political interference.
According to the order, “policy-influencing positions” must be transferred to the new status, thereby “ensuring that such employees can be removed for misconduct or poor performance is essential to protecting democratic self-government by an elected President.” This largely affects senior management roles at agencies that are spread widely across the federal government. The move reflects President Donald Trump’s long-standing claim that there is a “ deep state ” of federal workers who are resistant to his policies, and he has for years called for the schedule change in order to fire civil servants he has viewed as impediments to his policies. The move already faces at least three legal challenges from federal employees .
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Notably, these jobs also include positions that don’t involve policy work, such as “human resources officer,” “customer experience strategist” and “data management specialist,” as well as for some scientist roles . The administration also i…
Scientists just built a powerful AI computer worm that learns as it spreads
This prototype could help the world prepare for AI malware threats, according to the researchers who made it
By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron
A new study shows that computer malware powered by easily accessible artificial intelligence models is here—the research is a “wake-up call” to take cybersecurity risks from AI more seriously, one expert says.
In the study , researchers created an AI-powered computer “worm” designed to attack and spread between devices—revealing a threat that they say the world is woefully underprepared to fight.
“Our results demonstrate that self-sustaining AI-driven cyber-threats are no longer theoretical,” the researchers wrote. The paper, first reported by the New York Times, was posted on the preprint server arXiv.org and has yet to be peer-reviewed.
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David Lie, a professor at the University of Toronto, who is familiar with the research but was not directly involved with the study, says the work is a “wake-up call” that should inspire cyber experts and researchers to develop countermeasures to AI-boosted bugs as fast as possible. “The demonstration here is that there’s a motivation to do this sooner rather than later,” he says.
To make the “worm”—a form of malware that spreads between devices autonomously—the researchers didn’t rely on proprietary AI models from companies such as Anthropic or OpenAI, both of which have issued warnings about the threat of their technology being used by bad actors. Instead the researchers used an undisclosed but freely available AI model “that anyone can download off the internet,” they wrote in a post on their lab’s website.
Importantly, the prototype bug was create…
Landmark pancreatic cancer treatment paves way for targeting other tricky tumors
Unprecedented results against a stubbornly hard-to-treat cancer are boosting optimism that other challenging tumors will be next
The landmark success of a drug against an ‘undruggable’ cancer is spurring fresh optimism in the quest to treat seemingly untouchable tumour targets.
The experimental drug, daraxonrasib , disarms all three members of the RAS family of proteins, which are linked to some of the deadliest cancers. Designing drugs that target the RAS proteins has been notoriously challenging . But a large clinical trial has found that daraxonrasib nearly doubled survival — from 6.7 months to 13.2 months — in people with a form of advanced pancreatic cancer.
The results were presented to a packed room at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois, on 31 May, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine . At the conference, the talk was met with a long standing ovation, says Ecaterina Dumbrava, an oncologist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “After more than a decade without major advances in treatment for pancreatic cancer, seeing this is really emotional,” she says.
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That success is raising hopes that other challenging targets might also soon fall. Nature talked to researchers about progress in targeting RAS and other “undruggable” cancer proteins that can’t be bested with conventional approaches.
RAS proteins are molecular on–off switches that help to control cell growth and division. But some mutations leave RAS proteins stuck in the ‘on’ position, which drives tumour growth.
Ideally, a cancer drug would switch these proteins off. But drugs typically work by…
NASA’s Mars mission MAVEN is lost forever
MAVEN was the first successful mission designed to study the atmosphere of Mars. It also became a vital node of NASA’s communications network at the Red Planet
NASA has officially lost a decade-old Mars orbiter that performed vital scientific and communications work at the Red Planet.
The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, which launched in November 2013, was the first successful spacecraft dedicated to studying the atmosphere of the Red Planet and became a key node in the communications network supporting NASA’s Mars rovers on the surface. But MAVEN’s decade-long tenure has come to an end after NASA lost contact with the spacecraft last December and was unable to reestablish control over the orbiter.
“The science MAVEN has given us is key to informing what kind of radiation protection and safety measures we must take before sending humans to Mars,” said Louise Prockter, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA, in a June 3 statement . “The data collected from MAVEN will continue to provide valuable insight into Mars for decades to come.”
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The new announcement about MAVEN has come after a preliminary report from an anomaly review board that NASA convened in February to investigate the status of the spacecraft. MAVEN’s troubles started abruptly while it was on the far side of Mars from Earth. NASA’s last detailed information from the spacecraft came on December 4, after which a small amount of additional tracking data were delivered on December 6.
Those data suggested to NASA engineers that the spacecraft was “rotating in an unexpected manner” and that its “orbit trajectory may have changed,” the agency wrote last December . That fear appeared to b…
How elevators, pizza and card shuffles reveal the surprising math of everyday life
From slow elevators to perfectly split pizza, math quietly explains the quirks of everyday life
By Rachel Feltman , Manon Bischoff , Fonda Mwangi & Alex Sugiura
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American ’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.
If you love math, you’re probably already subscribed to Scientific American ’s weekly newsletter Proof Positive . But if you’re under the impression that you don’t love math, Proof Positive may prove you wrong.
Here to give us a taste of some of the surprising and delightful stories you’ll find in Proof Positive is Manon Bischoff. Manon is a theoretical physicist and an editor at Spektrum der Wissenschaft, the German-language sister publication of Scientific American .
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Thank you so much for coming on to chat with us today.
Manon Bischoff: Thank you for inviting me.
Feltman: So one of the things that you cover in your newsletter is how math impacts our everyday lives. One recent example is that mathematicians figured out why waiting for the elevator can seem to take forever, which is very relevant to my life—my building has two elevators, and one of them is currently out of commission. [Laughs.] So can you tell us more about how that experiment worked?
Bischoff: Yeah, so you just described it: you press the elevator button, and you’re hoping to go down or up or whatever, and the first elevator that comes, it just goes the wrong direction, right?
Bischoff: And it almost feels personal, so like the building is plotting against you. [Laughs.] I know that feeling. [Laughs.] But actually, it’s not just bad luck or Murphy’s Law; it’s really happening—the building is really plotting against you. [Laughs.…
Edison may not have been the first to record the human voice, new evidence suggests
Could a predecessor to the phonograph have appeared a century earlier?
On December 7, 1877, Thomas Edison walked into the offices of Scientific American in New York City and placed a metal device on a desk. With a turn of a crank, Edison astonished the dozen or so staffers who had gathered around the contraption.
The machine spoke. “Good morning,” it said in Edison’s voice. “How do you do?”
SciAm ’s editors described the demonstration in the December 22, 1877, issue . “There can be no doubt,” they wrote, “but that the inflections are those of nothing else than the human voice.” Accompanying the report was a detailed sketch of Edison’s device, which the inventor called a phonograph .Virtually overnight, the article catapulted Edison to fame and established the phonograph as the first machine to record and reproduce human speech.
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On May 15, 2026, at the annual meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections in Memphis, audio historian Patrick Feaster proposed another candidate for the title—a recording machine that would have preceded Edison’s by nearly a century.
Feaster, a tenacious researcher with a photographic mind for everything phonographic, began investigating this possibility more than 20 years earlier, when he came across a German article from the early 1900s surveying mechanical devices that synthesized (but did not record) some of the sounds of human speech. The article mentioned a man identified only by his last name, Müller, who had exhibited some kind of talking machine in the 1780s. Although the article’s author branded Müller’s machine an obvious hoax, Feaster was intrigued.
His occasional investigations over …
<p>More than 5,300 years after Ötzi’s death, researchers found genetic material from his gut microbiome and identified yeasts that continue to exist despite the mummy being kept below freezing</p>
U.S. science must innovate or die, National Academy of Sciences president says
The past year has been “filled with turmoil” for science, National Academy of Sciences president Marcia McNutt said during her State of the Science address
By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron
The past year has been “filled with turmoil” in science policy, National Academy of Sciences (NAS) president Marcia McNutt said on Tuesday during the annual State of the Science address in Washington, D.C.
McNutt cited problems such as “uncertainty” over federal support for science, “abrupt downsizing” of science agencies, a mass exodus of federal employees and the fact that the world’s top scientific minds are leaving the U.S.
“We always were the country where STEM talent came to us,” McNutt said, referring to science, technology, engineering and math fields. “Now we are exporting our science talent elsewhere.” After about 10 years as president of NAS, McNutt plans to step down on June 30.
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Since President Donald Trump took office last year, U.S. science has been a target for funding cuts, firings and intense regulatory scrutiny . By one estimate, around 100,000 federal employees at scientific agencies have either been fired or left public office in his second term. The administration has also cut nearly 8,000 scientific grants, mostly from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, according to a Nature analysis published in January (some grants have since been reinstated by the courts).
And just last week, as Scientific American reported , the administration published a proposal to give political appointees final say on grant funding instead of researchers, overturning a decades-long precedent. “Now, what co…
In a first, scientists transplanted both a pig liver and kidneys into a person who was brain-dead
The transplanted pig organs functioned for 36 hours before showing signs of rejection
A 53-year-old clinically dead man has become the first person to receive two kidneys and a whole liver from a genetically modified pig. The man’s organ function was sustained for almost five days with consent from his family, and there were no signs that the organs were being rejected in the first 24 hours, according to a study published in Med today.
Most procedures in which a pig organ is transplanted into a person — known as xenotransplantation — involve only a single organ. A small number of people have received pig organs, including hearts, kidneys , partial livers and lungs , and clinical trials in living people are under way in the United States and China. Until now, only parts of a pig liver have been transplanted into a person, says clinician-scientist Xuyong Sun, who led the latest procedure, at the Second Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University in Nanning, China.
Transplanting pig kidneys and a liver in the same procedure is also unique, says Leonardo Riella, a physician-scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who in 2024 led the team that first transplanted a pig kidney into a living person. Transferring multiple organs is more complex than moving one; procedures take longer, increasing the risk of complications, and people who need multiple transplants are often more seriously ill, he adds.
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The study shows that multi-organ xenotransplants are possible, says Wayne Hawthorne, a surgeon and transplant researcher at the University of Sydney in Australia.
Multi-organ transplants are already performed with…
Microsoft’s new quantum computer chip has a fundamental problem
Microsoft’s announcement of a new quantum computing breakthrough with its Majorana 2 chip continues a trend of bold claims followed by scant evidence
Microsoft claimed today that it has improved its quantum technology by an extraordinary factor. Outside experts say it doesn’t even work and never has.
The company has named its latest quantum chip Majorana 2 , for the theoretical quasiparticle it aims to use as the basis for a new “topological” approach to quantum computing . Chilled to ultracold temperatures in superconducting wires, electrons may be coaxed to act collectively—as so-called Majorana quasiparticles —in a manner that theoretically makes them more resistant to the physical “noise” that causes computational errors in other quantum systems.
Similar to braiding weak fibers together to make a strong rope, Microsoft’s approach seeks to create topological quantum bits, or qubits , by manipulating multiple Majorana quasiparticles on one device. In principle, this quantum computing method could scale up better than others, with Microsoft claiming it could someday squeeze millions of qubits onto a single chip. That could give the company a significant advantage in the race to build a quantum device that outpaces any machine in existence at certain problems .
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“This is a very exciting era that we’re in,” said Jason Zander, executive vice president leading Microsoft’s Quantum team, during a press briefing before the public announcement. “We’re at the start of a new chapter.”
But the company has a mixed track record when it comes to such claims. In 2021 Microsoft retracted a high-profile Nature paper after outside experts pointed out that the study’s data …
These sounds could be used to track the health of populations of the endangered Atlantic sturgeon
By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron
Atlantic sturgeon in the Hudson River in New York State generate low-frequency “thunder” sounds while mating, according to recent research . The findings could be used to help study declining populations of the endangered fish species.
Atlantic sturgeon are massive fish —an individual of the species can grow to about the same length as a Volkswagen Beetle and can weigh more than a parlor a grand piano. And these large animals apparently generate some rather grumbly mating events.
“It’s almost that you feel it more than you hear it,” said Maija Niemistö, a co-author of the study and a researcher at Cornell University’s New York State Water Resources Institute, in a statement .
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During spawning—or mating—a female sturgeon releases as many as two million eggs into the water, while males release milt, or fluid containing sperm. Scientists recorded “biological sounds” during these events in the Hudson, hearing what they describe as “thunders.” These are the first recordings of Atlantic sturgeon’s noisy mating, according to the authors—lake sturgeon, a separate species of fish, are known to make similar “thunder” sounds during spawning.
It’s unclear whether the sounds may be a form of sturgeon-to-sturgeon communication or simply the by-product of mating activity, the authors note. In hatcheries, male Atlantic sturgeon have been observed to “thrash against” females during the spawning process, the authors write.
This thrashing—and possibly the jiggling of the sturgeon’s swim bladder—could be generating the rumbling sounds, says Rebecca Cohen, lead author of the study and a postdo…
Trump’s new AI executive order drastically shifts the administration’s stance on the tech
This order asks artificial intelligence companies to give the U.S. government up to 30 days to assess frontier models before they are released
On Tuesday President Donald Trump issued an executive order that seeks to give the U.S. government more oversight of “frontier” artificial intelligence models—signaling a fundamental shift from the administration’s previous hands-off approach to the technology.
The order asks technology companies to voluntarily share new AI models with the government for up to 30 days before releasing the models more widely. It also asks companies to collaborate with the administration to “select trusted partners” that will gain early access to the models to “promote secure innovation and strengthen the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure .”
The order also directs leadership of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, as well as the Office of the National Cyber Director, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security to work with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to develop an “AI cybersecurity clearinghouse,” which will collaborate with the tech industry and infrastructure operators such as power companies and hospital administrators to identify and fix AI software vulnerabilities.
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The order’s broad call to strengthen U.S. resilience to cyberthreats and safeguard against potential rogue AI actors represents a major shift in the Trump administration’s approach, which had been more laissez-faire compared with the previous Biden administration’s push to make the AI industry more accountable and more geared toward safety, also on a voluntary …
Trump administration takes aim at crucial ocean monitoring network
The Ocean Observatories Initiative has been collecting data on physical, chemical, geological and biological conditions in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for the past decade
The Trump administration is targeting one of the world’s most trusted sources of climate and oceanic data—the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). According to the New York Times , ships will be dispatched this month to remove the more than 900 deep-sea instruments that comprise the network, which, for the past decade, has collected crucial data on physical, chemical, geological and biological conditions from all layers of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans on a continuous basis.
In a statement dated May 21, the OOI confirmed that the National Science Foundation (NSF) had begun a “descoping” process, including removing all in-water infrastructure from four of the OOI’s five deployed arrays. “This plan includes the removal of all in-water infrastructure from the Irminger Sea, Station Papa, Endurance and Pioneer Arrays, subject to ship scheduling and other operational constraints,” the OOI said in the statement. This covers instruments stationed in the Pacific, as well as others in the waters off the U.S. Atlantic coast and Greenland and Iceland. The initiative was originally meant to run for 25 years.
In a statement, an NSF spokesperson said the intention was not to cancel the OOI but to transition to a “nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio.”
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“NSF remains committed to ocean science and will continue working with the scientific community on …
<p>A group of researchers have proposed rules to prevent artificial intelligence from overpowering humans in math</p>
<p>Where did stars, and light itself, come from? Is there a hidden sector of particles and forces called “dark energy” affecting the cosmos?</p>
How Gödel numbers let you do math with math itself
By encoding mathematical statements into numbers, mathematician Kurt Gödel used ordinary arithmetic to check whether a statement can be proved
This article is from Proof Positive , our friendly math newsletter that's delivered to your inbox every Tuesday afternoon. Sign up today and read it first.
Last week I explained how a then 25-year-old logician, Kurt Gödel, overturned a basic assumption of many mathematicians in the early 20th century. Even as experts were building a seemingly firm foundation for all mathematics, Gödel demonstrated that this effort would never answer every question.
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Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are among the most fascinating results in mathematics. They have revolutionized the subject—and disillusioned scientists. But in addition to their far-reaching consequences, his ideas fascinated his colleagues by being able to say something about the capabilities of a mathematical system while operating within that system.
That is, Gödel used the computational rules and logical inferences that follow from the foundational axioms of mathematics (the Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice, or ZFC) to make statements about that system itself. This was a brilliant feat that no one had ever accomplished before.
To do this, he developed an approach that involved assigning a unique number to each mathematical statement. Instead of writing, for example, “for every number m , there is another number n greater than m ,” he defined a corresponding natural number (which is very large) from which the statement could be derived. The coding is not even that complicated: Gödel assigned the so-called Gödel numbers 1 to 12 to the 12 basic logical operation…
Trump’s psychedelics executive order could accelerate new treatments—including for children
The Trump administration has fast-tracked research into psychedelics, and experts say it is likely a matter of time before the drugs are used to treat minors
President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at fast-tracking research into the medical use of psychedelics will almost certainly open the door to experimenting with psychedelic therapies for children and eventually prescribing them, experts say.
Flanked by podcaster Joe Rogan and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. , Trump signed the order on April 18. The text of the order mentions federally banned psychedelics as promising options for the concerning number of Americans who are struggling with mental, behavioral and emotional disorders. And it points specifically to the roughly 6,000 military veterans who die by suicide every year. There is no mention of minors.
At least one company is already seeking U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for a treatment involving psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, and the agency has also issued priority vouchers to companies investigating the compound’s effectiveness in treating depression. But if these drugs are ultimately approved for use in adults in the U.S., clinicians and pharmaceutical companies could, at some point, target them to people under the age of 18.
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“It’s inevitable, because once the drug gets approved, then you start moving down that age timeline and testing kids,” says Dominic Sisti, an associate professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
The FDA requires more guardrails for drug trials in children than it does for those in adults.…
<p>Some clinics are touting pressurized oxygen chambers as a treatment for long COVID, but the evidence is mixed</p>
<p>A new analysis of red lines inside a U.K. cave suggest they were made deliberately by ancient humans some 17,000 years ago</p>
<p>Agriculture is at risk of a crisis because of this Middle East conflict. The reason why has to do with how fertilizer is made</p>
<p>Andrew Scott plays World War II meteorologist James Stagg in a new film <i>Pressure</i>, which explores the crucial role weather forecasting played in D-Day</p>