Researchers are announcing that a 53-year-old man in Germany has been cured of HIV. From a report: Referred to as "the Dusseldorf patient" to protect his privacy, researchers said he is the fifth confirmed case of an HIV cure. Although the details of his successful treatment were first announced at a conference in 2019, researchers could not confirm he had been officially cured at that time. Today, researchers announced the Dusseldorf patient still has no detectable virus in his body, even after stopping his HIV medication four years ago. "It's really cure, and not just, you know, long term remission," said Dr. Bjorn-Erik Ole Jensen, who presented details of the case in a new publication in "Nature Medicine."

"This obviously positive symbol makes hope, but there's a lot of work to do," Jensen said. For most people, HIV is a lifelong infection, and the virus is never fully eradicated. Thanks to modern medication, people with HIV can live long and healthy lives. The Dusseldorf patient joins a small group of people who have been cured under extreme circumstances after a stem cell transplant, typically only performed in cancer patients who don't have any other options. A stem cell transplant is a high-risk procedure that effectively replaces a person's immune system. The primary goal is to cure someone's cancer, but the procedure has also led to an HIV cure in a handful of cases.

An anonymous reader shares this thought-provoking article by a graphics reporter at The Washington Post who was part of its Pulitzer Prize-winning Explanatory Reporting team: The scientific paper published in the June 2021 issue of the journal Nature Climate Change was alarming. Between 1991 and 2018, the peer-reviewed study reported, more than one-third of deaths from heat exposure were linked to global warming. Hundreds of news outlets covered the findings. The message was clear: climate change is here, and it's already killing people. But that wasn't all that was happening. A month later, the same research group, which is based out of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine but includes scientists from dozens of countries, released another peer-reviewed study that told a fuller, more complex story about the link between climate change, temperature and human mortality. The two papers' authors were mostly the same, and they used similar data and statistical methods.

Published in Lancet Planetary Health, the second paper reported that between 2000 and 2019, annual deaths from heat exposure increased. But deaths from cold exposure, which were far more common, fell by an even larger amount. All told, during those two decades the world warmed by about 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit, and some 650,000 fewer people died from temperature exposure....

But whose lives? Projections indicate milder temperatures may indeed spare people in the globe's wealthy north, where it's already colder and people can buy protection against the weather. Yet heat will punish people in warmer, less wealthy parts of the world, where each extra degree of temperature can kill and air conditioning will often remain a fantasy....

What about the long term? A groundbreaking peer-reviewed study, published in November in Harvard's Quarterly Journal of Economics, gives us a glimpse. In the study, a team of researchers projected how mortality from temperature would change in the future. The worldwide temperature-linked mortality rate is projected to stay about the same, but you can see enormous geographic variation: colder, wealthier countries do well, while hotter, poorer countries suffer.

A new study on added sugars (also known as "free sugars") concluded they're bad for your health, reports NBC News.

"The research, published in the journal BMC Medicine, found that diets higher in free sugars — a category that includes sugar added to processed foods and sodas, as well as that found in fruit juice and syrups — raise one's risk of heart disease and stroke." The study relied on data about the eating habits of more than 110,000 people ages 37 to 73 in the United Kingdom, whose health outcomes were then tracked over about nine years. The results suggested that each 5% increase in the share of a person's total energy intake that comes from free sugars was associated with a 6% higher risk of heart disease and a 10% higher risk of stroke.

An author of the study, Cody Watling, a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, said the most common forms of sugar the study participants ate were "preserves and confectionary," with the latter category including cookies, sugary pastries and scones. Fruit juice, sugar-sweetened beverages and desserts were also common, he added.... The people found to have the highest risk of heart disease or stroke consumed about 95 grams of free sugar per day, or 18% of their daily energy intake, Watling said. By comparison, U.S. guidelines suggest that added sugars should make up no more than 10% of one's daily calories.

"Avoiding sugar-sweetened beverages is probably the single most important thing we can be doing," said Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard University who was not involved in the study. Willett added that although there are some health benefits to drinking a small glass of orange juice occasionally, its sugar content means "a glass of fruit juice is the same thing as Coke...."

The Oxford researchers found a positive relationship when it comes to fiber, unlike sugar intake: Consuming 5 grams of fiber a day was associated with a 4% lower risk of heart disease, the study suggested, although that did not hold true when researchers controlled for participants' body-mass indexes.... Watling said, the study demonstrates that the types of carbs people choose to eat may matter more than the total amount. "What's really important for overall general health and well-being is that we're consuming carbohydrates that are rich in whole grains," he said, while "minimizing the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, as well any kind of confectionary products that have added sugars."
It's a point underscored by CNN: After over nine years of follow-up, the researchers found total carbohydrate intake wasn't associated with cardiovascular disease. But when they analyzed how outcomes differed depending on the types and sources of carbohydrates eaten, they found higher free sugar intake was associated with a higher risk for cardiovascular disease and greater waist circumference. The more free sugars some participants consumed, the greater their risk of cardiovascular disease, heart disease and stroke was....

"This study provides much needed nuance to public health discussions about the health effects of dietary carbohydrates," said Dr. Maya Adam, director of Health Media Innovation and clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine, via email. Adam wasn't involved in the study. "The main takeaways are that all carbs are not created equal...."
CNN adds that the mechanism seems to be that sugar intake "can promote inflammation," according to an assistant cardiology professor at Columbia's medical center. "This can cause stress on the heart and blood vessels, which can lead to increased blood pressure..."

ChatGPT shows that artificial intelligence has gotten incredibly advanced -- and that it is something we should all be worried about, according to Elon Musk. From a report: "One of the biggest risks to the future of civilization is AI," Musk told attendees at the World Government Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, shortly after mentioning the development of ChatGPT. "It's both positive or negative and has great, great promise, great capability," Musk said. But, he stressed that "with that comes great danger."

ChatGPT "has illustrated to people just how advanced AI has become," according to Musk. "The AI has been advanced for a while. It just didn't have a user interface that was accessible to most people." He added: "I think we need to regulate AI safety, frankly. It is, I think, actually a bigger risk to society than cars or planes or medicine." Regulation "may slow down AI a little bit, but I think that that might also be a good thing," Musk added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: A drug aimed at treating eyes immobilized sperm and prevented pregnancy in mice, encouraging researchers that it might work as a contraceptive for men. Injected into male mice, the drug was 100% effective in preventing pregnancy for 2 1/2 hours and about 91% effective for up to 3 1/2 hours, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. The male mice were fertile after a day, the study found. The new approach is appealing for how quickly the contraceptive acts. The researchers said they would test the drug in other animals and aim for human trials in the coming years.

The drug presented in Tuesday's study acts by deactivating an enzyme in mice and men that make sperm swim. "It's like your on-switch on your TV," said Jochen Buck, a pharmacologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, an author of the study. When the researchers added the drug to human and mice sperm in a dish, the cells stopped moving temporarily. Lower doses of the drug resulted in progressively more mobile sperm cells, Dr. Buck said. The drug took about 15 minutes to take effect. Male mice injected with the drug didn't alter their mating behavior. Allowed to mate in the 2.5 hours after injection, none of 52 pairs of mice produced offspring. A third of mice partners in a control group of 50 had pregnancies. Mice given the drug were later able to father healthy pups, the study said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: When Nestle SA's peanut allergy medicine first hit the market in 2020, Robert Wood, the director of pediatric allergy at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, started preparing to offer it to the children he treats. But Covid-19 soon derailed in-person treatment, so over the next year and a half Wood and his colleagues told some 1,000 patients about the new drug instead, suggesting they consider it when the pandemic abated. Their responses came as a shock. Only six people were interested in a medicine that had been billed as a game changer for life-threatening allergies -- the first of its kind to be cleared by US authorities. Three years later, Wood has yet to prescribe the drug, Palforzia, and he isn't alone. Doctors and patients from California to Germany appear to be shunning the medicine in favor of the tried-and-true prescription for sufferers: simply avoiding peanuts and carrying an adrenaline injection for emergencies.

Nestle's chief executive officer, Mark Schneider, admitted as much in November, conceding that the drug's uptake had been slow. Schneider in 2020 bought out Palforzia's developer for $2.6 billion, paying a staggering 174% premium as he sought to take "the science business to the next level," snapping up vitamin makers such as Puritan's Pride and Solgar as well. The company is looking for a buyer, and the Swiss food giant says it will have to recognize a significant impairment to the deal's original value -- likely presaging a big writedown at a time when its core grocery business faces pressure from inflation. Maybe the company known for Nespresso capsules and Kit Kat chocolate wafers was never the right owner for a complex-to-administer niche medicine, but Schneider is on the hunt to find new avenues of growth in keeping with his strategic tilt toward health and wellness. The CEO "is looking to make acquisitions in new areas, and that inherently carries risks," says Martin Deboo, an analyst at Jefferies. "Palforzia is a signal of that." Nestle reiterated its commitment to nutritional health in an email and said Palforzia is safe and effective and solves the problem of variable potency that can hobble efficacy or trigger an allergic reaction with other less stringent treatments.

The product is essentially peanut protein that's been packed in a pill, standardized and categorized as a medicine after meeting the Food and Drug Administration's exacting clinical-trial requirements on safety and efficacy. By exposing children to tiny but gradually increasing amounts of the ingredient, Palforzia slowly raises their sensitivity threshold. But the process requires commitment by parents and kids to a demanding regime that lasts more than a year. [...] Palforzia is not without risk. During the clinical trials, about 9% of children suffered potentially dangerous immune reactions when their doses were being increased. [...] Bloomberg notes that Germany's Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care concluded that Nestle's drug "doesn't offer any advantage over peanut avoidance." A UK panel that assess medicines' cost-effectiveness also found the drug to be quite expensive, costing about $6,220 per patient in England.

"As for Wood at Johns Hopkins, he says the allergy center would've lost money administering Palforzia -- something it was willing to do if there had been enough interest among patients. When asked whether some patients might've gone elsewhere for Palforzia, Wood says probably not."

Pollution from livestock farming, pharmaceuticals and healthcare is threatening to destroy a key pillar of modern medicine, as spills of manure and other pollution into waterways are adding to the global rise of superbugs, the UN has warned. From a report: Animal farming is one of the key sources of strains of bacteria that have developed resistance to all forms of antibiotics, through the overuse of the medicines in farming. Pharmaceutical pollution of waterways, from drug manufacturing plants, is also a major contributor, along with the failure to provide sanitation and control sewage around the world, and to tackle waste from healthcare facilities. Resistant superbugs can survive in untreated sewage.

The findings of the new report, published on Tuesday, show that pollution and a lack of sanitation in the developing world can no longer be regarded by the rich world as a faraway and localised problem for poor people. When superbugs emerge, they quickly spread, and threaten the health even of people in well-funded healthcare systems in the rich world. Poor sanitation and healthcare, and a lack of regulation in animal farming, create breeding grounds for resistant bacteria, and threaten global health as a result, the UN Environment Programme found in the report. As many as 10 million people a year could be dying by 2050 as a result of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), according to the UN, making it as big a killer as cancer is today. The rise of superbugs will also take an economic toll, resulting in the loss of about $3.4tn a year by the end of this decade, and pushing 24 million people into extreme poverty.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: After decades of "demonization", psychiatrists will be able to prescribe MDMA and psilocybin in Australia from July this year. The Therapeutic Goods Administration made the surprise announcement on Friday afternoon. The drugs will only be allowed to be used in a very limited way, and remain otherwise prohibited, but the move was described as a "very welcome step away from what has been decades of demonization" by Dr David Caldicott, a clinical senior lecturer in emergency medicine at Australian National University.

3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine (MDMA) is commonly known as ecstasy, while psilocybin is a psychedelic commonly found in so-called magic mushrooms. Both drugs were used experimentally and therapeutically decades ago, before being criminalized. Specifically authorized psychiatrists will be able to prescribe MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder, and psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. Caldicott said it had become "abundantly clear" that a controlled supply of both MDMA and psilocybin "can have dramatic effects on conditions often considered refractory to contemporary treatment" and would particularly benefit returned service men and women from the Australian defense force. "The safe 're-medicalization' of certain historically illicit drugs is a very welcome step away from what has been decades of demonization," he said.

"In addition to a clear and evolving therapeutic benefit, it also offers the chance to catch up on the decades of lost opportunity [of] delving into the inner workings of the human mind, abandoned for so long as part of an ill-conceived, ideological "war on drugs.'"

From Science magazine: Cave Johnson is almost ready to start a new study in his secret underground facility. The founder of the Michigan-based technology company Aperture Science, he's invented a portal gun that allows people to teleport to various locations. Now, he and his colleagues want to see whether they can make portals appear on previously unfit surfaces with a new "conversion gel" containing moon dust. "It may be toxic. We are unsure," he wrote in a recent research proposal.

To test the gel, Johnson plans to recruit orphans, homeless people, and the elderly. They'll get 60 bucks — compensation he feels is well worth the risk of their skin potentially peeling off, death due to an artificial intelligence guide becoming sentient, or worse.

None of this is real, of course — Johnson is the villain of the popular video game Portal — but the makeshift ethical review board that evaluated his study was. At a Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research conference conducted online last month, attendees of the session "Mad Science on Trial: The Real Ethical Problems With Fictional Scientists" had some serious concerns with Johnson's research. Would the participants' data be secure and anonymized? Would the team of henchmen include some henchwomen as well? And, most importantly, would there be cake?

The moderators of the session didn't just target Johnson. They asked their audience of 450 virtual attendees to evaluate other fictional mad scientists as well, voting on whether an institutional review board (IRB) — a body of experts that a research institution uses to evaluate whether proposals are ethically sound — should approve their protocols.
Another example used was the scientist in the first-person shooter game Halo who proposed surgically enhancing 6-year-old children with armor, neural interfaces, and other technology to give them combat advantages against a theoretical alien attack.

Science interviewed two of the panelists, one noting "this format is good for making the Instituational Review Board ethics world fun and doing it in a way that kind of stretches people's minds."

Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for submitting the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: The ultraviolet nail polish drying devices used to cure gel manicures may pose more of a public health concern than previously thought. Researchers at the University of California San Diego have studied these ultraviolet (UV) light emitting devices, and found that their use leads to cell death and cancer-causing mutations in human cells. The devices are a common fixture in nail salons, and generally use a particular spectrum of UV light (340-395nm) to cure the chemicals used in gel manicures. While tanning beds use a different spectrum of UV light (280-400nm) that studies have conclusively proven to be carcinogenic, the spectrum used in the nail dryers has not been well studied.

Using three different cell lines -- adult human skin keratinocytes, human foreskin fibroblasts, and mouse embryonic fibroblasts -- the researchers found that the use of these UV emitting devices for just one 20-minute session led to between 20 and 30 percent cell death, while three consecutive 20-minute exposures caused between 65 and 70 percent of the exposed cells to die. Exposure to the UV light also caused mitochondrial and DNA damage in the remaining cells and resulted in mutations with patterns that can be observed in skin cancer in humans. [...] The researchers caution that while the results show the harmful effects of the repeated use of these devices on human cells, a long-term epidemiological study would be required before stating conclusively that using these machines leads to an increased risk of skin cancers. However, the results of the study were clear: The chronic use of these nail polish drying machines is damaging to human cells. "We saw multiple things: first, we saw that DNA gets damaged," said Ludmil Alexandrov, a professor of bioengineering as well as cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego, and corresponding author of the study published in Nature Communications. "We also saw that some of the DNA damage does not get repaired over time, and it does lead to mutations after every exposure with a UV-nail polish dryer. Lastly, we saw that exposure may cause mitochondrial dysfunction, which may also result in additional mutations. We looked at patients with skin cancers, and we see the exact same patterns of mutations in these patients that were seen in the irradiated cells."

"Our experimental results and the prior evidence strongly suggest that radiation emitted by UV-nail polish dryers may cause cancers of the hand and that UV-nail polish dryers, similar to tanning beds, may increase the risk of early-onset skin cancer," add the researchers. "Nevertheless, future large-scale epidemiological studies are warranted to accurately quantify the risk for skin cancer of the hand in people regularly using UV-nail polish dryers. It is likely that such studies will take at least a decade to complete and to subsequently inform the general public."

An anonymous reader writes:

The pharmaceutical company Moderna didn't present a set of infection data on the company's new Covid-19 booster during meetings last year when [FDA] advisers discussed whether the shot should be authorized and made available to the public
That data suggested the possibility that the updated booster might not be any more effective at preventing Covid-19 infections than the original shots. The data was early and had many limitations, but several advisers told CNN that they were concerned about a lack of transparency.

Specifically, Moderna hid data on actual infection rates among patients who were administered the original booster and those who got the bivalent vaccine. The data showed that the original booster resulted in slightly fewer infections than the bivalent version - though CNN points out that "the primary purpose of the study was not to study infection rates but to do immunogenicity analyses, taking blood from participants and examining their antibody responses to the vaccine."

CNN reports that Moderna "shared the infection data with the FDA and posted the study manuscript before the agency's panel meeting in June," but with an FDA spokesperson complaining that they received the preprint less than a day prior to the advisory committee meeting, and "therefore not provided in an adequate timeframe for it to be included in the agency's meeting materials..."

1.9% of the study participants who received the original booster became infected. Among those who got the updated bivalent vaccine -- the one that scientists hoped would work better -- a higher percentage, 3.2%, became infected.

Both versions of the shot were found to be safe. This infection data was far from complete. The number of study subjects who became infected was very small, and both the patients and the researchers were aware of who was getting the original shot and who was getting the new booster.... [S]ix FDA and CDC advisers interviewed by CNN said that this infection data wouldn't have changed how they voted, because the data had such limitations, but it still should have been presented to them.

Research released by the New England Journal of Medicine found that "boosting with new bivalent mRNA vaccines targeting both the BA.4-BA.5 variant and the D614G strain did not elicit a discernibly superior virus-neutralizing peak antibody response as compared with boosting with the original monovalent vaccines. Limitations of our study include the small sample size and follow-up period of our groups. We also note that the between-group comparisons were not controlled for factors such as age, vaccine type, and health status, which may have had an effect on antibody responses. These findings may be indicative of immunologic imprinting, although follow-up studies are needed to determine whether antibody responses will deviate over time, including after the administration of a second bivalent booster."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: An artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot can write such convincing fake research-paper abstracts that scientists are often unable to spot them, according to a preprint posted on the bioRxiv server in late December1. "I am very worried," says Sandra Wachter, who studies technology and regulation at the University of Oxford, UK, and was not involved in the research. "If we're now in a situation where the experts are not able to determine what's true or not, we lose the middleman that we desperately need to guide us through complicated topics," she adds. Researchers are divided over the implications for science. The chatbot, ChatGPT, creates realistic and intelligent-sounding text in response to user prompts. It is a 'large language model', a system based on neural networks that learn to perform a task by digesting huge amounts of existing human-generated text. Software company OpenAI, based in San Francisco, California, released the tool on November 30, and it is free to use.

Since its release, researchers have been grappling with the ethical issues surrounding its use, because much of its output can be difficult to distinguish from human-written text. Scientists have published a preprint2 and an editorial3 written by ChatGPT. Now, a group led by Catherine Gao at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, has used ChatGPT to generate artificial research-paper abstracts to test whether scientists can spot them. The researchers asked the chatbot to write 50 medical-research abstracts based on a selection published in JAMA, The New England Journal of Medicine, The BMJ, The Lancet and Nature Medicine. They then compared these with the original abstracts by running them through a plagiarism detector and an AI-output detector, and they asked a group of medical researchers to spot the fabricated abstracts.

The ChatGPT-generated abstracts sailed through the plagiarism checker: the median originality score was 100%, which indicates that no plagiarism was detected. The AI-output detector spotted 66% the generated abstracts. But the human reviewers didn't do much better: they correctly identified only 68% of the generated abstracts and 86% of the genuine abstracts. They incorrectly identified 32% of the generated abstracts as being real and 14% of the genuine abstracts as being generated. Wachter says that, if scientists can't determine whether research is true, there could be "dire consequences". As well as being problematic for researchers, who could be pulled down flawed routes of investigation, because the research they are reading has been fabricated, there are "implications for society at large because scientific research plays such a huge role in our society". For example, it could mean that research-informed policy decisions are incorrect, she adds. On the contrary, Arvind Narayanan, a computer scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey, says: "It is unlikely that any serious scientist will use ChatGPT to generate abstracts." He adds that whether generated abstracts can be detected is "irrelevant."

"The question is whether the tool can generate an abstract that is accurate and compelling. It can't, and so the upside of using ChatGPT is minuscule, and the downside is significant," he says.

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved a new Alzheimer's drug that may modestly slow the pace of cognitive decline early in the disease, but also carries risks of swelling and bleeding in the brain. From a report: The approval of the drug, lecanemab, to be marketed as Leqembi, is likely to generate considerable interest from patients and physicians. Studies of the drug -- an intravenous infusion administered every two weeks -- suggest it is more promising than the scant number of other treatments available. Still, several Alzheimer's experts said it was unclear from the medical evidence whether Leqembi could slow cognitive decline enough to be noticeable to patients.

Even a recent report of findings from a large 18-month clinical trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and co-written by scientists from the lead company making the drug, concluded that "longer trials are warranted to determine the efficacy and safety of lecanemab in early Alzheimer's disease." Eisai, a Japanese pharmaceutical company, led the development and testing of the drug. It is partnering with the American company Biogen, maker of the controversial Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm, for its commercialization and marketing, and the companies will split the profits equally. Eisai said the list price for Leqembi (pronounced le-KEM-bee) would be $26,500 per year. The price is slightly lower than Aduhelm's, but higher than that recommended by some analysts.

Slashdot reader guest reader shares some interesting research from the University of Missouri: Nearly 10,000 years ago, humans settling in the Fertile Crescent, the areas of the Middle East surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, made the first switch from hunter-gatherers to farmers. They developed close bonds with the rodent-eating cats that conveniently served as ancient pest-control in society's first civilizations.

A new study at the University of Missouri found this lifestyle transition for humans was the catalyst that sparked the world's first domestication of cats, and as humans began to travel the world, they brought their new feline friends along with them.

Leslie A. Lyons, a feline geneticist and Gilbreath-McLorn endowed professor of comparative medicine in the MU College of Veterinary Medicine, collected and analyzed DNA from cats in and around the Fertile Crescent area, as well as throughout Europe, Asia and Africa, comparing nearly 200 different genetic markers.... Lyons added that while horses and cattle have seen various domestication events caused by humans in different parts of the world at various times, her analysis of feline genetics in the study strongly supports the theory that cats were likely first domesticated only in the Fertile Crescent before migrating with humans all over the world....

Lyons, who has researched feline genetics for more than 30 years, said studies like this also support her broader research goal of using cats as a biomedical model to study genetic diseases that impact both cats and people, such as polycystic kidney disease, blindness and dwarfism.... "[A]nything we can do to study the causes of genetic diseases in cats or how to treat their ailments can be useful for one day treating humans with the same diseases," Lyons said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Deep brain stimulation is already used to treat severe cases of epilepsy and a few movement disorders such as Parkinson's. But depression is more complicated -- partly because we still don't fully understand what's going on in the brain when it occurs. "Depression is a complex illness," says Patricio Riva Posse, a neurologist at the Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, who was not involved in the trial. "It's not like trying to correct one tremor -- there's a whole universe of symptoms." These include low mood, suicidality, inability to experience pleasure, and changes in motivation, sleep, and appetite.

Doctors have been using electricity to treat brain disorders -- including depression -- for decades, and some studies have found that electrodes placed deep inside the brain can jolt some people out of their symptoms. But results vary. Neuroscientists hope that by getting a better idea of what's happening inside the brains of people with symptoms like John's, they can make the treatment more effective. John is one of five people who have volunteered to have their brains probed as part of a clinical trial. At the start of 2020, he had a total of 14 electrodes implanted across his brain. For nine days, he stayed in a hospital with protruding cables wrapped around his head, while neuroscientists monitored how his brain activity correlated with his mood.

The researchers behind the trial say they have developed a "mood decoder" -- a way of being able to work out how someone is feeling just by looking at brain activity. Using the decoder, the scientists hope to be able to measure how severe a person's depression is, and target more precisely where the electrodes are placed to optimize the effect on the patient's mood. So far, they have analyzed the results of three volunteers. What they have found is extremely promising, says Sameer Sheth, a neurosurgeon based at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, who is leading the trial. Not only have he and his colleagues been able to link volunteers' specific brain activity with their mood, but they have also found a way to stimulate a positive mood. "This is the first demonstration of successful and consistent mood decoding of humans in these brain regions," says Sheth. His colleague Jiayang Xiao presented the findings at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in San Diego in November.

Walking like John Cleese's character, Mr. Teabag, in Monty Python's famous "Ministry of Silly Walks" skit requires considerably more energy expenditure than a normal walking gait because the movement is so inefficient, according to a new paper published in the annual Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal. From a report: In fact, just 11 minutes a day of walking like Mr. Teabag was equivalent to 75 minutes of vigorously intense physical activity per week, presenting a novel means of boosting cardiovascular fitness. "Half a century ago, the [Ministry of Silly Walks] skit might have unwittingly touched on a powerful way to enhance cardiovascular fitness in adults," the authors wrote. "Had an initiative to promote inefficient movement been adopted in the early 1970s, we might now be living among a healthier society."

The BMJ's Christmas issue is typically more lighthearted, though the journal maintains that the papers published therein still "adhere to the same high standards of novelty, methodological rigor, reporting transparency, and readability as apply in the regular issue." Past years have included papers on such topics as why 27 is not a dangerous age for musicians, the side effects of sword swallowing, and measuring the toxicity of the concoction brewed in Roald Dahl's 1981 book George's Marvelous Medicine. (It's very toxic indeed.) The most widely read was 1999's infamous "Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal."

An anonymous reader shares a report: A large number of doctors write medicine prescriptions in haste, making it nearly impossible for their patients to understand what they scribbled. This problem has been around for decades and many tech firms have attempted to solve it with little to no success. Now Google is having a go at translating those unfathomable texts.

The search giant announced at its annual conference in India Monday that it is working with pharmacists to work out the handwriting of doctors. The feature, which will be rolled out on Google Lens, will allow users to either take a picture of the prescription or upload one from the photo library. Once the image is processed, the app detects and highlights the medicines mentioned in the note, a Google executive demonstrated.

A new study published in the journal PLoS ONE has reported on the first human tests of an experimental therapy using sound and light to treat Alzheimer's disease (AD). New Atlas reports: Over the last seven years, Li-Huei Tsai and colleagues at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have been investigating an unusual hypothesis. The researchers found toxic proteins associated with Alzheimer's disease could be eliminated from mouse brains following exposure to flickering lights. Further research found the magic frequency was 40 Hz. When animals were exposed to both sound and light at that frequency, improvements in brain health were detected. Of course, these kinds of animal tests don't mean much if they can't be replicated in humans, so after further investigations revealed how this sensory therapy could be affecting a mouse brain, the researchers started preliminary human experiments. Working with colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital, two clinical trials set out to test the therapy in humans.

The first Phase 1 study recruited 43 participants to test whether this kind of light and sound exposure was safe, and did anything to the human brain. Each subject was monitored using EEG measures while experiencing a short exposure to what has been dubbed by the researchers as GENUS (Gamma ENtrainment Using Sensory stimulation). This preliminary study comprised both healthy and cognitively impaired subjects, as well as participants with epilepsy in order to evaluate the seizure potential of the treatment. After a short exposure to the sensory stimulation, the researchers found a number of brain regions synchronize with the 40-Hz frequency.

The second trial recruited 15 participants with early-stage Alzheimer's disease. Each participant was given a device to take home and use for around an hour a day. The device was essentially a small LED white board with an iPad in the middle and a soundbar underneath. While watching videos on the iPad, the LED light panel on the white board would flicker at a rate of 40 Hz and the soundbar would play a 40-Hz tone. Half the cohort was randomized to a sham control condition, exposed to a constant white light and white noise. Compliance was relatively high between both the GENUS and the sham groups, with participants completing the daily requirement of exposure around 90 percent of the time. After around three months of use the researchers could detect statistically significant differences between the two groups, both on brain imaging and memory tests. The researchers are cautious not to overstate their initial findings, the report says. "It's early days for human studies [...], larger cohorts of patients are needed to better understand the impacts of this sensory stimulation and longer trials will hopefully establish more prominent beneficial effects."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The company said a possible melanoma vaccine it is studying with pharmaceutical giant Merck fared well in a small study of patients who had the cancer surgically removed. The drugmakers said a combination of the vaccine and Merck's immunotherapy Keytruda led to a statistically significant improvement in survival before the cancer returned in patients with advanced melanoma. [...] Like Spikevax (the vaccine used to help protect against COVID-19), the potential skin cancer vaccine uses mRNA technology. It trains a patient's immune system to recognize and respond specifically to mutations in the DNA of the patient's tumor.

In a mid-stage clinical trial involving 157 patients, researchers compared the vaccine-Keytruda combination with Keytruda alone. Keytruda, Merck's top seller, primes the body's immune system to detect and fight tumor cells. Regulators have approved it to treat several types of cancer. The patient group that took the potential vaccine and Keytruda saw a 44% reduction in the risk of death or the cancer returning, the companies said. The treatments continued for about a year in both groups unless the disease came back or side effects became too severe. Merck and Moderna expect to start a phase 3 study next year, and the companies say they intend to expand their approach to other tumor types.

"A teenage girl's incurable cancer has been cleared from her body," reports the BBC, "in the first use of a revolutionary new type of medicine...." Doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital used "base editing" to perform a feat of biological engineering to build her a new living drug. Six months later the cancer is undetectable, but Alyssa is still being monitored in case it comes back.

Alyssa, who is 13 and from Leicester, was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in May last year.... Her cancer was aggressive. Chemotherapy, and then a bone-marrow transplant, were unable to rid it from her body.... The team at Great Ormond Street used a technology called base editing, which was invented only six years ago [which] allows scientists to zoom to a precise part of the genetic code and then alter the molecular structure of just one base, converting it into another and changing the genetic instructions. The large team of doctors and scientists used this tool to engineer a new type of T-cell that was capable of hunting down and killing Alyssa's cancerous T-cells....

After a month, Alyssa was in remission and was given a second bone-marrow transplant to regrow her immune system.... Alyssa is just the first of 10 people to be given the drug as part of a clinical trial.
Her mother said that a year ago she'd been dreading Christmas, "thinking this is our last with her". But it wasn't.

And the BBC adds that applying the technology to cancer "only scratches the surface of what base editing could achieve.... There are already trials of base editing under way in sickle-cell disease, as well as high cholesterol that runs in families and the blood disorder beta-thalassemia."