A biotech startup called Bexorg is doing something that sounds like it was ripped straight from the pages of a cyberpunk novel — or from the script of “RoboCop,” for that matter.

The company is extracting human brains just hours after their owners died and then hooking them up to specialized life support machines, Science reports. While the masses of pink mush no longer host electrical activity, most of their key functions remain intact, allowing scientists to test experimental drugs, such as potential treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, like never before.

You’d hope that the disembodied cerebrums are most assuredly dead. But according to the reporting, an extracted brain hooked up to one of Bexorg’s proprietary life support machines, BrainEX, “hovers between life and death.” There’s no spark of consciousness, and yet the brains are kept running on an artificial lung, kidney oxygenate, blood, and other fluids.

Perhaps you can put this ambiguity down to the startup being deliberately enigmatic to provoke attention. Or maybe it’s a reflection of how the distinction between life and death is uncomfortably blurry.

But you can put those doubts out of your very-much embodied mind, assures Brendan Parent, one of Bexorg’s six ethicists. The extracted brains are almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary for minimal consciousness, he told Science. To prevent the eerie implausibility that some the brains produce electrical activity, the brains are also dosed with anesthetic propofol. Of course, that such a measure has to be taken in the first place may actually be less assuring and more unsettling.

Ethics aside — not a statement that should be made lightly — the scientific possibilities that these extracted brains afford may well hold promise. Bexorg CEO Zvonimir Vrselja said that the brains come with decades of environmental exposures, histories of drug treatments, and other factors that make them a more realistic testing medium for drugs. “You get cells that have been there for 60 to 80 years,” Vrselja told Science.

Bruna Bellaver, who studies neurodegeneration at the University of Pittsburgh, was also effusive. 

“It’s a huge step up from mouse models,” she told Science.

Bexorg is the same startup that demonstrated, over six years ago, that it could keep decapitated pig brains alive for 36 hours using a prototype of its BrainEX machine.

Today, its human brains aren’t kept running in perpetuity. After 24 hours, they’re sliced into hundreds of pieces so they can be analyzed by scientists. The company plans to use a robotic arm to slice up to 1,600 brains per year.

Though Bexorg hasn’t itself published any papers on its work with human brains, other companies have already been eagerly experimenting with them. The pharmaceutical firm Biohaven has used 130 of its brains to test drugs, according to Science, including a potential treatment for Parkinson’s disease, and plans to launch a clinical trial for another drug using data it gathered from those experiments.

More on neuroscience: Scientists Say Test Subjects Were Able to Quit Smoking After They Blasted Their Brains With a Huge Magnet

The post Startup Testing Drugs on Freshly Extracted Human Brains That Are Kept On Life Support appeared first on Futurism.

Therapy is predicated on trust. You can’t be honest and vulnerable, and share how you’re really feeling, if you don’t believe in the embodied-concerned-frown sitting in the armchair across from you.

So you can understand why one woman, 31-year-old Molly Quinn, was taken aback when her trusted therapist suddenly whipped out an AI model to start recording their private conversations, NPR reports. 

“She wasn’t taking notes like she usually did,” Quinn recalled realizing halfway through one session. “The iPad was just propped up.”

Where were her words being processed and stored? Will they one day become training data? It’s not something you have to ask yourself when your therapist jots stuff down on a clipboard. But those questions were now racing through Quinn’s head, leaving her uneasy.

“The more I thought about it, the more I just started getting more and more sick to my stomach,” she told NPR. “This person who I’m supposed to be able to trust with some very private and very intense emotions had just completely disregarded something I said I was not comfortable with. I felt completely violated.”

Though her therapist offered to stop using the AI tool, Quinn cut her off and found another one.

“The trust was gone,” she told NPR.

Like doctors, therapists across the country are adopting AI tools for notetaking and generating transcripts. AI companies offering these services frame it as a way of cutting down on the drudgery of paperwork and other administrative tasks, freeing up more time to focus on patients — a permutation of a common AI industry refrain: let us do the tedious stuff for you. 

The reliability of AI tools remains fairly dodgy, though, and even setting aside questions of hallucinations creeping into clinical notes — which is something we’re already seeing happen — it’s not clear whether patients are even comfortable with the tech yet. In a YouGov survey cited by NPR, only 11 percent of Americans said they would be open to using AI in mental health care. An even slimmer eight percent said they would trust AI being used this way, while 40 percent said they don’t trust the technology at all.

“Even the presence of AI changes the therapeutic experience,” Marisa Cohen, a couples and sex therapist in New York, told NPR. “Clients know or feel like something else is listening to them. That awareness can subtly alter their disclosure.”

“When you introduce something that’s being stored electronically, it raises additional questions about trust and safety,” Cohen added. “It’s essentially a third party.”

Tal Salman, the CEO a popular AI scribe tool for therapists called Berries, insists that conversation recordings are deleted immediately and that transcripts are stored on HIPAA compliant servers in the US. Even if this is true, if AI companies’ tools are to ever have a place in private mental health settings, they need the trust of patients — and that’s something the AI industry clearly hasn’t earned yet. Quinn fears that AI-recorded conversations could one day be exposed by hackers.

“We’re going to see breaches,” she told NPR. “Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week. But in a few years? I think we’re going to see them. And I don’t want my therapy session to be part of that.”

More on AI: The Pope Just Low Key Declared Holy War on Artificial Intelligence

The post Woman Alarmed When Her Trusted Therapist Starts Recording Her With AI appeared first on Futurism.

Dust storms are becoming increasingly common sights throughout much of the US, fueled by hot and arid conditions brought about by global warming. While there are the ever-present dusters in states like Arizona, those living in regions like the Midwest and Pacific Northwest are now learning what it means to be swallowed by these great walls of sand and dirt.

These dust storms are dangerous enough on their own, leading to spikes in emergency room visits and disrupting agricultural economies. But according to writing climate scientist Bill McGuire in the BBC‘s Science Focus, dust storms are now becoming vectors for massive clouds of fungal spores, an event he calls “fungal storms.”

Far-out as that may sound, McGuire writes that fungus and bacteria traveling along with dust particles has been strongly correlated with outbreaks of bacterial meningitis across the Sahel region of Africa. In the continental US, they’re becoming increasingly tied to outbreaks of Valley Fever, a lung infection caused by the spores from the fungus Coccidioides.

One 2017 research paper published in Geophysical Research Letters noted that incidents of Valley Fever ballooned by over 800 percent from 2000 to 2011. In two geographical areas with high concentrations of the infection, dust storms where “found to better correlated with the disease than any other known controlling factor.”

Though some have argued the term “fungal storm” is more media hyperbole than a well-defined scientific phenomenon, further research has noted “abundant evidence” pointing to dust storms as a vector for pathogens like Valley Fever.

Whatever you call it, it’s clear the dangers of dust storms are growing right before our eyes.

As secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization Celeste Saulo told McGuire, “sand and dust storms do not just mean dirty windows and hazy skies. They harm the health and quality of life of millions of people and cost many millions of dollars through disruption to air and ground transport, on agriculture and on solar energy production.”

More on climate change: The Upcoming El Niño Is About to Unleash Devastation, Experts Warn

The post Apocalyptic “Fungal Storms” Are Now Surging Across the US appeared first on Futurism.

Parents say their kids are going ballistic when they take their iPads away from them, leaving them unsure of what normal behavior might be — and whether there’s something sinister going on with their child’s connection to the devices.

Rachel, a mother of two, tried limiting her son Jonah’s screen time by warning him that he had put down his iPad to leave for a birthday party at 11 AM. Despite the repeated warnings the day before and several reminders before the hour mark, when it came time to leave, Jonah had a meltdown.

“He just left his body,” the mother told The Cut of her son, who hurled the electronics and started screaming: “You said I had until 11! It’s not 11 yet! You’re always doing this!”

Jonah followed her around the house, distraught, until finally collapsing on the kitchen floor and refusing to move.

“I remember standing there thinking, I don’t know this person,” she recalled. “I genuinely did not recognize him.”

Thirty minutes later, he tied his shoes, got in the car, and acted like nothing had happened.

“That’s the part that really messes with you,” Rachel says. “How fast they come back.”

Think that’s bad? Hear what Nora had told The Cut about her 13-year-old son when she asked to check his phone settings: he accused Nora of ruining his life, before dropping a grenade in conversation.

“You make me want to kill myself,” he lashed out.

And while getting dinner last month at an Italian restaurant, Rachel told the outlet that she allowed her daughter Maya to watch YouTube Kids on the phone. When it was time too leave, she took the phone back. Maya went rigid, screamed, and hid under the table.

What’s going on here? Are these the kind of extreme tantrums that kids are prone to throw no matter the toy they’re being deprived of? Is everyone a bad parent, or at least not handling this the right way? Or are apps and the devices they run on uniquely addictive, somehow impacting a child’s development in novel and frightening ways?

The research into this area is still emerging, as are the generation of children raised on YouTube Shorts, Roblox, and other mobile games. That’s to say that we’re still a long way from grasping the long-term cognitive effects of being a so-called “iPad kid.” And the latest Silicon Valley horror, AI chatbots, are an even bigger question mark.

What evidence we do have, however, is alarming. The Cut cites a recent University of Washington study that found that 22 percent of parents’ attempts to cut down screen time sparked a negative reaction from kids under five. And in another study from Brigham Young University, 93 percent of parents reported that their toddlers would sometimes whine or throw tantrums when “transitioning away from media.”

Experts are mixed on whether the devices are provoking some newly negative response. 

“We frequently hear from parents who say, ‘When I ask my child to get off technology, they get very mad at me.’ That is true of almost anything that children find reinforcing,” Dave Anderson, a senior psychologist at the Child Mind Institute in New York City, told The Cut.

Anderson was skeptical of using the word addiction to describe what’s fueling iPad rages, noting that withdrawal symptoms of actual addiction don’t disappear within minutes. Kid’s minds just aren’t developed enough to handle having their favorite toy taken away from them, she said.

Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke, however, hasn’t hesitated to invoke the specter of addiction, calling screen devices a “digital drug” in an interview with Oprah. And Sarah Coyne, a professor of human development at Brigham Young, seemed to consider equating post-iPad rages to tantrums related to other pleasures outrageous. 

“I’m not sure how many children are struggling to function because their parents tell them to be done with their ice cream,” she told The Cut, adding that she’s seen addiction-like behavior in kids using devices as young as two years old.

If describing these patterns as signs of outright addictive behavior goes too far, there’s certainly there is a lot of evidence painting screen time’s cognitive effects. One study found that the more  babies and toddlers looked at screens each day, the more likely they were to miss key development goals, including fine motor skills and social skills.

The effects are no less worrying in older children. A study that followed tweens over four years found that increased screen time was a reliable predictor of ADHD diagnoses. Beyond iPad rages and worrying cognitive trends, there are other behaviors that illustrate the impact of device usage on children. In a survey of UK preschool school teachers, the teachers on average estimated that a third of their pupils didn’t know how to correctly use books — as in they literally couldn’t figure out that they had to turn the page. Instead, some reportedly tried to swipe or tap them.

More on mental health: Influential Tech Founder Says His Peers Are Suffering From Mass AI Psychosis

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It’s no secret that many of the world’s top CEOs are obsessed with AI. By pursuing lofty goals of complete AI automation, these executives have created one of the largest financial bubbles in recent memory while transforming the job market into a barren wasteland, with little to show for their efforts so far.

As the top tech companies have yet to find a way to turn AI into a profitable venture, those decisions to go all-in on AI are looking increasingly delusional. According to Aaron Levie, CEO and founder of the massive cloud computing company Box, there’s a simple explanation for it: many of his colleagues are suffering from AI psychosis.

“CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI,” Levie wrote on X-formerly-Twitter. Translation: AI-happy CEOs are out of touch with the rank-and-file workers tasked with making their AI ambitions come to life.

As an example, Levie offers cases in which corporate executives say “look I made this awesome product prototype” with an AI chatbot. “Yes but you didn’t have to review the code before it went into production and fix a bunch of issues,” he retorts.

Whether “AI psychosis” is the best metaphor for this concept is up for debate. Arguably the most common definition of AI psychosis is that it’s a phenomenon where extreme interactions with AI triggers or amplifies delusions or paranoia, sometimes already existing and sometimes seemingly newly cooked up with the AI. The symptoms can be extreme, with AI chatbots convincing victims that they’re communing with God-like entities, or have singlehandedly uncovered a grave threat to humankind.

There are indeed some executives who seem to fit the bill. Last year, Futurism reported that colleagues of Geoff Lewis, managing partner of the multi-billion dollar investment firm Bedrock, were concerned that he was suffering from a break with reality after spending too much time with ChatGPT (ironically, Bedrock was an early investor in OpenAI.) In that case, Lewis had claimed to be mapping an incomprehensible “non-governmental system” that was designed to disrupt his life.

That said, there’s a major gap between an exec believing they’re targeted by a vast conspiratorial network and an exec buying into AI hype. The phenomenon Levie is identifying might better fall under “organizational blindness,” a known phenomenon where leaders of a company find themselves disconnected from the reality of work on the ground. Coupled with a ravenous hunger for profit, this kind of tunnel vision seems to be exactly what we’re seeing in companies around the globe.

In today’s world, many executives and managers operate at an abstract level, working via spreadsheets, emails and Zoom meetings. This is different from concrete labor, meaning the specific, friction-heavy tasks that workers perform, like writing code or wiring server racks. When a board-room full of executives loses sight of this tangible labor — by failing to consider the kinds of tasks AI chatbots are actually good at, for example — it can certainly create a break from material reality, though one driven by social factors rather than psychological.

In other words, there are two possibilities: either the world’s CEOs are losing their minds, or they’re just succumbing to the latest manifestation of capitalism run amok. Occam’s razor probably suggests the latter.

More on AI and CEOs: 99 Percent of CEOs Are Preparing to Lay Off Workers and Replace Them With AI Within Two Years, Survey Finds

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How much should we sleep each night? It’s the age-old question that makes almost nobody happy, since most of us know at the back of our chronically shut-eye deprived minds that we don’t get enough of it. 

But on the flip-side, new research suggests there’s such a thing as excessive sleep, too. In a study published in the journal Nature, scientists narrowed down a “sweet spot” of between 6.4 and 7.8 hours of sleep per night. Sleep durations that fall too much on either side of that, the study found, were associated with accelerated aging.

This cuts against the traditional wisdom that everyone should get around eight hours of sleep per night, and it also notably contrasts with some studies that found that less than seven hours of sleep per night is associated with a higher risk of negative health outcomes like high blood pressure and heart disease.

“Too little sleep is bad and too much sleep is bad,” Mark Lachs, co-chief of the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, who wasn’t involved in the study, told the Washington Post. “It is a Goldilocks kind of phenomenon.”

The optimal amount of sleep is highly dependent on the individual, with some needing as few as six hours, and others as much as nine. A rare few — less than one percent of the population — thrive off of just four hours of sleep per night with no health consequences; scientists are still trying to understand why, with current research focusing on a mutation in a gene that modulates the production of orexin, a hormone that regulates sleep. (Whatever the cause, we’re envious.)

In this latest work, the researchers analyzed biomedical data on 500,000 volunteers collected from another long-term study, the UK Biobank, with the goal of developing a biological aging clock for the body’s organs. They examined data including self-reported sleep durations, MRI images of organs, and blood plasma and metabolomics data.

“The hypothesis is that different organs, even within the same person, age at different rates,” lead author Junhao Wen, an assistant professor of radiology at Columbia University, told WaPo.

Their analysis found a U-shaped pattern between sleep and biological age gaps, with smaller deviations from the sweet spot associated with less aging, and larger deviations with more.

Both sides of the U were intriguing. Less than six hours of sleep was associated with increased risk of disease and all-cause mortality, which is lower than the typical seven hours of sleep that other studies have set as the minimum. And on the other side, these negative effects were also associated with more than eight hours of sleep.

There are limitations to the study. The UK Biobank data set skews mostly toward people of White European ancestry. And the researchers say there’s more of a direct link with the effect of short sleep, because they can’t rule out that a worse biological aging clock, or essentially poorer health, could be partially causing longer sleep instead of vice versa, as when someone who’s sick or depressed may need to sleep longer than someone who’s healthy.

Chances are that you need to get a little more sleep, but, according to these findings, probably not as much as you think.

“I would treat this as guidance,” Wen told WaPo. “The key point is consistent sleep time, around 6 to 8 hours per day. We know that’s going to do good for your overall health.”

More on health: They Held a New Olympics Where Athletes Can Take as Many Drugs and Steroids as They Want, and the Funniest Possible Thing Happened

The post More Than This Many Hours of Sleep Is Linked to Early Death, Scientists Find appeared first on Futurism.

For years now, organizers of a controversial sporting event called the Enhanced Games have been promising to push the limits of human athleticism by allowing participants to use whatever performance enhancing drugs they want.

The event, backed by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and fellow billionaire biohacker Christian Angermayer, was meant to prove a highly contentious point: that regimens of stimulants, growth hormones, and peptides — many of which can be bought directly through the event’s website, naturally — can unlock previously unattainable levels of human performance and beat world records in the process.

Unfortunately for them, the spectacle didn’t go according to plan. The event, which took place over the weekend, saw dozens of athletes go head to head in a number of Olympic disciplines with the hope of proving that synthetically enhancing their bodies would allow them to swim and sprint faster, not to mention lift heavier weights.

But instead, as The Guardian reports, three of the event’s winners weren’t actually taking any banned substances at all — a hilarious development that put a major dent into the organizers’ boisterous marketing.

However, there was one widely-disputed claim of a world record, which won’t be recognized by international sporting bodies. Greek athlete Kristian Gkolomeev beat Australian swimmer Cameron McEvoy’s 50 meter freestyle record by a mere 0.07 seconds, covering the distance in just 20.81 seconds. And even that claim is a bit muddy: while Gkolomeev was using several banned substances, he was also relying on a special swimming suit that was banned in professional sports over a decade ago.

Organizers were seemingly desperate to run a victory lap in their efforts to paint the event as the “Olympics of the future.”

“We have arrived in mainstream culture,” said Enhanced Games CEO ­Maximilian Martin in a statement. “We are here to stay. We have changed the world tonight.”

“With the power of enhancements we can prove we are the best we can ever think of and you are ­living proof of that,” he added while addressing an audience of influencers and biotech investors.

Other athletes were far less impressed. McEvoy, who broke the 50 meter freestyle swimming world record in March, shot back following Gkolomeev’s performance.

“Seriously?! That’s all you got!” a meme he posted to Instagram following the event reads.

Meanwhile, Icelandic strongman Thor Bjornsson, of “Game of Thrones” fame, failed to beat his own deadlifting record of 1124 pounds, further putting a damper on the event.

In short, the Enhanced Games had embarrassingly little to show in terms of pushing the envelope with the use of potentially dangerous and highly controversial performance enhancing drugs. If anything, the event appears to have had the opposite of the intended effect.

“The whole pitch was that drugs would shatter the limits of clean sport,” one user tweeted. “Instead they proved the gap between juiced and clean is now seven hundredths of a second — in a suit banned 17 years ago.”

“The only thing they actually proved was how good the clean athletes already are,” the user added.

More on the games: Peter Thiel Funding New Olympics Where Athletes Can Take Performance Enhancing Drugs

The post They Held a New Olympics Where Athletes Can Take as Many Drugs and Steroids as They Want, and the Funniest Possible Thing Happened appeared first on Futurism.

Longtime Cybertruck watchers might remember a peculiar day back before the brutalist pickup was even released, when Tesla CEO Elon Musk randomly tweeted that the vehicle would function as a rudimentary flotation device.

“It will even float for a while,” he wrote at the time.

It wasn’t a one-off claim. Musk later boasted that the vehicle would be able to “traverse at least 100m [330 feet] of water as a boat.”

“Mostly just need to upgrade cabin door seals,” he claimed, writing at another point that the “Cybertruck will be waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat, so it can cross rivers, lakes and even seas that aren’t too choppy.”

The Cybertruck finally did make it to market, where it’s suffered a seemingly endless parade of recalls, embarrassing incidents, and dismal sales figures.

Unsurprisingly, all Musk’s bluster about the truck serving as a makeshift schooner turned out to be flimflam. In fact, it quickly emerged that just getting wet in a car wash could brick the thing.

To muddy the waters further, the company ended up adding what it calls “Wade Mode” to the vehicles, which sets the truck’s ride height to the highest level, ostensibly so it can ford creeks and streams.

All that mixed messaging clearly got jumbled for a Texas man, though, who activated Wade Mode and drove his Cybertruck into a lake. Unsurprisingly, things didn’t go well for him.

“Yesterday, [Grapevine Police Department] and [Grapevine Fire Department] were dispatched to Grapevine Lake, where a Tesla Cybertruck was stranded in the water,” police in Grapevine, Texas, wrote on X-formerly-Twitter. “The driver drove into the lake to use the ‘Wade Mode’ feature when the vehicle became disabled.”

Not only is the man’s vehicle swamped — as the cops showed in an amazing attached photo — but he’s in legal trouble as well.

“The passengers abandoned the vehicle and the driver was arrested,” they wrote.

More on the Cybertruck: Cybertruck Recalled to Keep Its Wheels From Flying Off While Driving

The post Man Drives Cybertruck Into Lake to Test Elon Musk’s “Boat” Claims, and It Went About as Well as You’d Guess appeared first on Futurism.

Daraxonrasib, which nearly doubled patients' survival time, fights the disease in a new way. It bear-hugs a cancer protein that drives cell growth.

The new test may catch active tuberculosis in those with low access to health care or who have trouble making the phlegm needed for traditional tests.

Andes hantavirus causes deadly lung failure, but its method of attack differs from other respiratory illnesses. The details might inform future treatments.

As Congo’s Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak grows, public health responders are turning to old-school tactics to fight it as scientists search for new tools.

A noninvasive treatment called high-intensity focused ultrasound helped relieve the shaking, stiffness and pain that accompany Parkinson’s disease.

PHOENIX, Ariz. — Nervous? One day soon, relief might be just a chew away.

For years, research has been showing that chemicals found in passionflower plants can help fight anxiety. Two teens have now created a chewing gum that can release those chemicals.

“Gum is very popular among high schoolers,” says Zackary Nizker, 16. This junior at McIntosh High School in Peachtree City, Ga., hopes this habit will make gum an easy way for teens to deal with anxiety. And there are many who face this. “In the U.S.,” Zackary says, “a third of all adolescents and young adults suffer from a form of anxiety.”

But teens aren’t the only ones who could use some relief. Zackary’s grandmother struggles with nervousness, which he says “got really severe last year.” The drugs she got prescribed help, he says, though their side effects can be “very severe.” In his grandma’s case, “she could hardly walk or stand. It was a very scary situation.”

Flavonoids are antioxidant chemicals made by many plants. The plants use them to fight tissue damage from oxidation. Many herbal remedies contain these compounds, too, notes Sara Hoti, Zackary’s classmate. Chamomile, used in some teas, is one flavonoid-loaded herb. But for their study, she and Zackary used an extract of a plant that grows wild in their hometown: passionflower (Passiflora incarnata).

Their work earned these teens a spot as finalists here at the 2026 Regeneron International Science & Engineering Fair, or ISEF. It’s a program created and run by Society for Science (which also publishes this magazine). As fourth place winners in the Translational Medical Science division, Sara and Zackary took home $600. They were among 1,725 students — from 65 nations or territories — competing at the 76th annual ISEF. Participants this year shared nearly $7 million in prizes.

Flower-powered relief

“Chewing gum, by itself, is already known to reduce anxiety,” says Zackary. But a host of studies going back decades shows that passionflower flavonoids reduce anxiety. They do this, he explains, by increasing brain levels of a signaling compound known as GABA. (That’s short for gamma-aminobutyric acid.) “It slows down neuron firing in your brain,” Zackary says. That slowdown, he says, seems to calm an anxious brain.

By combining herbal remedies with rhythmic chewing, he says, their new gum could become “a more effective treatment.” But to test whether chewing gum would release any flavonoids in it, they needed to run some tests.

To start, they cooked up some bubble gum. It included a gum base, powdered sugar, various other sweeteners — and, of course, passionflower extract. 

The teens had hoped to make that extract. After all, Sara says, in her hometown, passionflowers are everywhere. But the pair did their experiment during the winter, when the flowers were “all gone — out of season.” So they ended up having to buy the extract.

Afterward, they tested their prototype gum — and struggled, Zackary recalls. Why? “We’re not allowed to just give people some random gum we made and say, ‘Here, chew this, let’s see if it works.’” Instead, they had to do tests “outside of the body.”

Double bubble testing

The pair conducted two tests. The first examined whether each quantity of gum contained the same dose of passionflower extract. So they analyzed slices of the gum under a microscope. Using computer software, they could calculate the share of the flavonoid particles in view. Here, Sara says, “you want your value to be below 15. We actually got a value of 8.4, which was perfect.” (In these tests, Zackary adds, the “values” do not come with a unit.)

A second test, called the Shinoda test, measured how well flavonoids in their gum resist breakdown. If they broke down, the likelihood they’d prove helpful against anxiety could fall apart, too. So the young scientists exposed their gum to various conditions and then used this color-changing test to check whether the flavonoids had held up.

This test is usually done with liquids. Their gum was a solid. So learning how to Shinoda test their gum proved a “really long process,” Sara says.

To mimic the work of saliva, they cut their gum into pieces and soaked them in alcohol for three hours. And nothing happened. The flavonoids never left the gum.

To use the gum you’d chew it, they realized, an action which could release the flavonoids. But “since we couldn’t chew it ourselves,” Zackary says, “we broke the gum into pieces with our hands. That simulates chewing.” They also extended their soak time to three days.

This time, “we got this bright orange coloration change,” says Sara. That showed that the gum’s flavonoids had been released but not broken down — even after exposure to hydrochloric acid and other harsh conditions.

In the future, the teens want to find ways to market their gum and test in people its ability to relieve anxiety.

“Medicated chewing gum is not a new thing,” says Sara. Energy-boosting gums, which release a stimulant, already exist. Smoking-cessation gum contains nicotine. And you can buy passionflower teas. But “nowhere on the market is there a gum for anxiety,” says Sara.

She hopes their recipe could help anyone who feels a bout of nervousness coming on. Maybe you’re “going into an interview or a presentation,” she says. “You can just [chew] this and you know, chill out.”

From special pens to earwax evaluations, a plethora of emerging diagnostics could one day be a major boon for people with the debilitating disease.

Identifying children with early signs of type 1 diabetes makes a difference to their health. A new study suggests wider screening is effective.

The mind can regulate the immune system. And through directed thinking, people can learn to turn on immune-boosting brain areas, a new study finds.

The idea that the brain can influence the body emerged long ago, says Tor Wager. He’s a neuroscientist at Dartmouth University in Hanover, N.H. But only in the last few years have there been “real breakthroughs in understanding the neuroscience behind this,” he says.

Positive expectations turn on one part of the brain’s reward system. This region triggers the feelings of pleasure we get from eating good food, winning a game or receiving a compliment. Nerve cells in this part of the brain respond to such rewards by releasing the chemical dopamine. 

Tamar Koren is a physician scientist at Tel Aviv Medical Center in Israel. She was part of a team that used genetic methods to stimulate these “reward” cells in mice.

Turning on those neurons brought surprising health benefits. The mice were better able to fight bacterial infections and recovered more quickly from heart attacks. Stimulating the animals’ reward circuit even slowed the growth of tumors.

The approach looked so promising that Koren’s team wanted to know if it could work for people, too. But the genetic and molecular tools used in mice can’t ethically be used in humans. Instead, the team trained people to turn on their reward circuits with their own thoughts.

Her team shared details on how they did that in the January 19 Nature Medicine.

Responding to cues

This line of research grew out of work done in the late 1890s by Ivan Pavlov. This Russian scientist studied how our bodies extract energy and nutrients from food. In one famous experiment, he rang a bell every time he got ready to feed a hungry dog. Before long, just the sound of the bell would make the dog start salivating — even when there was no food. Psychologists call this a conditioned response. (For this and related work, Pavlov would take home the 1904 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.)

Decades later, Robert Ader and Nicholas Cohen at the University of Rochester’s medical school did something similar in rodents. They gave the animals a cue — here, a sweet drink — at the same time they injected a drug that suppresses the immune system. Eventually, giving rats just the drink could trigger the immune change.

Such an effect is known as psychosomatic (SY-koh-soh-MAT-ik). It means that the brain can trigger changes in the body after some conditioned cue (such as hearing a dinner bell or getting a sweet drink).

That term can carry stigma. It’s often used to describe real health symptoms — such as headaches, pain, nausea or skin changes — that can be triggered or worsened by mood or stress. People might see these health effects as being imagined or trivial.

But the opposite also occurs, such as getting relief after taking a sugar pill that looked like an actual drug. This is what’s called the placebo (Pluh-SEE-boh) effect. Some people also dismiss this, saying it’s not real medicine.

Yet it can be. In fact, some researchers view placebos as an opportunity.

The placebo effect reflects real physical changes. The effect may result from having positive expectations or a sense of hope. Whatever causes it, says Koren, “maybe we should understand how it works.” That, she says, might help people respond better to treatments.

Turning on the placebo effect

Her team has now tested that. Working with a psychology lab at Tel Aviv University, they recruited 85 young adults. All were employees who needed a vaccine to work at the medical center. This shot is given to ward off the hepatitis B virus (HBV). Seeing how people responded would offer an easy way to measure immune changes.

For the first phase of the experiment, the recruits had functional MRI (fMRI) scans. They laid in a machine that scans the brain and shows which parts are active. For each 40-second session, participants were told to put their brain to work. Each could choose how they wanted to do so. For instance, they could watch a red dot on the screen. Or recall a trip. Or think about the future. Or solve a math problem. 

Afterward, areas of the brain scan got a rating from 0 to 10. Those scores reflected activity in deep-brain regions of the reward pathway. One key region is known as the VTA, short for ventral tegmental area. This is the same area Koren’s team targeted in mice to trigger health benefits.

Some participants were randomly put into a control group. Their scores came from an unrelated brain region. 

When someone got a low score, they were asked to focus their thoughts on something else for the next session. If their score rose, they might repeat or refine that thought-focusing strategy. This trial-and-error process, called fMRI neurofeedback, was carried out in 45 to 60 sessions over several weeks. Through it all, participants had one goal: Get the highest score possible.

“The important thing for us was not the absolute score but the improvement,” says Nitzan Lubianiker. He led this study back when he was a graduate student on the team. (He now works as a psychology researcher at Yale University in New Haven, Conn.)

Right after their final fMRI session, each recruit got the HBV vaccine. This shot instructs the body to make antibodies. Those immune proteins recognize hepatitis B virus and help protect the liver from becoming infected by it. Blood tests measured virus antibodies before and two weeks after each person got their shot.

People who had been better at increasing brain activity in the VTA showed a larger rise in HBV antibodies after vaccination. That indicates a stronger immune response.

The improvement was just a 7 to 10 percent increase in HBV antibodies. Still, that was impressive, says Jonathan Kipnis. He was not involved in the research. But he knows about such things: His lab studies brain-immune connections at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo.

Mind-body connection

“We were all surprised that there actually was an effect,” says Koren. The response her team saw in lab mice was less surprising because they directly targeted the nerve cells. But getting people to turn on that region through thoughts alone seemed like “science fiction,” she now says.

And success here did not depend on someone’s personality. People who said on a questionnaire they’re more optimistic or hopeful did not all get higher VTA scores.

But high scorers did have something in common: They tended to choose mental strategies that involve positive expectations. For some, thoughts centered on friends or family. Others focused on experiences. The details didn’t seem to matter, since participants were not told what to think about. Rather, they adjusted their thoughts based on the neurofeedback scores. That was a “cool finding,” says Lubianiker.

The result “emphasizes how much our mental state is relevant to our well-being and day-to-day physiology,” Koren says. “Even if we’re not aware of it.”

Phoenix, Ariz. — Batter up! For many teen athletes, performance is the top priority. Rest and recovery, not so much. But sliding some simple recovery techniques in between innings, a high-school junior now reports, might help baseball pitchers maintain their speed — and arm health.

Arnav Prathipati, 17, pitches for his school’s baseball team at Carlmont High School in Belmont, Calif. “When I was in eighth grade, I had a pretty traumatic elbow injury,” he recalls. “I had a lot of minor tears in my elbow.” It took him out of play for about six months.

And that’s not unusual. According to a 2018 study, three in every four high-school pitchers develop arm pain at some point.

Arnav noticed a lack of recovery-focused training for teen pitchers. Typically, he says, they “just pitch, call it a day, go home and then don’t do anything else” in terms of recovery. But injuries can have big and lasting consequences. Two players at his school, Arnav says, “both hurt their arms pitching and lost their [college] scholarships.”

Hoping to avoid such problems, Arnav looked for studies aimed at limiting pitching injuries in high-school students. He found little. Most research had focused on adults. And that’s a problem, Arnav says, because unlike adults, teens are still developing. They may not sustain or recover from injuries the same way adults do. Also, pro pitchers usually have a team of doctors and therapists to help monitor and treat them. High-school athletes don’t.

Arnav couldn’t put together a big study, but he wanted to do “at least some preliminary testing [on] what recovery methods could be helpful for high-school students.”

What he achieved won Arnav a spot here, this week, at the 2026 Regeneron International Science & Engineering Fair. It’s the 76th annual ISEF, a program created and run by the Society of Science (which also publishes this magazine). Arnav was among 1,725 finalists — from 65 nations or territories. A host of winners will share nearly $7 million in prizes.

Dugout recovery options

Arnav recruited four students for his study. These pitchers went through three testing days, each separated by four days off. That’s similar to a typical baseball schedule, the teen notes.

Test days started much the same way real game days would. Pitchers warmed up and stretched. Then they tossed and caught a few balls to “get their arms loose.” Afterward, each pitched 15 balls during each of three “innings.” Between innings, the participants took a six-minute rest (what would be typical in a game).

Arnav assigned the teens a different recovery method on each test day, randomizing their order.

One day, it was active recovery: a light jog to keep up blood flow to their muscles. Another day, they’d just veg out in the dugout. The third option was EMS, short for electromuscular (Ee-LEK-troh-MUS-ku-lur) stimulation. Here, tiny electrodes applied to the pitching elbow and shoulder delivered a small electrical current. Physical therapists often use it to promote blood flow to target tissues.

Focusing on in-game recovery — rather than post-game — was important, Arnav says. As a pitcher rests in the dugout, their arm goes “cold,” he says. There’s less “steady blood flow” to “replenish the muscles.” By keeping pitchers’ arms “warm” with increased blood flow during the game, Arnav hoped to reduce the risk of injury.

Arnav assessed how well each technique worked four ways.

One was speed. As the pitcher’s arm tired, Arnav expected their pitches would slow. He also measured lactate in a pitcher’s blood. As cells break down blood sugar for fuel, lactate can build up in the blood, especially after intense exercise. Its levels clear during recovery. So, higher blood-lactate levels should indicate greater stress and less recovery. Arnav tested blood lactate in a blood-prick test before pitching, to establish a baseline. He tested again during each between-inning break.

The teen also asked the pitchers how intensely they felt they had pitched and to rate their sense of recovery at 24 and 48 hours after pitching. That’s because soreness often develops hours after exercise.

What the data show

Arnav had expected a jog between innings would help flush out blood lactate to improve recovery. In fact, he found the opposite. “Active recovery actually increased the blood lactate,” he reports. Blood lactate decreased — about equally — after the other two recovery treatments.

Many studies had suggested active recovery can be really effective, Arnav says. But timing might be important. Mid-game may not be the best time to measure this, he now says.

Pitch speed also dropped after a light jog. EMS led to a drop in pitch speed as well. Generally, Arnav finds, as average pitch speed decreased, so did a pitcher’s estimated pitch intensity. But on EMS days, the athletes rated their pitch intensity as lower than on the other days. Their average estimated pitch intensity on the EMS day began at 8.5 (on a 10-point scale). By the third inning, it dropped to 6.75.

The teen published some of his data in the January American Journal of Student Research. In it, he suggests that a pitcher’s lower assessment of pitching intensity after EMS treatment helps explain their drop in pitch speed: They just weren’t throwing as hard.

When asked to rank how effective pitchers felt their recovery had been on the different days, EMS came out on top. Its score averaged 7.5 (on a 10-point scale). The athletes scored sitting at 5.67 and jogging at 4.5.

Because all pitchers went through the same routines, each had served as their own controls.

Restful efficiency

High-school “pitchers have been throwing at higher and higher intensities in order to get recruited,” says Arnav. This was reported in a 2024 study in the American Journal of Sports and Medicine. “We can’t prevent pitchers from throwing at high intensity,” the teen says. “They most likely won’t listen.” But Arnav says he and others can recommend better recovery techniques. 

Arnav’s data have led him to use EMS between innings now. “It is actually helping me a lot with my velocity,” he says. His pitch speed, he reports, “has been consistently staying in like the mid- to upper 80s [miles per hour] because I’m able to recover my muscles more.” He says it “has definitely been helpful.”

And he’s not keeping his findings to himself. Besides publishing his data, he’s reached out to other teams. “Some high-school coaches have emailed me back,” he says. He hopes his work will inspire schools to reconsider between-inning sports-recovery measures.

Summer is finally around the corner, bringing lots of opportunities for outdoor adventures. With more free time, it’s easy to spend entire days splashing at the pool or visiting local parks with friends.

Those outdoor activities are all well and good — until temps rise into dangerous territory. And thanks to climate change, that’s happening more and more often. The last three years have been the hottest ever recorded. So it’s more important than ever to know how to keep cool.

“For the most part, we think that the sun is fun,” says Roxana Chicas. She’s an environmental and occupational health scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. “But it can also be very dangerous.”

Thousands of people die every year from overheating. Many more get sick. Heat-related illness happens when the body’s core temperature starts to climb. Normally, our bodies keep cool in hot weather by sweating. As sweat evaporates off the skin, it takes heat with it. But when it’s too hot and humid, that cooldown slows, and our core temperature rises.

“It’s like having a fever,” Chicas says, and it triggers similar symptoms, such as headaches and muscle aches. “If your core body temperature continues to rise, those symptoms start to get more severe,” she says. You might become confused, vomit or even faint. That last one is super serious. If someone faints in the heat, it’s a medical emergency.

Chicas studies how people can keep cool on hot days. That’s especially important for people who spend a lot of time outside, such as farm and construction workers. But they’re not the only ones who need to watch out for high temps. “Older adults, young children and high-school and college athletes who condition outdoors” are also at risk, Chicas says.

Fortunately, summer safety doesn’t have to mean staying indoors where it’s air conditioned. To make the most of your time outside, here are some innovative, science-backed ways to beat the heat.

1. Surround yourself with green

Green spaces have consistently cooler temperatures than areas without plants. One reason is that trees provide shade. Another is that plants release moisture from their leaves. As the water evaporates, it cools surrounding air.

Parks and yards are great places to enjoy these effects. But not everyone lives in places with yards or trees, and you probably don’t have much say in what’s planted along your street. If you have a porch, deck or balcony, potted plants can do the trick too.

In a 2024 study, researchers in India placed a variety of potted plants on a balcony. They then measured surface temperatures as well as the air temp inside and out. They measured again when the balcony was bare.

When it had greenery, the balcony stayed consistently cooler than when it was plant-free, they found. The balcony itself was cooler by 3.3 degrees Celsius (5.9 degrees Fahrenheit). Potted plants also dropped indoor temps by 2.3 degrees Celsius (4.1 degrees Fahrenheit). This was true both day and night, making rooms more comfortable for sleeping.

If you don’t have a balcony, you could plant window boxes to achieve a similar effect. These plants also help shade windows, which cuts how much heat comes in through the glass. So even if you have air conditioning, window plants could reduce how often it has to run — making your home an oasis of cool between outdoor hangouts.

2. Cover up — the right way

Shorts and tank tops might seem like the best fashion choices when it’s hot out. But when the sun’s rays hit your skin directly, they raise its temperature. So if you’re going to be in the sun for hours on end, bare skin will actually make you hotter.

Just one layer of clothing reduces the impact of those rays to help you stay cooler, says Asis Patnaik. He studies textiles for clothing and other uses at Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town, South Africa.

Sometimes, one layer of cloth isn’t enough to shield skin from the beating sun. In areas with extreme heat, including the Middle East, people often wear multiple layers of loose clothing. The air gaps between each layer act as insulators, Patnaik explains. They help keep hot outer layers away from the skin.

Patnaik also recommends clothes made from natural fibers, such as cotton or linen. These materials contain openings that allow sweat to move away from the body. When that sweat evaporates, it cools your skin.

Synthetic materials, such as polyester, can have the opposite effect. “If you [wear] polyester clothing, then you will feel very, very hot,” Patnaik says. These clothes often hug the body more closely. And their fibers lack openings, so there’s no way for sweat to leave the skin. If you opt for synthetic exercise clothes, be sure they have mesh under the arms. Mesh allows air to move through the fabric, which dries sweat and cools you down.

One last thing to consider? Color. “If the sun is blazing, you don’t wear black clothing,” Patnaik says. Dark colors absorb heat and pass it on to you. Light colors reflect more sunlight to help you stay cool.

3. Try a new hairstyle

Just like clothing, hair protects the skin from direct sunlight. Bald people sweat two to three times more on their heads than people with hair do, research has found, suggesting that hair helps keep the scalp cooler.

The texture of your hair matters too, according to a 2023 study. The coolest hair? Curls.

Tina Lasisi led this research. She’s a biological anthropologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Curly hair “provides a barrier [above] the scalp, like a parasol,” Lasisi says. It blocks the sun from reaching the skin, while leaving room for airflow that carries heat away from the head. Straight hair is more likely to trap heat.

If you’re lucky enough to have curly hair, consider rocking your natural curls for the summer. If your hair is straight but long enough, you might consider getting a perm or putting your hair in overnight curlers. If you’ve got short hair, a color change might help.

“There’s research on mammals showing that if an animal has short hair, lighter hair [color] reflects more heat,” Lasisi explains. Once hair gets more than two inches long, though, color seems to play less of a role in those mammals.

Lasisi’s study is one of the first to examine the role of curly hair in regulating body temperature. “There’s lots we still have to learn,” she says. But her early work suggests a trip to the hairdresser might be in order to help you keep a cooler head. If you don’t have hair, a hat can add a layer of protection from the sun’s rays.

4. Protect your neck

If you have long hair, chances are good you put it up when it’s hot out. That improves airflow across the neck — but exposes skin to hot sunlight. Covering the neck with a cooling bandana can protect against both sunlight and heat-related illness.

Chicas and her team put this to the test in a 2021 study. The scientists had farm workers wear cooling gear while they worked outdoors in Florida in late spring. Some wore cooling bandanas, which were made of a special lightweight material soaked in water. Some had cooling vests. Others wore both. A fourth “control” group didn’t wear either one.

People who wore both a vest and a bandana had 80 percent fewer symptoms of heat-related illness compared to the control group. These symptoms included headaches, nausea or vomiting and muscle cramps. People who wore only the bandana kept their core body temperature in the safest range.

The bandana was probably effective because we have big blood vessels in the neck, Chicas says. “We don’t want the brain to overheat,” she says. “That is what controls the body’s temperature.” Cooling the blood headed to the brain seemed to keep the body’s temperature in check.

If you don’t have a special cooling bandana, you can soak a regular one in cold water. Then wring it out and wrap it around your neck.

5. Chillin’ from the inside out

If you do start to overheat, it’s important to bring your body temperature down to a safe range. An excellent — and tasty — way to do that is to enjoy a slushie.

Slushies — or ice slurries, as scientists call them — aren’t simply cold drinks. These kinds of beverages contain lots of tiny ice crystals, sort of like dunking a Sno-Cone in your drink. They help because every sip brings bits of ice into the body. There, the bits absorb heat from surrounding tissues, which lowers body temperature. Slurries cool us from the inside out faster than cold liquid alone.

An added benefit to ice slurries: They can help prevent overheating. If you exercise outdoors, drinking a slurry before you start can help keep your body cool during your workout. It can also boost your endurance, so you can stay active for longer.

Even better, slurries help cool the brain, according to a 2018 study from Japan. And just like a bandana around the neck, that can keep the rest of the body in check too.

6. Add a hint of mint

For the best cooling burst, consider making your slushed ice treat minty!

Minty flavors, such as peppermint, are often described as cooling — and it turns out they can actually make us feel cooler. That’s because they stimulate the sensors in the body that detect dropping temperatures, says Russell Best. He’s a sports nutritionist at the Waikato Institute of Technology in New Zealand.

In a 2023 review of past research, Best reported that consuming menthol or putting it on the skin helps us feel cooler. Menthol is the most common compound found in peppermint oil. It’s often found in creams and gels for the skin. Menthol and peppermint can also “be added to drinks, ice blocks and even water sprays at low doses to help us feel comfortable during heat waves or on hot days,” he says. Feeling cooler can help athletes compete for longer when it’s hot and humid, research has found.

But minty additives, especially menthol, need to be used in low doses. Too much causes our blood vessels to tighten up, Best says. That reduces blood flow in our skin and makes it harder to release body heat. So avoid menthol creams or gels if you don’t have access to shade or water, he suggests.

Another thing to consider: “Menthol only helps us feel cool. It doesn’t actually cool us down,” Best notes. And if you don’t feel as hot, you might stay outside or be active longer than you should. Menthol and mint also suppress thirst, which can make it hard to stay hydrated.

If you do use mint in the heat, “consider drinking to a plan,” Best says. For example, drink small amounts every 15 to 20 minutes while you’re outside.

Remember: Stay hydrated and check in with your friends

Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate! Without enough water, your body can’t sweat, and you need that evaporation to keep your body in a safe temperature range.

“Water is excellent,” Chicas says. But if you’re sweating a lot, water alone might not be the best choice. “Our sweat is salty, so we have electrolytes that are coming out of our body,” she says. Choosing a drink with electrolytes can help replenish those salts.

“It’s also really important not to overdo it on electrolytes,” Chicas cautions. Many electrolyte sports drinks are also full of sugar. Look for drinks that are low in sugar instead.

As you enjoy fun in the sun, keep tabs on how you and your friends are feeling. Heat-related illness and heat stroke are common in middle and high school students, Chicas points out. “Become aware of that,” she says. “Know that these are all preventable illnesses and deaths.”