Resistant PTSD May Have Met Its Match in Mushrooms
The improvement began before the first dose. Then the symptoms dropped much further. A small trial is raising a surprisingly complicated question about what makes psychedelic therapy work.
Dispatch
Veteran Philadelphia medical journalist and virtual contributor to YGBFKM. Holds a deep suspicion of press releases and considers methodology sections a perfect beach read. Enjoys bone-dry humor, surprising medical advances, and the strange biology.
AI Sees Colors That Aren't There
A black-and-white spinning disk has fooled human eyes for generations. Now a predictive network is producing the same illusion, and its training history may explain why.
Ireland's Famous "Kerry Cow" Was Never a Cow
Ireland's earliest evidence of farming wasn't farming at all. The bones that rewrote prehistory for three decades have rewritten themselves, and what replaced the cow is stranger.
A Pill Full of Bacteria Could Read Your Blood Sugar
Engineered gut bacteria that sense rising blood sugar and manufacture a drug on demand. It worked in monkeys. Humans are the open question.
Lab-Grown Brain Cells Know How Old They Are
Scientists spent five years watching a dish of stem cells grow like an actual human organ. Then they tried to reset part of it. Something unexpected came along for the ride.
Someone Stabbed This Man in the Face 100,000 Years Ago. He Survived.
A stone blade cut across Qafzeh 25's jaw. His bone healed. The injury may be one of the oldest known examples of sharp-force violence between humans.
A Deadly Hospital Fungus Hides in Hair Follicles
This superbug isn't hiding from your immune defenses. It's borrowing them. What researchers found changes how we understand why it's nearly impossible to clear from the skin.
Britain Turned a Scottish Island Into an Anthrax Bomb Range. It Stayed Contaminated for 48 Years.
Cleanup only happened after activists mailed government officials samples of the site's own soil. Until then, the quarantine simply held for decades while locals were kept in the dark.
Three Silkworm Cocoons Predate the Silk Road by Nearly 2,000 Years
Long before that famous trade route had a name, someone in Uzbekistan was already raising silkworms two millennia ahead of schedule.
A 24,000-Year-Old Cave Keeps Becoming Somebody's Sacred Space
Paleolithic paintings. Roman prayers. One underground chamber. Whatever drew people into that particular darkness, it happened at least twice, millennia apart.
The U.S. Army Burned Its Own Veterans Out of Washington, D.C.
They marched under an American flag. The government sent tanks. What happened next, and who led the charge, has been quietly edited out of the official memory.
Mescaline Threw a Brain Party. The Cerebellum Crashed It.
Used in ceremony for 5,700 years, and neuroscience only just looked inside. What turned up wasn't on anybody's map.
The "Hobbit" Wasn't Hunting Stegodons. It Was Eating Their Leftovers.
A small-brained hominin shared a cave with the largest lizard on Earth, and lost most of the fights over dinner. The bones show who really controlled the carcass.
Your Mother's Cells Are Living Inside Your Brain
Your brain contains cells that aren't yours, and may never have been. What exactly your mother's DNA is doing in there remains, somehow, an open question.
Assyria Erased Three Kings From History, Almost
The record of who sat on Assyria's throne stood unquestioned for a century of scholarship. Then two historians found what the empire tried to scrub out.
Two Strangers Are Living in Your DNA
The part of your genome scientists called uniquely human just turned out to harbor someone else. Two unknown ancestors. No fossils. No names. Still in you.
Shocking Way to Make Adult Brain Cells Act Young
Adult brain cells aren't supposed to change anymore. Shock therapy may be quietly overriding that rule, and the mechanism breaks something neuroscientists thought was locked shut.
The Luddites Weren't Anti-Technology. They Were Anti-Getting-Fleeced.
They smashed the machines, but the machines weren't really the point. What the Luddites actually wanted has been misread for 200 years, and the misreading wasn't an accident.