Scientists Tweaked LSD’s Molecular Structure and Created a Wild New Brain Drug

Researchers made small tweaks to the molecular structure of LSD to see if it could be turned into an effective brain-healing treatment.

A team of researchers at the University of California, Davis, made small tweaks to the molecular structure of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to see if it could be turned into an effective brain-healing treatment for patients that suffer from conditions like schizophrenia — without risking a potentially disastrous acid trip.

As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month, the researchers created a new compound called JRT by shifting the position of just two atoms of the psychedelic's molecular structure.

With the two atoms flipped, the new drug could still stimulate brain cell growth and repair damaged neural connections, while simultaneously minimizing psychedelic effects, in mice.

"Basically, what we did here is a tire rotation," said corresponding author and UC Davis chemistry professor David Olson in a statement. "By just transposing two atoms in LSD, we significantly improved JRT’s selectivity profile and reduced its hallucinogenic potential."

In experiments involving mice, the team found that JRT improved negative symptoms of schizophrenia without worsening other behaviors associated with psychosis.

While it's still far too early to tell if JRT could be effective in humans as well, the team is hoping that the new drug could become a powerful new therapeutic, especially for those suffering from conditions like schizophrenia.

"No one really wants to give a hallucinogenic molecule like LSD to a patient with schizophrenia," said Olson. "The development of JRT emphasizes that we can use psychedelics like LSD as starting points to make better medicines."

"We may be able to create medications that can be used in patient populations where psychedelic use is precluded," he added.

Olsen and his colleagues hope their new drug could provide an alternative to drugs like clozapine, a schizophrenia treatment, without negative side effects like an inability to feel pleasure and a decline in cognitive function.

Interestingly, it also proved a powerful antidepressant in early experiments involving mice at doses 100-fold lower than ketamine, a popular anesthetic used for the treatment of depression and pain management.

But before it can be tested in humans, the team still has plenty of work to do.

"JRT has extremely high therapeutic potential," Olsen said in the statement. Right now, we are testing it in other disease models, improving its synthesis, and creating new analogs of JRT that might be even better."

More on LSD: Former CEO Sues Company That Fired Him for Microdosing LSD in an Investor Meeting

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Top Chatbots Are Giving Horrible Financial Advice

Despite lofty claims from artificial intelligence soothsayers, the world's top chatbots are still quite bad at giving financial advice.

Wrong Dot Com

Despite lofty claims from artificial intelligence soothsayers, the world's top chatbots are still strikingly bad at giving financial advice.

AI researchers Gary Smith, Valentina Liberman, and Isaac Warshaw of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence posed a series of 12 finance questions to four leading large language models (LLMs) — OpenAI's ChatGPT-4o, DeepSeek-V2, Elon Musk's Grok 3 Beta, and Google's Gemini 2 — to test out their financial prowess.

As the experts explained in a new study from Mind Matters, each chatbot proved to be "consistently verbose but often incorrect."

That finding was, notably, almost identical to Smith's assessment last year for the Journal of Financial Planning in which, upon posing 11 finance questions to ChatGPT 3.5, Microsoft’s Bing with ChatGPT’s GPT-4, and Google’s Bard chatbot, the LLMs spat out responses that were "consistently grammatically correct and seemingly authoritative but riddled with arithmetic and critical-thinking mistakes."

Using a simple scale where a score of "0" included completely incorrect financial analyses, a "0.5" denoted a correct financial analysis with mathematical errors, and a "1" that was correct on both the math and the financial analysis, no chatbot earned higher than a five out of 12 points maximum. ChatGPT led the pack with a 5.0, followed by DeepSeek's 4.0, Grok's 3.0, and Gemini's abysmal 1.5.

Spend Thrift

Some of the chatbot responses were so bad that they defied the Walter Bradley experts' expectations. When Grok, for example, was asked to add up a single month's worth of expenses for a Caribbean rental property whose rent was $3,700 and whose utilities ran $200 per month, the chatbot claimed that those numbers together added up to $4,900.

Along with spitting out a bunch of strange typographical errors, the chatbots also failed, per the study, to generate any intelligent analyses for the relatively basic financial questions the researchers posed. Even the chatbots' most compelling answers seemed to be gleaned from various online sources, and those only came when being asked to explain relatively simple concepts like how Roth IRAs work.

Throughout it all, the chatbots were dangerously glib. The researchers noted that all of the LLMs they tested present a "reassuring illusion of human-like intelligence, along with a breezy conversational style enhanced by friendly exclamation points" that could come off to the average user as confidence and correctness.

"It is still the case that the real danger is not that computers are smarter than us," they concluded, "but that we think computers are smarter than us and consequently trust them to make decisions they should not be trusted to make."

More on dumb AI: OpenAI Researchers Find That Even the Best AI Is "Unable To Solve the Majority" of Coding Problems

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Scientists Find Signs of Life Deep Inside the Earth

A groundbreaking new study of microbes underground is challenging everything we thought we knew about extreme environments.

Little Friends

We've heard of underground parties, but this is ridiculous. A new study by an international team of researchers has uncovered troves of microbes thriving in the hostile subsurface of the earth, far from the life-giving energy of the sun.

The findings, published in the journal ScienceAdvances, are the culmination of eight years of first-of-its-kind research comparing over 1,400 datasets from microbiomes across the world.

Chief among the findings is that the dank cracks of the planet's crust could be home to over half of microbial cells on Earth, challenging our previous — and logical — understanding that life gets less diverse and abundant the farther it gets from the sun.

"It’s commonly assumed that the deeper you go below the Earth’s surface, the less energy is available, and the lower is the number of cells that can survive," said lead author Emil Ruff, a microbial ecologist at the famed Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, in a news release about the research. "Whereas the more energy present, the more diversity can be generated and maintained — as in tropical forests or coral reefs, where there’s lots of sun and warmth."

"But we show that in some subsurface environments," he added, "the diversity can easily rival, if not exceed, diversity at the surface."

Breakthrough

That comparable diversity is the key to the group's breakthrough — the researchers wrote in their paper that "species richness and evenness in many subsurface environments rival those in surface environments," in what the team is calling a previously unknown "universal ecological principle."

The study is notable not only for its findings, but also for its methodology.

Prior to the team's work, which began in 2016, there was little concerted effort to standardize microbial datasets from around the globe, due to differences in collection and analysis standards. That changed thanks to a survey led by Bay Paul Center molecular biologist Mitchell Sogin — also a coauthor of the new paper — who organized a drive to standardize microbial DNA datasets from researchers around the world.

The team's comparative work is built on these standardized datasets, allowing them to compare a sample sourced by a team at the University of Utah to that of a sample from the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain.

It's a captivating tale of international collaboration and deep-diving research — paving the way for a fascinating and previously overlooked avenue of research.

More on microorganisms: Researchers Say "Conan the Bacterium" Could Be Hidden Beneath Mars’ Surface

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There’s Something Very Strange About Our Galaxy

Researchers have found that there's something highly unusual about the Milky Way, setting it apart from other galaxies.

Galactic Outlier

Researchers have found that there's something highly unusual about the Milky Way that sets it apart from galaxies which, on a surface level, appear similar.

As detailed in three recent papers published in The Astrophysical Journal, a team of researchers examined a mountain of data as part of the Satellites Around Galactic Analogs (SAGA) survey, which was dedicated to comparing the Milky Way to 101 other galaxies that are similar in mass.

The distinction is technical but significant, the researchers say: they found that the Milky Way has surprisingly few smaller satellite galaxies compared to its peers — and some of them have mysteriously stopped forming new stars.

"Now we have a puzzle," said Stanford astrophysics professor Risa Wechsler, who cofounded SAGA and coauthored all three papers, in a statement. "What in the Milky Way caused these small, lower-mass satellites to have their star formation quenched?"

Satellite Activity

The findings suggest our galaxy's evolutionary history is strikingly different, setting it apart from all the others — research that could also force scientists to reexamine how we understand the formation of galaxies.

"Our results show that we cannot constrain models of galaxy formation just to the Milky Way," said Wechsler. "We have to look at that full distribution of similar galaxies across the universe."

At the core of the researchers' findings is dark matter, the mysterious substance that scientists believe makes up 85 percent of the matter in the universe, but has yet to be directly observed. Researchers have previously found that massive halos of dark matter allow galaxies to form within them, creating gravitational forces strong enough for ordinary matter to clump together.

"Perhaps, unlike a typical host galaxy, the Milky Way has a unique combination of older satellites that have ceased star formation and newer, active ones... that only recently fell into the Milky Way's dark matter halo," Wechsler suggested.

When Wechsler and her colleagues examined 378 small satellite galaxies that orbit the 101 much larger galaxies like the Milky Way, they found that half the Milky Way's satellites were no longer forming stars, unlike most other galaxies, whose satellites were still active stellar factories.

It all raises an intriguing question: why is our galactic home different?

"To me, the frontier is figuring out what dark matter is doing on scales smaller than the Milky Way, like with the smaller dark matter halos that surround these little satellites," Wechsler said.

More on galaxy formation: This Ancient "Rebel" Galaxy Closely Mirroring the Milky Way Has Astronomers Freaked Out

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Scientists Gene Hack Bacteria That Breaks Down Plastic Waste

The scientists edited to the bacteria to prove which enzyme it used to degrade PET plastics into bioavailable carbon.

Bottom Feeders

We may have a way of literally eating away at our planet's pollution crisis.

As part of a new study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, researchers have shed additional light on a possibly game-changing bacteria that grows on common polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics, confirming that it can break down and eat the polymers that make up the waste.

Scientists have long been interested in the plastic-decomposing abilities of the bacteria, Comamonas testosteroni. But this is the first time that the mechanisms behind that process have been fully documented, according to study senior author Ludmilla Aristilde.

"The machinery in environmental microbes is still a largely untapped potential for uncovering sustainable solutions we can exploit," Aristilde, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University in Illinois, told The Washington Post.

Enzyme or Reason

To observe its plastic-devouring ability, the researchers isolated a bacterium sample, grew it on shards of PET plastics, and then used advanced microscopic imaging to look for changes inside the microbe, in the plastic, and in the surrounding water.

Later, they identified the specific enzyme that helped break down the plastic. To prove it was the one, they edited the genes of the bacteria so that it wouldn't secrete the enzyme and found that without it, the bacteria's plastic degrading abilities were markedly diminished.

That gene-hacking trick formed a full picture of what goes on. First, the bacteria more or less chews on the plastic to break it into microscopic particles. Then, they use the enzyme to degrade the tiny pieces into their monomer building blocks, which provide a bioavailable source of carbon.

"It is amazing that this bacterium can perform that entire process, and we identified a key enzyme responsible for breaking down the plastic materials," Aristilde said in a statement about the work. "This could be optimized and exploited to help get rid of plastics in the environment."

PET Project

PET plastics, which are often used in water bottles, account for 12 percent of global solid waste, the researchers said. It also accounts for up to 50 percent of the microplastics found in wastewater.

That happens to be the environment that C. testosteroni thrives in, opening up the possibility of tailoring the bacteria to clean up our sewage before it's dumped into the ocean, for example.

But we'll need to understand more about the bacteria before that can happen.

"There's a lot of different kinds of plastic, and there are just as many potential solutions to reducing the environmental harm of plastic pollution," Timothy Hollein, a professor of biology at Loyola University Chicago who was not involved with the study, told WaPo. "We're best positioned to pursue all options at the same time."

More on pollution: A Shocking Percentage of Our Brains Are Made of Microplastics, Scientists Find

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Absolutely Deranged Study Says Swallowing Makes You Happy and Is Why You Overeat

Groundbreaking, surprising research reveals that the joy of swallowing, not just taste or aroma, drives our eating habits.

Every now and again, we get news of a scientific breakthrough that makes us want to put our heads through drywall — and this is one of them: researchers have determined that the happiness we derive from swallowing is what keeps us eating more (and more) of it, not from food's aroma, or taste, as you might expect.

Yes, you read that correctly: You keep eating more because your brain loves to swallow.

Start with why you're excited to eat in the first place. A constellation of indicators driven by flavor, aroma, and hunger cause us to take that first bite. But after that?

In what may be the greatest ad for Ozempic nobody could've seen coming, a paper with the catchy title of "Serotonergic modulation of swallowing in a complete fly vagus nerve connectome" was published last month in the journal Current Biology, to figure out the neurological process that keeps us, for lack of better poetry, NOMing back for more.

While reasonable hypotheses such as "Have you ever only eaten 1/15th of a cheesesteak?!" and "What kind of serial killer-grade psychopath only eats one french fry?!" went tragically untested, a substantial conclusion was somehow reached:

We identify a gut-brain feedback loop in which Piezo-expressing mechanosensory neurons in the esophagus convey food passage information to a cluster of six serotonergic neurons in the brain. Together with information on food value, these central serotonergic neurons enhance the activity of serotonin receptor 7-expressing motor neurons that drive swallowing. 

By which they mean: The moment food moves from your grill past your gullet — technically, your esophagus — your brain releases a hit of serotonin, a.k.a. the "feel-good" hormone.

Seeking to figure out how your stomach interacts with your brain when you're digesting food, an international consortium of scientists set out on this adventure, armed with an electron microscope aimed at the larvae of fruit flies — who have somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 nerve cells — after splitting them into "razor-thin slices." This is how they were able to get a closer look to see how their nerve cells work in tandem with one another during the digestive process.

For a visual reference, please enjoy the art used for the University of Bonn press release, which somehow accurately conveys the entire thing:

Masterful. But that's not all! The researchers did indeed find something significant, which was what they called a "stretch receptor" in the esophagus — a nerve signal that's fired off to the brain when the esophagus is processing food. If this all sounds utterly useless at face value, we're relieved to tell you that somehow, it's not. In fact, it could be extremely useful information. Per the Bonn press release:

"If [that "stretch receptor"] is defective, it could potentially cause eating disorders such as anorexia or binge eating. It may therefore be possible that the results of this basic research could also have implications for the treatment of such disorders."

In other words, if this research does path to humans like the researchers suspect it does, then there could be implications involving helping identify — and maybe, one day, reactivating — those receptors which may be broken in those with eating disorders, helping solve those problems.

It's yet another example of the kind of human behaviors we believe are a matter of choice, when they're just part and parcel of brain chemistry.

Until then, the next time you're being chided for having that extra french fry, just remember: It's not nearly as much a matter of self-control as you've probably believed it to be. If nothing else, take it as a way to be more forgiving to yourself. After all, there are far more bitter pills to (ahem) swallow. The only problem is that they might make you want to eat more of them.

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