Ethereum Price Analysis: ETH Could Extend Losses Below $80 …

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Key Highlights

Ethereum price declined further below key supports against the US Dollar and bitcoin. ETH/USD could accelerate losses if there is a break below $80.

Recently, there was a minor upside move above $88 and $90 in ETH price against the US Dollar. The ETH/USD pair tested the $90 resistance area and faced a solid selling interest. As a result, there was a bearish reaction and the price declined below the $87 and $85 support levels. There was also a close below the $87 level and the 100 hourly simple moving average.

A new intraday low was formed at $82.99 and it seems like the price may decline further. It is currently correcting higher above $85. An initial resistance is the 50% Fib retracement level of the recent decline from the $90 high to $83 low. Moreover, there is a new connecting bearish trend line formed with resistance at $89 on the hourly chart of ETH/USD. An intermediate resistance is the 61.8% Fib retracement level of the recent decline from the $90 high to $83 low. It seems like there is a cluster of resistances formed between $88 and $90. Therefore, as long as the price is below $90, it may continue to decline.

Looking at the chart, ETH price could even break the $83 support level. The next key support is at $80, below which the price will most likely accelerate towards the $75 level.

Hourly MACD The MACD is now back in the bearish zone.

Hourly RSI The RSI is currently well below the 50 level and heading towards 30.

Major Support Level $80

Major Resistance Level $90

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What is Ethereum Gas: Step-By-Step Guide – Blockgeeks

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Ethereum Gas is the lifeblood of the Ethereum ecosystem, there is no other way of putting that. Gas is a unit that measures the amount of computational effort that it will take to execute certain operations.

Every single operation that takes part in Ethereum, be it a simple transaction, or a smart contract, or even an ICO takes some amount of gas. Gas is what is used to calculate the amount of fees that need to be paid to the network in order to execute an operation.

In this guide, we are going to understand how gas works. But before we do so, there are several concepts that we must learn. So, without further ado, lets begin our deep dive on Ethereum Gas.

Bitcoin was created because everyone was asking the same questions.

Satoshi Nakamoto answered these questions when he created bitcoin. We finally had a decentralized monetary system which can transfer money from one person to another.

However, there was a problem with bitcoin which is a problem with all first generation blockchains. They only allowed for monetary transactions, there was no way to add conditions to those transactions.

Alice can send Bob 5 BTC, but she couldnt impose conditions on those transactions. Eg. She couldnt tell Bob that he will get the money only if he performed certain tasks.

These conditions would need extremely complicated scripting. Something was required to make the process more seamless.

And that something was a smart contract.

Smart contracts help you exchange money, property, shares, or anything of value in a transparent, conflict-free way while avoiding the services of a middleman.

Vitalik Buterins Ethereum is easily the stalwart of this generation. They showed the world how the blockchain can evolve from a simple payment mechanism to something far more meaningful and powerful.

So, what are these smart contracts and whats the big deal?

Smart contracts are automated contracts. They are self-executing with specific instructions written in its code which get executed when certain conditions are made.

You can learn more about smart contracts in our in-depth guide here.

Smart contracts are how things get done in the Ethereum ecosystem. When someone wants to get a particular task done in Ethereum they initiate a smart contract with one or more people.

Smart contracts are a series of instructions, written using the programming language solidity, which works on the basis of the IFTTT logic aka the IF-THIS-THEN-THAT logic. Basically, if the first set of instructions are done then execute the next function and after that the next and keep on repeating until you reach the end of the contract.

The best way to understand that is by imagining a vending machine. Each and every step that you take acts like a trigger for the next step to execute itself. It is kinda like the domino effect. So, lets examine the steps that you will take while interacting with the vending machine:

Now look at all those steps and think about it. Will any of the steps work if the previous one wasnt executed? Each and every one of those steps is directly related to the previous step. There is one more factor to think about, and it is an integral part of smart contracts. You see, in your entire interaction with the vending machine, you (the requestor) were solely working with the machine (the provider). There were absolutely no third parties involved.

So, now how would this transaction have looked like if it happened in the Ethereum network?

Suppose you just bought something from a vending machine in the Ethereum network, how will the steps look like then?

Every transaction that you do through the smart contracts will get recorded and updated by the network. What this does is that it keeps everyone involved with the contract accountable for their actions. It takes away human malice by making every action taken visible to the entire network

Before we understand what the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is, we must understand why a Virtual Machine is needed.

So lets go back to smart contracts.

What are the desirable properties that we want in our smart contract?

Anything that runs on a blockchain needs to be immutable and must have the ability to run through multiple nodes without compromising on its integrity. As a result of which, smart contract functionality needs to be three things:

A program is deterministic if it gives the same output to a given input every single time. Eg. If 3+1 = 4 then 3+1 will ALWAYS be 4 (assuming the same base). So when a program gives the same output to the same set of inputs in different computers, the program is called deterministic.

There are various moments when a program can act in an un-deterministic manner:

In mathematical logic, we have an error called halting problem. Basically, it states that there is an inability to know whether or not a given program can execute its function in a time limit. In 1936, Alan Turing deduced, using Cantors Diagonal Problem, that there is no way to know whether a given program can finish in a time limit or not.

This is obviously a problem with smart contracts because, contracts by definition, must be capable of termination in a given time limit. There are some measures taken to ensure that there is a way to externally kill the contract and to not enter into an endless loop which will drain resources:

In a blockchain, anyone and everyone can upload a smart contract. However, because of this the contracts may, knowingly and unknowingly contain virus and bugs.

If the contract is not isolated, this may hamper the whole system. Hence, it is critical for a contract to be kept isolated in a sandbox to save the entire ecosystem from any negative effects.

Now that we have seen these features, it is important to know how they are executed. Usually, the smart contracts are run using one of the two systems:

Lets compare these two and determine which makes for a better ecosystem. For simplicitys sake, we are going to compare Ethereum (Virtual Machine) to Fabric (Docker).

So, as can be seen, Virtual Machines provide better Deterministic, terminable and isolated environment for the Smart contracts. However, dockers have one distinct advantage. They provide coding language flexibility while in a Virtual Machine (VM) like Ethereum, one needs to learn a whole new language (solidity) to create smart contracts.

The EVM is the virtual machine in which all the smart contracts function in Ethereum. It is a simple yet powerful Turing Complete 256-bit virtual machine. Turing Complete means that given the resources and memory, any program executed in the EVM can solve any problem.

As explained in the introduction, Gas is a unit that measures the amount of computational effort that it will take to execute certain operations.

Note: Before we continue, huge shoutout to Joseph Chow for his amazing presentation on Ethereum gas.

Most of the smart contracts that run in the EVM are coded using Solidity (Ethereum is planning to move on to Viper from Solidity in the future). Each and every line of code in Solidity requires a certain amount of gas to be executed.

The image below has been taken from the Ethereum Yellowpaper and can be used to gain a rough idea of how much specific instructions cost gas-wise. Every transaction requires at least 21,000 gas according to this table:

Image Courtesy: Ethereum Yellow Paper

To better understand how gas works in Ethereum, lets use an analogy. Suppose you are going on a road trip. Before you do so you go through these steps:

Now, lets draw parallels with Ethereum.

Driving the car is the operation that you want to execute, like executing a function of a smart contract.

The gas is well.gas.

The gas station is your miner.

The money that you paid them is the miner fees.

All the operations that users want to execute in ethereum must provide gas for the following:

Now that we have covered the bare basics, you maybe asking the following question.

The answer is simpleincentivization.

Like any proof-of-work peer-to-peer system, Ethereum is heavily dependent on the hashrate of their miners. More the miners, more the hashrate, more secure and fast the system.

In order to attract more miners into the system, they need to make the system as profitable and alluring as possible for the miners. In Ethereum, there are two ways that miners can earn money:

Lets explore the second point.

The miners are responsible for putting transactions inside their blocks. In order to do so, they must use their computational power to validate smart contracts. The gas system allows them to charge a certain fee for doing so.

This fee is known as the miners fee and it helps incentivize them enough to take part actively in the ecosystem.

So, how much fees can they charge? Before we can calculate that lets understand how we measure gas.

Gas is simply measured in units of gas. A transaction sent to the Ethereum network costs some discrete amount of gas (e.g. 100 gas) depending on how many EVM instructions need to be executed.

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What is Ethereum Gas: Step-By-Step Guide - Blockgeeks

Singularitarianism | Transhumanism Wiki | FANDOM powered …

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Singularitarianism is a moral philosophy based upon the belief that a technological singularity the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence is possible, and advocating deliberate action to bring it into effect and ensure its safety. While many futurists and transhumanists speculate on the possibility and nature of this technological development (often referred to as the Singularity), Singularitarians believe it is not only possible, but desirable if, and only if, guided safely. Accordingly, they might sometimes "dedicate their lives" to acting in ways they believe will contribute to its safe implementation.

The term "singularitarian" was originally defined by Extropian Mark Plus in 1991 to mean "one who believes the concept of a Singularity". This term has since been redefined to mean "Singularity activist" or "friend of the Singularity"; that is, one who acts so as to bring about the Singularity.[1]

Ray Kurzweil, the author of the book The Singularity is Near, defines a Singularitarian as someone "who understands the Singularity and who has reflected on its implications for his or her own life".[2]

In his 2000 essay, "Singularitarian Principles", Eliezer Yudkowsky writes that there are four qualities that define a Singularitarian:[3]

In July 2000 Eliezer Yudkowsky, Brian Atkins and Sabine Atkins founded the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence to work towards the creation of self-improving Friendly AI. The Singularity Institute's writings argue for the idea that an AI with the ability to improve upon its own design (Seed AI) would rapidly lead to superintelligence. Singularitarians believe that reaching the Singularity swiftly and safely is the best possible way to minimize net existential risk.

Many believe a technological singularity is possible without adopting Singularitarianism as a moral philosophy. Although the exact numbers are hard to quantify, Singularitarianism is presently a small movement. Other prominent Singularitarians include Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom.

Often ridiculing the Singularity as "the Rapture for nerds", many critics have dismissed singularitarianism as a pseudoreligion of fringe science.[4] However, some green anarchist militants have taken singularitarian rhetoric seriously enough to have called for violent direct action to stop the Singularity.[5]

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John McAfee, Ripple (XRP) and the SEC – Global Coin Report

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Known for his well-timed predictions (and their explosive results) within the cryptocurrency community, John McAfee is in the headlines again, going underground as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) attempts to silence his voice. A vocal critic of the SEC, McAfee has taken to Twitter to update his followers on current developments as the SEC has allegedly infiltrated his property, disturbing McAffees peace and forcing the hand of a man most famously known for his wild Bitcoin predictions.

Perhaps the most vocal and angry critic of the SEC, McAfee has spoken out numerous times concerning the commissions actions to destroy value in the market. Now, with an increase in suspicious activity happening around his home in Tennessee, his twitter feed has lit up with the dramatic unfolding of this newest dilemma. With the entire story unfolding via social media, we need to look no further than Twitter and Youtube for updates. The official story, however, has been told by Rob Loggia on his increasingly popular website.

While easily passed off as paranoid by the mainstream media, McAfees security detail sees current developments differently. As an example, Jimmy Watson, a former Navy Seal hired by McAfee for protection has stated,

All of my instincts point in one direction. Weve had a white single-engine plane circle the property at low altitude for almost an hour. It has visited us several times. Thats not normal.

Other abnormal instances include vehicles with passengers trying to obscure their faces as they take off at high speed, and apparent human activity leaving traces in the tall grass surrounding McAfees home. Needless to say, McAffee has felt it necessary to leave the safety of his cul de sac, and reveal his truths from an undisclosed location, traveling via armed motorcade.

While there is no direct connection to the recent visits and the SEC, McAfee is again speaking out against the commission and its overwhelming intrusions into our civil liberties. Having been targeted by the commission in the past, McAfee believes it is them making life difficult once again.

The SEC has made headlines recently with their meddling into the affairs of a few big-name cryptocurrencies. Ripple (XRP) has now been targeted and is quickly mounting a defense (or at least creating a new logo) to distance the currency (XRP) from Ripple the company. The SEC is waiting to make up its mind as what truly constitutes a security in the crypto-universe, and the fate of Ripples (XRP) value is again held in limbo to the consternation of hodlers across the market.

While the SEC intrusion makes waves through the daily headlines of our favorite crypto news sites, its decision (either way) speaks volumes to McAfees discussion on the commissions overreach. And while the verdict is yet to officially come out, the damage is being done in front of our eyes, as the SEC once again affects the value of Ripple (XRP) and the market as a whole.

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Disclaimer: This article should not be taken as, and is not intended to provide, investment advice. Global Coin Report and/or its affiliates, employees, writers, and subcontractors are cryptocurrency investors and from time to time may or may not have holdings in some of the coins or tokens they cover. Please conduct your own thorough research before investing in any cryptocurrency and read our fulldisclaimer.

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John McAfee, Ripple (XRP) and the SEC - Global Coin Report

Psychedelics – Pharmacological Reviews

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I. Introduction

I was delighted when the editors invited me to write a review on psychedelics, perhaps a watershed moment, representing a shift in opinion that has been developing for more than 3 decades with respect to research and understanding of psychedelics. When I began my graduate studies in 1969, it was politically correct in scientific circles to refer to these substances only as psychotomimetics, a negative term suggesting that they fostered a mental state resembling psychosis (Hoffer, 1967). Later, as it was realized that these compounds did not provide very realistic models of psychosis or mental illness, it became more correct to refer to them as hallucinogens, again a pejorative term suggesting that they principally produce hallucinations. Yet that is not what they do in most users at ordinary doses, so this term likewise is not particularly descriptive or useful, although it is still widely used and seems to remain the preferred name for these substances in most scientific writing. In addition, the term hallucinogen is often used as a rather broad category to include all kinds of psychoactive molecules, including cannabinoids, ecstasy, dissociative agents, and others.

This review will focus exclusively on the so-called classic serotonergic hallucinogens (psychedelics), which are substances that exert their effects primarily by an agonist (or partial agonist) action on brain serotonin 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT) 2A receptors, as discussed later. The discussion will not consider cannabinoids, dissociatives such as ketamine, salvinorin A (a specific opioid agonist), or entactogens such as 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA). In certain contexts, all of these and some related agents have been swept into the catchall category hallucinogens. Although they all can produce profound changes in consciousness, they have a different mechanism of action and will not be discussed unless there is a specific reason to do so.

The name psychedelics for these substances was coined by Humphrey Osmond in 1957, connoting that they have a mind-manifesting capability, revealing useful or beneficial properties of the mind (Osmond, 1957). This name has been popular among the lay public for more than 5 decades, but it has generally been frowned upon by the scientific community because it implies that these substances have useful properties. The notion that psychedelics can have beneficial effects has thus far not been embraced in most medical or scientific circles; indeed, federal funding agencies (e.g., the National Institutes of Health National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Mental Health) have no mission to support research on potentially useful properties of psychedelics. Yet this term has remained popular with the public and even appears to be gaining popularity. As I intend to show in this discussion, however, the idea that psychedelics may have useful properties is not at all farfetched, and very recent clinical studies have reinforced the belief by many that psychedelics are well worth studying from a number of different perspectives. Indeed, one of the most striking developments in this field has been the initiation and successful completion of a variety of clinical studies of psychedelics in the past 15 years, most of which have been targeted to specific medical indications. As will be discussed later, the results have been, in the main, remarkably positive.

It should be kept in mind that the relative dearth of research on psychedelics in the past half century did not result from a lack of scientific interest, but rather occurred as a consequence of political forces that manifested principally in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s (Grinspoon and Bakalar, 1979). Use of (5R,8R)-(+)-lysergic acid-N,N-diethylamide (LSD) and marijuana by so-called hippies who demonstrated against the Vietnam War during the 1960s created great consternation among authorities and legislative bodies, both at the federal and state levels. Antiwar attitudes and rejection of conventional social norms by adolescents and college students were often perceived by the mainstream culture to be a consequence of drug use; hence, these substances were often believed to be perverting the minds of our youth. Furthermore, the outspoken Harvard University professor and firebrand Timothy Leary encouraged young people to turn on, tune in, and drop out, essentially coaching them to take drugs, discover their true selves, and abandon convention. Such messages did not play well with the mainstream culture, all while the mass media fanned the flames of public hysteria with greatly exaggerated reports of drug-induced insanity, chromosomal damage, attempts to fly, and so forth.

Strict laws were quickly passed. After the passage of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, LSD and other psychedelics known at the time were placed into the most restrictive category of drugs, Schedule 1. This classification made them virtually impossible to study clinically and effectively ended any significant research into the pharmacology and medical value of psychedelics for more than 3 decades. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that psychedelics played a substantial role in defining the youth culture of the 1960s and 1970s, with books and essays too numerous to cite being written on this topic. It is believed that more than 30 million people have used LSD, psilocybin, or mescaline (Krebs and Johansen, 2013). One suspects that had LSD never been discovered, the world might look very different today than it does now, for better or worse, depending on ones perspective.

Despite the recreational use of psychedelics, a quote from a book by Grinspoon and Bakalar (1979 Pg 192) needs to be kept in mind:Many people remember vaguely that LSD and other psychedelic drugs were once used experimentally in psychiatry, but few realize how much and how long they were used. This was not a quickly rejected and forgotten fad. Between 1950 and the mid-1960s there were more than a thousand clinical papers discussing 40,000 patients, several dozen books, and six international conferences on psychedelic drug therapy. It aroused the interest of many psychiatrists who were in no sense cultural rebels or especially radical in their attitudes.

One very important scientific consequence of the discovery of LSD also is often overlooked. The powerful psychologic effect of LSD was accidently discovered in 1943 (Hofmann, 1979a), followed only a decade later in 1953 by the detection of serotonin in the mammalian brain (Twarog and Page, 1953). The presence of the tryptamine moiety within LSD was also quickly seen to be the scaffold for the chemical structure of serotonin (Fig. 1).

Chemical structures of serotonin and LSD.

This recognition led to a proposal only 1 year later by Woolley and Shaw (1954) that mental disturbances caused by lysergic acid diethylamide were to be attributed to an interference with the action of serotonin in the brain. Therefore, one could reasonably argue that the whole field of serotonin neuroscience, and especially the role of serotonin in brain function, was catalyzed by the discovery of LSD! By way of illustration, in 1952, there were only 10 publications in the National Library of Medicine concerning serotonin, nearly all of them dealing with some aspect of its ability to constrict blood vessels. Only 8 years later, in 1960, there were 300 publications on serotonin, 35 of which were now focused on studies of serotonin in the brain. For comparison, in 1960, there were only 197 publications about norepinephrine (NE)/noradrenaline, a neurotransmitter that had been discovered and studied in the mid-1940s. Green (2008) provides an interesting overview of the 19501970 period of intense research activity after the discovery of serotonin in the brain.

There have been numerous recent reviews on this topic, usually titled as hallucinogens, and the reader is encouraged to consult these works for further details (Nichols, 2004; Nichols and Chemel, 2006; Fantegrossi et al., 2008a; Green, 2008; Passie et al., 2008; Winter, 2009; Griffiths and Grob, 2010; Vollenweider and Kometer, 2010; Brandt and Passie, 2012; Beck and Bonnet, 2013; Halberstadt and Geyer, 2013b; Baumeister et al., 2014; Halberstadt, 2014; Tyl et al., 2014). I wrote a comprehensive review on the subject in 2004, so the literature considered for this review will focus primarily, but not exclusively, on the years from 2004 to the present.

Psychedelics are a class of drug that cannot be fully understood without reference to a number of other fields of research, including anthropology, ethnopharmacology, psychiatry, psychology, sociology, and others. This review will focus mostly on pharmacology, both preclinical and clinical, but on occasion reference will be made to aspects of some of those other areas.

Psychedelics may be the oldest class of psychopharmacological agents known to man. Important examples of these substances include a substance used in ancient India known as Soma, which was highly revered and is frequently mentioned in the Rigveda, with numerous Vedic hymns written in praise of Soma (Wasson and Ingalls, 1971). In the ancient village of Eleusis, outside Athens, for more than 2000 years there was an annual all-night secret ceremony that is believed to have involved ingestion of a hallucinogenic brew known as (Wasson et al., 1978). We know almost nothing about the ceremony other than that profound insights about life could be achieved, and it was apparently a treasured once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for any Greek citizen who had not been convicted of murder.

Psilocybin mushrooms were used by the Aztec shaman in healing and in a variety of religious and divinatory rituals. These mushrooms were known as teonanacatl, meaning gods flesh (Ott and Bigwood, 1978; Schultes and Hofmann, 1979). The use of various psychoactive plant materials and substances was common in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican societies, including the Olmec, Zapotec, Maya, and Aztec cultures (Carod-Artal, 2015). In the Bradshaw rock art in the Kimberly region of Australia and in the Sandawe rock art in the Kolo region of Eastern Tanzania, one finds uniquely shared images such as the mushroom head symbol of psilocybin use, suggesting that the two cultures were linked and had shamanic practices that used psychoactive mushrooms (Pettigrew, 2011).

Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) is a small cactus native to the American Southwest and Northern Mexico that has been used for millennia and is consumed as a sacrament during services of the Native American Church. Two peyote samples from a cave on the Rio Grande River in Texas were analyzed and subjected to radiocarbon dating. The average age of the samples, both of which contained mescaline, dated to 37803660 BCE (El-Seedi et al., 2005). This evidence supports the use of peyote by Native North Americans as long ago as 5700 years (Bruhn et al., 2002). Classic psychedelics that have been extensively studied include LSD, shown earlier, mescaline, psilocybin, and N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) (Fig. 2).

Chemical structures of classic psychadelics mescaline, psilocybin, and DMT.

Ayahuasca, also known as yag or hoasca, has a long history of use by natives in the Amazon valley of South America (Dobkin de Rios, 1971; Schultes and Hofmann, 1979). Ayahuasca is a decoction prepared from an admixture of two plants: the pounded bark from Banisteriopsis caapi vines and leaves from Psychotria viridis. The latter contains the hallucinogen DMT, a Schedule 1 controlled substance under U.S. law, and it is generally considered that the psychoactive effects of ayahuasca can be attributed to its DMT content. Although DMT is not orally active, B. caapi contains -carboline alkaloids that inhibit the liver monoamine oxidase (MAO) that normally breaks down DMT; thus, ayahuasca is taken orally as a tea. Its use has been incorporated as a sacrament into the religious practices of two syncretic Brazilian churches [Unio do Vegetal (UDV) and the Santo Daime] that have branches in the United States, with the U.S. Supreme Court rendering a 2006 decision to allow the use of ayahuasca by the UDV under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

In view of the widespread historical use of psychedelics as sacraments in a variety of other cultures, Jaffes (1990) definition for the class of psychedelics can perhaps be appreciated: the feature that distinguishes the psychedelic agents from other classes of drug is their capacity reliably to induce states of altered perception, thought, and feeling that are not experienced otherwise except in dreams or at times of religious exaltation. All pharmacologists will recognize that this definition for a class of psychoactive drugs is indeed quite unique!

One of the pioneers of LSD research, the late Daniel X. Freedman, noted that one basic dimension of behavior compellingly revealed in LSD states is portentousness the capacity of the mind to see more than it can tell, to experience more than it can explicate, to believe in and be impressed with more than it can rationally justify, to experience boundlessness and boundaryless events, from the banal to the profound (Freedman, 1968). Freedmans observation is completely consistent with Jaffes definition.

The use of psychedelics as a central feature of many religious practices, as well as the profound and unique psychopharmacological effects suggested by Jaffes definition and the observations of Freedman, surely makes us aware that psychedelics are an exceptional category of mind-altering substances. Indeed, this knowledge prompted Ruck et al. (1979) to coin the word entheogen as a replacement for the terms hallucinogen and psychedelic, both of which they felt had negative connotations. Entheogen is derived from the Greek roots entheos, meaning God (theos) within, and genesthe, meaning to generate. The word entheogen thus essentially refers to a substance or material that generates God or the divine within someone. Although the term entheogen is now seeing fairly wide acceptance within the culture of those who use these substances recreationally, a search of the term in the National Library of Medicine finds only five hits. Although it seems unlikely that the term entheogen will be adopted within the formal scientific community, the reader should realize that in some circles entheogen is generally synonymous with psychedelic. Nonetheless, it should be appreciated that the effects produced by psychedelics are highly dependent on the set (mental expectation) of the user and the setting (environment). A set and setting designed to facilitate a mystical experience will increase the probability of such an occurrence, whereas an unstructured or party-type setting is less likely to lead to a positive outcome.

Studerus et al. (2012) investigated the importance of 24 predictor variables on the acute response to psilocybin and confirmed that nonpharmacological factors play an important role in the effects of psilocybin. Variables examined included age, sex, education, personality traits, drug pre-experience, mental state before drug intake, experimental setting, and drug dose. Their analysis was based on pooled data from 23 controlled experimental studies involving 261 healthy volunteers who had participated in 409 psilocybin administrations over a 19-year period in the authors laboratory. Multiple linear mixed-effects models were fitted for each of 15 response variables. Drug dose was shown to be the most important predictor for all measured response variables, but several nonpharmacological variables significantly contributed to the effects of psilocybin. Specifically, having a high score in the personality trait of absorption, being in an emotionally excitable and active state immediately before drug intake, and having experienced few psychologic problems in past weeks were most strongly associated with pleasant and mystical-type experiences. High emotional excitability, young age, and an experimental setting involving positron emission tomography (PET) most strongly predicted unpleasant and/or anxious reactions to psilocybin. Interestingly, in addition to confirming that nonpharmacological variables play an important role in the effects of psilocybin, an experimental setting involving PET most strongly predicted unpleasant and/or anxious reactions to psilocybin.

Two instruments have been most widely used to assess the subjective effects of hallucinogenic drugs. The first of these, the Hallucinogen Rating Scale (HRS) was developed by Strassman et al. (1994) during their studies of the intravenous administration of DMT. The HRS was first drafted based on interviews with 19 experienced DMT users and was modified during the early stages of their study. The final version, used for their double-blind study, contained 126 individual items. HRS items were placed into six conceptually coherent clusters: somaesthesia (interoceptive, visceral, and cutaneous/tactile effects), affect (emotional/affective responses), perception (visual, auditory, gustatory, and olfactory experiences), cognition (alteration in thought processes or content), volition (a change in capacity to interact willfully with themselves, the environment, or certain aspects of the experience), and intensity (strength of the various aspects of the experience). Subjects were asked to recall their experiences from the immediately preceding session. Most questions were scored on a 04 scale (0, not at all; 1, slightly; 2, moderately; 3, quite a bit; and 4, extremely).

The second assessment instrument widely used to quantify the subjective effects of hallucinogens is the Abnormal Mental States (APZ) questionnaire, first developed by Dittrich (1994, 1998) to measure altered states of consciousness (ASCs). In a series of 11 experiments using different induction methods in 393 healthy subjects, the hypothesis was tested that ASCs have major dimensions in common, irrespective of their mode of induction. The original version contained 158 items covering a range of phenomena potentially occurring during an ASC. The common denominator of ASCs was described by three primary oblique dimensions, designated as oceanic boundlessness (OSE, later as OBN), dread of ego dissolution (AIA, and later as DED), and visionary restructuralization (VUS, later as VRS). The APZ questionnaire became the international validated standard for the assessment of ASCs and the name was further revised to the OAV scales (Bodmer et al., 1994) and later to the five-dimensional altered states of consciousness (5D-ASC) (Dittrich et al., 2006). Details of the development of the original APZ questionnaire and its further refinements were summarized by Studerus et al. (2010). To overcome a variety of methodological limitations, Studerus et al. (2010) carried out a psychometric evaluation of the OAV and 5D-ASC in a relatively large sample from 43 pooled experimental studies of healthy subjects who had received psilocybin, ketamine, or MDMA. The total sample was composed of 591 drug sessions. After comprehensive and detailed statistical analyses, the authors found that the original OAV scales were multidimensional constructs, and arrived at an improved final model that had 11 factors: experience of unity, spiritual experience, blissful state, insightfulness, disembodiment, impaired control and cognition, anxiety, complex imagery, elementary imagery, audio-visual synesthesia, and changed meaning of percepts. Correlations between the 11 factors and their association with the original OAV scales were presented. The new lower-order scales were proposed to be better suited to assess drug-induced ASCs.

Mechanistically, psychedelics have agonist or partial agonist activity at brain serotonin 5-HT2A receptors. This molecular characterization will be elaborated in some detail later in this review, and aspects of the anatomic and functional importance of this receptor type will also be extensively explored. Discussions over the years with many colleagues working in the pharmaceutical industry have informed me that if upon screening a potential new drug is found to have serotonin 5-HT2A agonist activity, it nearly always signals the end to any further development of that molecule.

A recent study by Turton et al. (2014) reported on the subjective experience of intravenous psilocybin administered during a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) examination. Fifteen volunteers were administered an intravenous infusion of either placebo or 2 mg psilocybin and were blinded as to whether they would receive placebo or drug for a particular experiment. Drug infusion began 6 minutes after the start of a scan in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner. Subjects completed a visual analog scale rating the intensity of the drug experience at the start of the scan and prior to drug infusion, 5 minutes postinfusion, and 12 minutes postinfusion. All subjects subsequently were interviewed about the drug effects, and interviews were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis, a qualitative method. All subjects reported that the onset of drug effect was very rapid and intense, with a duration of effect lasting 1015 minutes. The investigators identified nine broad categories of phenomenology. Altered somatosensory, visual, auditory, and proprioceptive sensations were reported, with 14 of 15 subjects describing perceptual changes as the primary effect of the drug. Thirteen subjects reported changes in perception of time, either speeding up or slowing down. The report describes a variety of effects on cognition, mood, memory, and spiritual or mystical experiences. Overall, subjects found the experience difficult to describe, yet most found it pleasant and positive.

In a new study by Schmid et al. (2015), LSD (200 g) was administered orally to 16 healthy subjects in a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, crossover study. LSD produced a pronounced alteration in waking consciousness that lasted for 12 hours and included visual hallucinations, audio-visual synesthesia, and positively experienced derealization and depersonalization phenomena. Compared with placebo, LSD increased subjective well-being, happiness, closeness to others, openness, and trust. Increases in blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature, pupil size, plasma cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and epinephrine also were measured. On the 5D-ASC scale, LSD produced higher scores than did psilocybin or DMT. The authors also described subjective effects on mood that were similar to those reported for MDMA that might be useful in psychotherapy. No severe acute adverse effects were observed and the effects subsided completely within 72 hours.

In a very recent study by Carhart-Harris et al. (2015a), LSD was shown to enhance responsiveness to suggestion. Their study was prompted by very early reports indicating that LSD increased suggestibility (Sjobergand Hollister, 1965; Middlefell, 1967). Thus, Carhart-Harris et al. (2015a) administered LSD (4080 g, i.v.) to 10 healthy volunteers in a within-subject placebo-controlled design. Suggestibility and cued mental imagery were assessed using the Creative Imagination Scale and a mental imagery test. The two instruments were administered between 110 and 140 minutes after drug infusion, at the peak of the drug effect. Subjects scored significantly higher on the Creative Imagination Scale, but not the mental imagery test after LSD administration, compared with placebo. The magnitude of suggestibility enhancement was positively correlated with the subjects baseline trait conscientiousness. This enhanced suggestibility may have implications for the use of LSD as an adjunct to psychotherapy, but it also indicates that individuals with a high trait conscientiousness are particularly sensitive to the suggestibility-enhancement effect of LSD.

It has been axiomatic among users of psychedelics that music takes on an intensified and more enjoyable quality under the effects of LSD or other psychedelics, yet no modern placebo-controlled study had ever been carried out to confirm that widely held belief. Early studies at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center found that music was a very effective stimulus and complement to the effect of LSD (Bonny and Pahnke, 1972). Gaston and Eagle (1970) also reported that the presence of music was much preferable to its absence in alcoholic patients undergoing treatment using LSD therapy, both by patient preference and treatment results. Numerous other studies had been reported on the value of music in the context of various shamanic and therapeutic approaches (see references in Kaelen et al., 2015). Very recently, therefore, Kaelen et al. (2015) tested the hypothesis that the emotional response to music is enhanced by LSD. Ten participants were administered placebo or various doses of LSD, including 40, 50, 70, or 80 g, infused intravenously over 3 minutes. They then listened to five different instrumental music tracks on each of two study days: a placebo day followed by an LSD day, separated by 57 days. Music tracks were chosen that produced the highest liking and lowest familiarity by a separate sample of nine participants. The question How emotionally affected were you by the music? was asked immediately after each track and served as the studys primary outcome. The nine-category Geneva Emotional Music Scale (Zentner et al., 2008) was also used. Mean scores for all music stimuli in response to the question how emotionally affected were you by the music? were significantly higher for the LSD condition than for placebo. In addition, all nine factors on the Geneva Emotional Music Scale were scored higher after LSD administration than after placebo. Emotions related to transcendence also were enhanced by LSD. Specific emotions showing the strongest enhancement included wonder, transcendence, tenderness, and power. Furthermore, there was a significant positive relationship between ratings of the intensity of the LSD effect and emotional arousal to music. The results of Zentner et al. (2008) support the hypothesis that LSD enhances music-evoked emotion.

The experimental study of mystical or ecstatic states engendered by psychedelics perhaps began with the so-called Good Friday experiment, carried out at Boston Universitys Marsh Chapel in 1962 by Walter Pahnke as his research for the Ph.D. in religion and society at the Harvard Divinity School. Pahnke (1963) examined the similarities and differences between experiences described by mystics and those induced by psilocybin. On Good Friday in 1962, 20 Christian theological student volunteers attended a 2.5-hour religious service in Boston Universitys Marsh Chapel. The setting and preparation of the subjects was designed to optimize a spiritual or mystical experience. In a double-blind procedure, subjects were given either an oral dose of 30 mg psilocybin, or a 200-mg placebo dose of nicotinic acid, administered in identical capsules. Based on responses to a variety of instruments and questionnaires, subjects who received psilocybin had experiences that were indistinguishable from those experienced by mystics. The experiences were powerful and personally meaningful. Doblin (1991) reported a follow-up to the Pahnke study in 1989 and was able to locate and interview 19 of the original 20 experimental participants. All of the psilocybin subjects felt that the experience had significantly affected their lives in a positive way and they expressed appreciation for having participated in the experiment.

An extension of the Good Friday experiment was recently carried out by Griffiths et al. (2006). The investigators used rigorous double-blind clinical methods to evaluate acute and longer-term effects of psilocybin (30 mg/70 kg) compared with an active comparator compound (40 mg/70 kg methylphenidate). A complex design was used to obscure which treatments were administered from the study participants and the monitors, and the study was designed to minimize adverse effects. Thirty-six healthy volunteers were enrolled, all of whom indicated some participation in regular religious or spiritual activities. Instruments used to assess effects 7 hours after drug administration were the HRS, the Addiction Research Center Inventory, the States of Consciousness questionnaire, and the Mysticism Scale. Seven to 8 weeks after each session, and before any additional session, subjects completed the Persisting Effects Questionnaire, the Mysticism ScaleLifetime, the Spiritual Transcendence Scale, the NEO Personality Inventory, and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule Expanded Form. Based on measures of mystical experience, 22 of the 36 volunteers had a complete mystical experience after psilocybin administration, whereas only 4 did after the methylphenidate (placebo) sessions. Based on ratings of personal meaningfulness and spiritual experience, 67% of the volunteers rated the psilocybin experience to be either the single most meaningful experience of their lives or among the top five most meaningful experiences in their lives. Based on community observer ratings, psilocybin sessions were associated with significant positive changes in the volunteers behavior and attitudes.

Thus, when psilocybin was administered under structured conditions to well prepared volunteers, it occasioned experiences that had marked similarities to classic mystical experiences, imparting to the participants substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance. The investigators point out that the high value some subjects placed on the psilocybin experience may in part explain the long-term historical use of psychedelics within some cultures for divinatory or religious purposes. Griffiths et al. (2006) conclude with the statement that, The ability to prospectively occasion mystical experiences should permit rigorous scientific investigations about their causes and consequences.

Griffiths et al. (2008) subsequently conducted a 14-month follow-up of the subjects from their earlier study. Subjects were asked to identify in which session they experienced the most pronounced changes in your ordinary mental process. It was found that the 14-month retrospective follow-up ratings for the psilocybin session did not differ significantly from the immediate postsession ratings. Compared with methylphenidate, the psilocybin experience produced significant increases in ratings of positive attitudes, mood, social effects, and behavior at 14 months of follow-up. At the 14-month follow-up, 58% of the 36 volunteers still rated the psilocybin experience as among the five most personally meaningful experiences of their lives and 67% rated it as among the five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives.

A second study using a similar protocol with 18 volunteers examined dose effects of psilocybin, using 0, 5, 10, 20, and 30 mg/70 kg (Griffiths et al., 2011). The percentage of subjects who met the criteria for having a complete mystical-type experience increased with dose. Overall, 72.2% of volunteers had complete mystical experiences at either or both doses of 20 and 30 mg/70 kg. Positive ratings about life, attitudes about self, mood, social effects, and behavior also increased as a function of dose. Ratings at the 14-month follow-up were undiminished compared with ratings at 1 month after the sessions.

MacLean et al. (2011) analyzed the data from the two double-blind controlled studies of psilocybin reported by Griffiths et al. (2006, 2011). In particular, their goal was to use the NEO Personality Inventory to analyze possible personality changes that might have occurred after the high-dose psilocybin sessions in those studies. It is generally believed that personality traits are relatively enduring and that an individuals personality is predominantly stable across the lifespan. Yet evidence also exists that significant life events may dramatically change adult personality (see references in MacLean et al., 2011). The most widely accepted model of personality structure is the five-factor model, which describes five broad domains of personality: neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness (see references in MacLean et al., 2011). The authors suggest that numerous subjective claims of long-term changes after hallucinogen use appear to align with the personality trait of openness, which encompasses aesthetic appreciation and sensitivity, imagination and fantasy, and broad-minded tolerance of others viewpoints and values. Thus, they hypothesize that the mystical experiences reported in the studies by Griffiths et al. might lead to enduring increases in openness. Analysis of personality was assessed 1 to 2 months after a high-dose psilocybin session and again 16 months later to determine the persistence of any personality change(s). Consistent with their hypothesis, a mystical experience after psilocybin administration was significantly correlated with increases in openness. No such effect was seen after methylphenidate treatment. In addition, there were no significant changes in any of the other four personality factors after psilocybin administration. At the 16-month follow-up, openness levels still remained significantly elevated. The authors note that This is the first study to demonstrate changes in personality in healthy adults after an experimentally manipulated discrete event.

Studerus et al. (2011) pooled raw data from eight double-blind placebo-controlled experimental psilocybin studies conducted between 1999 and 2008. The data were analyzed for acute, short- and long-term subjective effects of psilocybin in 110 healthy human subjects who had received between one and four doses of 45315 g/kg psilocybin. Studerus et al. (2011) reported that nearly 40% of the participants in their laboratory studies of psilocybin claimed positive long-term changes in aesthetic experience and in their relationship with the environment (i.e., nature) after their psilocybin sessions. At 816 months after psilocybin sessions, more than 60% of subjects rated the experience as very enriching, and more than 90% described it as enriching to at least a medium degree. These effects occurred despite the fact that no attempt was made in their experiments to optimize conditions for a spiritual or mystical experience, which contrasts with the setting and preparations used in the two Griffiths studies cited above.

Bouso et al. (2012) compared 127 regular ayahuasca users with 115 actively religious controls who did not use ayahuasca. Baseline measurements were taken of general psychologic well-being, mental health, and cognition and the groups were then compared 1 year later to determine whether regular ayahuasca use had an effect on these measurements. Regular ayahuasca users showed lower scores on all psychopathology scales as assessed by the Symptom Checklist 90Revised, as well as on measures of harm avoidance and self-directedness. Participants scored higher on a measure of psychosocial well-being and performed better on the Stroop test (an indicator of resistance to emotional interference) and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (a measure of working memory). No evidence of psychologic maladjustment, mental health deterioration, or cognitive impairment was found in the ayahuasca-using group.

Lerner and Lyvers (2006) compared users of psychedelic drugs with users of nonpsychedelic drugs and nonillicit drugusing social drinkers. Samples were drawn from Israel and Australia. Compared with the other two groups, psychedelic drug users scored significantly higher on mystical beliefs (e.g., oneness with God and the universe), life values of spirituality, and concern for others, and scored lower on the value of financial prosperity, irrespective of culture of origin.

Lyvers and Meester (2012) carried out a website survey of 337 adults who used a variety of drugs, including psychedelics. Only about 25% reported spiritual motives for using psychedelics, yet use of high doses of LSD and psilocybin was significantly correlated in a dose-related manner with scores on two well known indices of mystical experiences; use of MDMA, cannabis, cocaine, opiates, or alcohol was not. Thus, even when taken recreationally, psychedelics have the potential to induce mystical experiences.

Quite interestingly, the underlying neuronal basis for mystical/spiritual experiences has recently been the subject of scientific investigation. Kometer et al. (2015) studied the neuronal basis of spiritual experiences and insightfulness after administration of psilocybin to human subjects. They conducted a double-blind, placebo-controlled study and administered psilocybin (170 or 215 g/kg, p.o.) to 50 healthy human volunteers. Electroencephalography (EEG) data were recorded from 64 scalp electrodes. Exact low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography was applied to compute the three-dimensional intracerebral current density values of the scalp-recorded EEG rhythms. They used lagged phase synchronization, a new measure that can capture nonlinear neuronal relationships to assess dynamic functional connectivity (Pascual-Marqui et al., 2011).

The 11-dimension 5D-ASC questionnaire was used to quantify the subjective psychologic effects of psilocybin, with a particular interest in the spiritual experience subscale, and the related subscales of experience of unity, comprising experience of oneness with the environment and the self, insightfulness, measuring profound insights into life and existence, blissful state, measuring experiences of pleasure, inner peace, and love. Voxel-wise product-moment correlations between current source density in the psilocybin condition and the 11-dimension 5D-ASC subscale scores were computed by regression analysis.

Psilocybin significantly increased scores of all subscales on the 5D-ASC but significantly decreased current source density of oscillations in all frequency bands up to 20 Hz (eyes-closed condition) or up to 30 Hz (eyes-open condition). There was a significant and consistent psilocybin-induced reduction of current source density across low frequency bands (<20 Hz) in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and the retrosplenial cortex (RSC). Psilocybin decreased the current source density of neuronal 1.5- to 2.0-Hz oscillations within a neural network comprising the PCC, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and parahippocampal regions. The intensity of psilocybin-induced spiritual experience and insightfulness correlated with the lagged phase synchronization of 1.5-to 2.0-Hz oscillations between the RSC, parahippocampus, and lateral orbitofrontal area.

The extent of lagged phase synchronization within a network of deep cortical structures strongly and positively correlated with score on the insightfulness subscale of the 5D-ASC and spiritual experiences subscales of the 5D-ASC during the eyes-closed condition. Lagged phase synchronization of 1.5- to 4-Hz oscillations within a network comprising the RSC, parahippocampus, and lateral orbitofrontal area was associated with spiritual experiences and insightfulness.

These findings of Kometer et al. (2015) provide further evidence that decreased ongoing oscillations below 20 Hz, particularly / oscillations, may be a common mechanism of action of psychedelics. The decrease in lower frequency oscillations was found to be localized within an extended network that included the PCC, RSC, ACC, and parahippocampal regions, a network that strongly overlaps with the default mode network (DMN). Thus, psilocybin may modulate default mode functions by decreasing ongoing lower frequency oscillations within this network.

Lower frequency oscillations, particularly in the range, mediate rhythmic cortical inhibition of neuronal ensembles (see references in Kometer et al., 2015). The marked decrease in lower frequency oscillations observed in this study may indicate that psilocybin induces a shift of the resting excitation/inhibition balance toward excitation, which would be expected to disrupt the ordinary temporal structure of neuronal processes within the extended DMN.

Lagged phase synchronization was strongly associated with the psilocybin-induced state of consciousness, supporting the view that neural integration, rather than activity, underlies the state of consciousness. Scores of the spiritual experiences subscale of the 5D-ASC questionnaire were also associated with increased lagged phase synchronization of oscillations between parahippocampal regions and the RSC. Kometer et al., (2015) speculate that the neuronal network processes they identified may constitute a crucial pathway that can be modulated by serotonergic receptors to regulate mental health, a conclusion that would be consistent with some of the potential positive mental health outcomes discussed earlier in this section.

For decades, the media have largely portrayed psychedelics as extremely dangerous drugs; in fact, the classic serotoninergic psychedelics are generally considered very physiologically safe, certainly compared with opiates and psychostimulants. Jaffe (1985) stated, In man, deaths attributable to direct effects of LSD are unknown, and this statement remains true even today. Nonetheless, despite the relative physiologic safety of psychedelics, they can lead to serious psychologic consequences. In addition, as will be discussed later, some of the newer highly potent synthetic phenethylamine hallucinogens have proven to be unexpectedly toxic. This section will detail studies indicating that psychedelics can be safely used under supervision, and that few documented serious adverse effects occur even after recreational use. The discussion will then turn to some generally recognized adverse reactions, followed by case reports of some more serious and even fatal reactions to psychedelics. It should be emphasized that these latter fatalities, which are rare, have occurred after use of newer synthetic phenethylamine compounds, and not as a result of ingestion of LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, or DMT.

Analysis of early published reports on adverse reactions and long-term negative sequelae induced by classic psychedelics failed to identify significant adverse events; if long-term adverse effects from repeated use did occur, they were subtle or nonsignificant (Strassman, 1984; Halpern and Pope, 1999). Their reviews were based on reports from supervised clinical studies using pure drugs, so the same conclusions might not apply to recreational use of drugs with unknown identities or purity.

These substances do not lead to addiction or dependence and are not considered to be reinforcing (O'Brien, 2001). This is understandable when one realizes that the serotonergic hallucinogens do not have direct effects on brain dopaminergic systems, a pharmacology that appears essential for nearly all drugs that can engender dependence. Attempts to train animals to self-administer hallucinogens, an animal model that can predict abuse liability, have generally been unsuccessful.

Using 20012004 data drawn from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), Krebs and Johansen (2013) recently evaluated possible associations between lifetime use of psychedelics and current mental health in the U.S. adult population. In a large sample of respondents, 13.4% reported lifetime psychedelic use. No significant associations were found between lifetime use of any psychedelic or past-year use of LSD and increased rate of any mental health outcome. Surprisingly, in several cases, use of psychedelics was associated with a lower mental health problem rate.

A statewide survey of the adult population in Colorado sought to determine whether psychedelic use was correlated with the lifetime risk of panic attacks (Bonn-Miller et al., 2007). No association was found between psychedelic use and panic attacks, but psychedelic abuse and dependence were significantly related to an increased lifetime risk of panic attacks. It should be noted that in this study, however, phencyclidine (PCP) was included in their survey as a psychedelic, and this substance, in contrast with the classic serotonergic psychedelics, can cause dependence.

Peyote (L. williamsii) is a small cactus that grows in the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico. It contains the psychedelic compound mescaline and has been used for centuries by Native American populations in rituals and ceremonies. Mescaline is also found in the San Pedro and Peruvian Torch cacti, and these have also been used ceremonially. Although peyote is classified as a Schedule 1 controlled substance, members of the Native American Church have a legal exemption to use it in their religious services. Halpern et al. (2005) compared 61 Navajo Native American Church members who regularly ingested peyote with 79 individuals reporting minimal use of peyote, alcohol, or other substances. Cognitive function was assessed using the Rand Mental Health Inventory and 10 standard neuropsychological tests of memory and attentional/executive functions. The peyote-using group showed no significant deficits on the Rand Mental Health Inventory or on any of the 10 other tests used. For the peyote-using group, total lifetime peyote exposure was not associated with neuropsychological performance.

By contrast, recreational use of peyote has led to adverse events, although peyote exposures reported to poison control centers are relatively rare compared with other drugs of abuse. In 2007, for example, only 116 peyote or mescaline exposures were reported to U.S. poison control centers out of more than 2.4 million total drug exposures (Bronstein et al., 2008). Carstairs and Cantrell (2010) retrospectively reviewed the California Poison Control System electronic database between the years 1997 and 2008 for reports of cases involving adverse reactions to peyote or mescaline ingestion when it was the sole intoxicating agent. A total of 31 cases were identified that met their inclusion criteria. Life-threatening symptoms did not occur, and most exposures were associated with only mild to moderate clinical effects, which most commonly included tachycardia and central nervous system (CNS) effects. Symptoms typically resolved within 24 hours or less and did not usually require anything more than supportive measures or sedation. One case of a prolonged peyote-induced psychosis was reported by Lu et al. (2004), in which the psychosis resolved after sleep. The case involved a 54-year-old Native American man with no prior history of psychosis. He drank peyote juice during a healing ceremony and within a few hours became convinced that he was hunted by animal spirits. He was unable to sleep for 2 weeks, at which time he developed visual and auditory hallucinations of the spirits and became increasingly depressed. He was persuaded to enter a hospital, where he received trazodone to help him sleep. He fell asleep and slept for 15 hours, which led to complete resolution of his psychotic symptoms. The authors speculated that his psychosis was a result of his prolonged sleep deprivation.

Hasler et al. (2004) studied eight subjects given either placebo or 45, 115, 215, or 315 g/kg psilocybin (a very low, low medium, or high dose, respectively). Instruments used to assess psilocybin effects included the 5D-ASC, the Frankfurt Attention Inventory (FAIR), and the Adjective Mood Rating Scale (AMRS). Several physiologic and plasma hormones were also measured. Psilocybin dose-dependently increased all measures on the 5D-ASC. The medium and high doses of psilocybin led to a 50% reduction in performance on the FAIR test. The only scores that were increased on the AMRS were general inactivation, emotional excitability, and dreaminess. Hasler et al. (2004) found no evidence that psilocybin is hazardous with respect to somatic health.

Bouso et al. (2015) used magnetic resonance imaging to examine potential differences in cortical thickness in 22 Spanish regular users of ayahuasca, compared with 22 matched controls. Inclusion criterion for ayahuasca users was that they had used it at least 50 times in the 2 previous years. Subjects also were assessed using three neuropsychological tests, including the two-back test to assess working memory, the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test to assess executive function, and a switching task to assess set shifting. Personality was also assessed by self-report using the Spanish version of the Temperament and Character InventoryRevised questionnaire. Ayahuasca users scored significantly better than controls on several variables derived from the neuropsychological tests. No increased psychopathology or worse neuropsychological performance was observed in the ayahuasca group, consistent with findings reported earlier by Grob et al. (1996) for ayahuasca users who were members of the Brazilian church, the UDV. Indeed, ayahuasca users scored significantly better than controls on harm avoidance, and its subscale anticipatory worry, and significantly higher on self-transcendence. Cortical thinning was found for six brain areas in the ayahuasca group: the middle frontal gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus, the precuneus, the superior frontal gyrus, and the PCC. By contrast, cortical thickening was seen in the precentral gyrus and the ACC. Correlation analysis revealed that lifetime use of ayahuasca was inversely correlated to cortical thickness in the PCC.

Although there is a general public perception that psychedelic drugs are dangerous, from a physiologic standpoint they are in fact one of the safest known classes of CNS drugs. They do not cause addiction, and no overdose deaths have occurred after ingestion of typical doses of LSD, psilocybin, or mescaline. Cohen (1967) and Jaffe (1985) have both stated that death due to direct LSD toxicity is unknown. Indeed, recreational users who have consumed massive doses of LSD have survived. For example, eight individuals who believed they had cocaine accidentally insufflated an extremely high dose of LSD. Their plasma LSD levels were reported as between 1000 and 7000 g/100 ml (recall that a typical total oral dose of LSD might be 100200 g). These individuals all became comatose, with hyperthermia, vomiting, light gastric bleeding, and respiratory problems. With hospital treatment, however, all eight survived and without apparent residual effects (Klock et al., 1974).

Although the classic psychedelics have not been directly responsible for causing death, the judgment of users is certainly impaired while under the influence of these drugs. This is a particular concern when hallucinogens are used in unsupervised settings. Users may believe that they are invincible or possess superpowers and may do things they would not normally consider, such as believing they can fly (Reynolds and Jindrich, 1985), jumping from buildings (Keeler and Reifler, 1967), or incurring severe ocular damage by prolonged staring at the sun (Schatz and Mendelblatt, 1973; Fuller, 1976).

Studerus et al. (2010) analyzed acute, short-, and long-term subjective effects of psilocybin in healthy humans. Again, using pooled raw data from eight double-blind placebo-controlled experimental studies conducted between 1999 and 2008, their analysis included 110 healthy subjects who had received between one and four oral doses of psilocybin (45315 g/kg body weight). Psilocybin dose-dependently induced profound changes in mood, perception, thought, and self-experience, but most subjects described the experience as pleasurable, enriching, and nonthreatening. Acute adverse reactions were characterized by strong dysphoria and/or anxiety/panic, but occurred only at the two highest doses of psilocybin in a relatively small number of subjects. All acute adverse drug reactions were successfully managed through interpersonal support and did not require psychopharmacological intervention. Follow-up questionnaires indicated no subsequent drug abuse, persisting perception disorders, prolonged psychosis, or other long-term impairment of functioning in any of the subjects. The results indicate that the administration of modest psilocybin doses to healthy, high-functioning, and well prepared subjects in the context of a carefully monitored research environment carries an acceptable level of risk.

The recent resurgence of interest in the clinical uses of psychedelics led Johnson et al. (2008) to propose appropriate procedures for using them in clinical practice. The guidelines they outline have certain parallels with ritual uses of hallucinogens by older indigenous cultures. In particular, Johnson et al. (2008) cite the need for structured use (expressed as ritual in indigenous use) and restrictions on use, including the need for guidance and appreciation of the powerful psychologic effects of hallucinogens (expressed as reverence in indigenous use). Psychedelic administration in humans results in a unique profile of effects and potential adverse reactions that need to be appropriately addressed to maximize safety. The primary safety concerns with psychedelics are largely psychologic rather than physiologic in nature. Somatic effects vary but are relatively insignificant, even at doses that elicit powerful psychologic effects. The proposed guidelines extend and complement the recommendations of Fischman and Johanson (1998) for high-dose hallucinogen research. The guidelines include 1) the presence of two monitors with some medical knowledge, knowledge of ASCs, and a degree of clinical sensitivity; 2) a physical environment that is safe, aesthetically pleasing, and comfortable; 3) careful subject preparation, including several meetings to establish rapport and trust with the monitors; 4) a detailed consent form and explanations of the study procedures, detailed discussions about the range of potential experiences, and time of onset and duration of the effects; and 5) an available physician in the event of an untoward medical reaction. Anyone contemplating carrying out a clinical research program with a psychedelic is strongly encouraged to read the detailed guidelines presented by Johnson et al. (2008).

Krebs and Johansen (2013) evaluated any association between lifetime use of psychedelics and current mental health in the adult population. Data were analyzed for 20012004 for 130,152 randomly selected NSDUH respondents; 21,967 respondents (13.4% weighted) reported lifetime psychedelic use. The authors found no significant association between lifetime use of any psychedelic and increased rate of any mental health outcomes. Indeed, they discovered that psychedelic use was associated with a lower rate of mental health problems in several cases. Johansen and Krebs (2015) subsequently analyzed a new data set of 135,095 randomly selected U.S. adults that included 19,299 users of psychedelics. Data were from the NSDUH for 20082011. As in their earlier study, the authors found no significant associations between lifetime use of psychedelics and increased likelihood of past-year serious psychologic distress, mental health treatment, depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts, plans, or attempts. Johansen and Krebs (2015) failed to find any evidence that use of psychedelics is an independent risk factor for mental health problems. Indeed, they report that lifetime use of psychedelics was associated with decreased inpatient psychiatric treatment.

Hendricks et al. (2014) analyzed data from 20022007 for 25,622 individuals charged with a felony in the Southeastern United States and under community corrections supervision in the Treatment Accountability for Safer Communities program, which is a case management intervention program for individuals with a history of substance involvement. The authors examined relationships between any hallucinogen use disorder (versus no hallucinogen use disorder) and all available sociodemographic and psychosocial variables. They report that any hallucinogen use disorder was associated with a decreased probability of supervision failure. They note the contrast with any cannabis, cocaine, alcohol, opiate, or amphetamine use disorder, each of which was associated with an increased probability of supervision failure. Their results suggest that hallucinogens may promote alcohol and other drug abstinence and prosocial behavior in a population with high rates of recidivism.

In a more recent report by Hendricks et al. (2015), the authors evaluated any relationship between use of a classic psychedelic and psychologic distress and suicidality among more than 190,000 U.S. respondents pooled from the NSDUH for 20082012. Lifetime use of a psychedelic was associated with significantly reduced odds of past-month psychologic distress, past-year suicidal thinking, past-year suicidal planning, or past-year suicide attempt. By contrast, lifetime use of other illicit drugs was associated with an increased likelihood of these outcomes. The authors suggest that classic psychedelics may hold promise in the prevention of suicide. These findings are consistent with the surveys of Krebs and Johansen (2013) and Johansen and Krebs (2015); in all three studies, the authors suggest that their data are not compatible with the highly restricted legal status of psychedelics and that more extensive clinical research is warranted.

Use of high doses of psychedelics can lead to vascular problems because the 5-HT2A receptor is associated with vascular smooth muscle contraction, platelet aggregation, thrombus formation, and coronary artery spasms (Nagatomo et al., 2004). Acute vasoconstriction caused by serotonin is usually shared by activation of 5-HT1B and 5-HT2A receptors; however, in intracranial arteries, only the 5-HT1B receptor mediates constriction (Kaumann and Levy, 2006). Both 5-HT2A and 5-HT1B receptors can mediate coronary artery spasm. 5-HT2A receptors also constrict the portal venous system, including esophageal collaterals in cirrhosis. Data from studies by Ootsuka et al. (2004) suggest that spinal 5-HT2A receptors contribute to sympathetically induced cutaneous vasoconstriction regulated by the raphe/parapyramidal neurons in the brainstem.

Balkov (2005) reports a fatal and nonfatal overdose after ingestion of the psychedelic phenethylamine 2,5-dimethoxy-4-bromoamphetamine (DOB) by two male individuals. Gas chromatographymass spectrometry was used to detect the presence of DOB in both gastric and urine samples of the two men. Although one subject survived, the other suffered convulsions and metabolic acidosis and died 6 days after admission.

Psilocybin, when administered in a controlled setting, has frequently been reported to cause transient, delayed headache, with incidence, duration, and severity increased in a dose-related manner (Johnson et al., 2012). Bickel et al. (2005) reported the case of a 25-year-old hepatitis Cinfected man, who presented with severe rhabdomyolysis and acute renal failure after Psilocybe mushroom ingestion. He later developed encephalopathy with cortical blindness. Respiratory and cardiovascular support, mechanical ventilation, continuous venovenous hemodialysis, and corticosteroid treatment led to improvement and the patient recovered completely over several months.

Psilocin was identified in the urine of a subject who was investigated for driving under the influence (Tiscione and Miller, 2006). The subject apparently did not exhibit any response to the crash of his automobile, seemingly unaware of the severity of his situation or immediate surroundings.

Although very rare, there have been reports of rhabdomyolysis after ingestion of LSD (Berrens et al., 2010). A newer tryptamine, 5-methoxy-N,N-diisopropyltryptamine (foxy) also produced rhabdomyolysis and transient acute renal failure in an otherwise healthy 23-year-old man (Alatrash et al., 2006).

Although many ergot alkaloids are known to produce vasospasm, especially after chronic use, LSD has rarely been associated with this adverse effect. Nevertheless, Raval et al. (2008) reported on a 19-year-old woman who experienced severe lower-extremity ischemia related to a single use of LSD 3 days prior to presentation. After intra-arterial nitroglycerin and verapamil failed, balloon percutaneous transluminal angioplasty therapy led to rapid clinical improvement in lower-extremity perfusion. As of the date of the report, the patient had not required a major amputation.

Sunness (2004) described a 15-year-old female patient with a 2-year history of afterimages and photophobia after a history of drug use that included LSD, marijuana, and other illicit drugs. She had discontinued LSD 1 year prior to examination. Although the author connected her visual problems with her prior LSD use, it is not at all clear from the report that her LSD use was the cause of her visual problem.

Bernhard and Ulrich (2009) reported a case of cortical blindness in a 15-year-old girl. She had headache and nausea 5 days after taking LSD and suddenly developed complete blindness in both eyes. The blindness persisted for 48 hours. Over the next 3 months, the subject had three more episodes of complete blindness that lasted 1236 hours, with no visual disturbances between episodes. The authors suggested that the temporary blindness might be a correlate of flashbacks caused by LSD.

Toxicity also has been noted for several of the so-called designer drugs. For example, Jovel et al. (2014) reported the case of a healthy young male individual who ingested 5-methoxy-N,N-diallytryptamine, one of the emerging new tryptamine-type research chemicals. The patient was admitted with extreme agitation, tachycardia, diaphoresis, and combativeness that required physical restraint and intravenous sedation, but the patient did recover.

Andreasen et al. (2009) reported a fatality involving the potent synthetic psychedelic phenethylamine compound 1-(8-bromobenzo[1,2-b; 4,5-b]difuran-4-yl)-2-aminopropane, known commonly as Bromo-Dragonfly. An 18-year-old woman was found dead after ingesting 1 ml of a hallucinogenic liquid. She and her boyfriend had ingested it between 10 and 11 PM on the previous evening and then they both fell asleep. On awakening at 5 AM the next morning, the womans boyfriend discovered that she was dead. Autopsy findings 3 days after her death included edema of the lungs, slight edema of the brain, spleen enlargement, irritation of the mucous membrane in the stomach, and ischemic changes in the kidneys. Her femoral blood concentration of the drug was 4.7 g/kg. The bottle containing the hallucinogenic liquid was recovered and analyzed by ultraperformance liquid chromatography time-of-flight mass spectrometry, high-performance liquid chromatography diode array detection, 1H nuclear magnetic resonance, and 13C nuclear magnetic resonance and found to contain a solution of almost pure Bromo-Dragonfly. Based on the solution concentration and the amount of solution consumed, it was estimated that she had ingested approximately 700 g. Although that would seem to be a relatively small dose, no other drugs were discovered in her system, including the absence of ethanol.

It is often difficult to establish whether the drug is pure or has been coingested with other unknown drugs of unknown purity. For example, Ovaska et al. (2008) reported a case of sympathomimetic toxicity in a patient who was reported to have ingested 2,5-dimethoxy-4-chloroamphetamine (DOC), yet toxicological screening showed the patient had ingested both DOC and MDMA.

Data for 2005 to 2006 from the Texas Poison Control Centers were reviewed for mushroom exposures (Barbee et al., 2009). There were a total of 742 exposures, which were all acute and intentional. Of those, 59 individuals were admitted to a hospital, with 17 requiring admission to a critical care unit. Nonetheless, only 10 of the admissions that were identified involved psilocybin. Of all of the admissions, major toxic reactions were uncommon, with no deaths reported.

One adverse effect of hallucinogen use, particularly associated with LSD use, is hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD). This term has displaced an earlier somewhat more nonspecific one known as flashbacks, which was a re-experiencing of one or more of the perceptual effects induced by a hallucinogen at some later time, after the acute drug effects had worn off. HPPD is composed of afterimages, perception of movement in peripheral visual fields, blurring of small patterns, halo effects, and macro- and micropsia long after the drug has been used.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition (DSM-IV), Text Revision lists the following three criteria for HPPD: A) re-experiencing, after the use of a hallucinogen, of one or more of the perceptual symptoms that were experienced while intoxicated with the hallucinogen; B) the symptoms in criterion A cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning; and C) the symptoms are not due to a general medical condition and are not better accounted for by another mental disorder.

Halpern and Pope (2003) noted that when LSD was used in a therapeutic or research setting, HPPD appeared less frequently than when LSD was used recreationally. The authors concluded, however, that some individuals, especially users of LSD, can experience a long-lasting HPPD syndrome with symptoms of persistent perceptual abnormalities reminiscent of acute intoxication. Nevertheless, the incidence of HPPD is very small given the many tens of millions of persons who have taken LSD, most often in a recreational setting. Litjens et al. (2014) provided a recent comprehensive review on the subject of HPPD. The actual incidence of HPPD is not known and depends on the prevalence of use in different countries, but epidemiologic information is scarce.

Hermle et al. (2008) reviewed MEDLINE data for 19972007, searching for reports of hallucinogen-induced psychosis, flashbacks, and HPPD. The authors reported that adolescent intoxication with psychedelic drugs rarely produced acute psychotic syndromes, further stating that The clinical relevance of flashback phenomena as a post-hallucinogenic psychiatric disorder has to be disputed.

Although LSD was most widely used and therefore has led to the greatest number of HPPD cases, it is clear that other hallucinogens also can evoke the syndrome. For example, Espiard et al. (2005) reported HPPD in an 18-year-old man after mixed intoxication with psilocybin and cannabis. The symptoms persisted for more than 8 months. Ikeda et al. (2005) reported flashbacks after use of 5-methoxy-N,N-diisopropyltryptamine (5-MeO-DIPT) by a 35-year-old man without a previous psychiatric history. He had used the substance six or seven times over 5 months but discontinued it after he had a bad trip, with anxiety, palpitations, auditory oversensitiveness, and visual distortions. Treatment with oral risperidone ameliorated his symptoms. Another case study described a 33-year-old woman who developed HPPD after LSD use for a year. Although treatment with antidepressants and risperidone did not ameliorate her symptoms, treatment with the antiseizure drug lamotrigine almost completely abolished her visual disturbances (Hermle et al., 2012).

Although the classic serotonergic hallucinogens are not recognized to be particularly toxic, a new class of substituted phenethylamines with toxic properties has recently become very popular as recreational drugs (Nikolaou et al., 2014). Unfortunately, there are now several reports of hospitalizations and fatalities attributed to these compounds (Poklis et al., 2013, 2014; Rose et al., 2013; Nikolaou et al., 2014; Tang et al., 2014; Walterscheid et al., 2014), but it is not clear whether deaths resulted from ingestion of lethal amounts of pure bulk drug or whether the drug has some inherent toxicity that is not normally associated with other psychedelics.

Suzuki et al. (2015) provided a comprehensive literature review of toxicities associated with NBOMe ingestion. The most common adverse reactions were agitation (including aggressiveness), tachycardia, and hypertension, with seizures reported in 40% of the patients. In the 20 individual cases they reviewed, 3 (15%) were fatalities.

The most potent of these new recreational chemicals are shown in Fig. 3, with potency increasing going from X = H to X = I.

For purposes of law enforcement the iodo compound (X = I; 25I-NBOMe) is presently considered by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to be an analog of 2C-I [2-(4-iodo-2,5-dimethoxy)aminoethane], which is currently a Schedule 1 controlled substance. The procedure to classify 25I-NBOMe as a Schedule 1 substance has been initiated and it has been placed temporarily into Schedule 1 (Drug Enforcement Administration, 2013). Global interest in these compounds and closely related analogs has attracted increasing interest. For example, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction has received a range of notifications from European Union member states about analytically confirmed nonfatal and fatal intoxications associated with 25I-NBOMe. This was followed by a risk assessment conducted by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction Scientific Committee to assess health and social risks associated with the iodo analog (European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, 2014). In addition, the World Health Organizations Expert Committee on Drug Dependence reviewed the status of a range of new substances for its 36th meeting in June 2014, which included 25I-NBOMe and its 4-bromo and 4-chloro analogs (World Health Organization, 2014).

In the mouse head-twitch assay, 25I-NBOMe and a related analog were extremely potent in inducing this behavior, which was blocked by preadministration of the selective 5-HT2A antagonist M100907 [(R)-(+)-a-(2,3-dimethoxyphenyl)-1-[2-(4-fluorophenyl)ethyl]-4-pipidinemethanol] (Halberstadt and Geyer, 2014). As discussed in the section on mouse models later in this review, the mouse head twitch has shown a high correlation with human psychedelic activity.

A relatively large series of 48 NBOMe-type compounds has been evaluated for affinity and function at 5-HT2 family receptors (Hansen et al., 2014). Their work was directed toward development of potential radioligands for in vivo PET imaging of 5-HT2A receptors that would be selective over 5-HT2C receptors. One compound was discovered that had approximately 100-fold selectivity for both affinity and function at the 5-HT2A versus 5-HT2C receptor. Their high affinity and relative selectivity for the 5-HT2A receptor has made some of these compounds useful as agonist ligands for in vivo PET imaging (Ettrup et al., 2010; Finnema et al., 2014).

Curiously, the NBOMe-type compounds do not appear to be orally active and are typically administered bucally, or by nasal insufflation. Their potency is so high that they are often distributed on blotter papers and marketed as being LSD. Users place the blotters against their gums to effect absorption. One hypothesis put forward to explain the lack of oral activity for these highly active compounds is a significant first-pass metabolic effect (Leth-Petersen et al., 2014). In that study, the microsomal stability of 11 phenethylamines and their N-benzylated congeners was studied using human liver microsomes. It was found that the N-benzylated compounds had a much higher intrinsic clearance than did the simple phenethylamines, and the authors hypothesized that their low hepatic stability was the reason for their lack of oral activity.

Stellpflug et al. (2014) reported a clinical case of a nonfatal overdose with 25I-NBOMe. They identified a major metabolite of the compound in the urine that had a concentration 80-fold higher than the parent drug. The subjects urine was treated with -glucuronidase and then analyzed using ultraperformance liquid chromatography electrospray ionization plus tandem mass spectrometry to identify a major metabolite with a mass that was one methyl group lower than the parent compound. Comparison of the full fragmentation pattern was then assessed and concluded to be an O-demethylated metabolite at the 2- or 5-position of the trisubstituted ring, but the investigators were not able to determine which position had been metabolized. They detected two other very minor metabolites that also appeared to be O-demethylated. The concentration of the unmetabolized parent 25I-NBOMe in the urine was 7.5 ng/ml, whereas the desmethyl metabolite was 600 ng/ml. This metabolite and the two other minor metabolites were not present in the urine in the absence of prior enzymatic treatment, indicating that they were all glucuronidated.

Most recently, Leth-Petersen et al. (2015) identified the basis for the high first-pass effect of NBOMe compounds and the likely basis for their inactivity after oral administration. Using in vivo studies in pigs, they determined that the 5-methoxy of the trisubstituted phenyl ring is rapidly O-demethylated. After intravenous administration of 25B-NBOMe [N-(2-[11C]methoxybenzyl)-2,5-dimethoxy-4-bromophenethylamine (Cimbi-36)] to a pig, analysis revealed that plasma levels of the parent drug rapidly declined, with a new metabolite rapidly appearing and accumulating in plasma. At the 30-minute mark, there was more than twice as much of this metabolite present in plasma as there was of the parent compound. This metabolite was definitively identified as the 5-O-glucuronide using liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry and chemical synthesis. Evidently, the highly hydrophobic nature of the N-benzyl phenethylamines readily targets them to the mixed function oxidases in the endoplasmic reticulum, where they are efficiently 5-O-demethylated and then very quickly glucuronidated.

Stanislov Grof characterized LSD as a powerful nonspecific amplifier of the unconscious (Grof, 1975). This empirical observation was based on his personal supervision of more than a thousand clinical administrations of LSD. Barr et al. (1972) also stated that the phenomena induced by LSD cannot be predicted or understood in purely pharmacological terms; the personality of the drug taker plays an enormous and critical role in determining how much effect there will be and of what particular type.

However, until we understand the fundamental nature of consciousness and its underlying neuronal substrates, as well as the unconscious, it will not be possible to scientifically test Grofs hypothesis. What can be discussed are the findings that point to involvement of specific receptors in certain brain areas that lead to the overt effects of psychedelics. In addition, recent brain scanning technologies, including PET, fMRI, EEG, magnetoencephalography (MEG), and pharmacological magnetic resonance imaging (phMRI), have also allowed the identification of key brain areas that must be involved in the actions of psychedelics.

One should keep in mind that the effects of psychedelics are highly variable and are not necessarily dose dependent. At low doses of LSD (e.g., <100 g), sensory and cognitive processes may be distorted and altered but the user generally remains aware that the effects are attributable to having ingested the drug. For the purposes of clinical investigations, such doses allow the use of various questionnaires, instruments, and interviews to determine the intensity and qualitative aspects of the drug effect. Even lower doses of LSD are popular for recreational use or group events in which the user wishes to remain in contact with their surroundings.

By contrast, high doses have a greater propensity to transport the user to an alternate reality, where they lose contact with their everyday environment. These occasions are often described as peak experiences, transcendent, or mystical and are profoundly altered states of consciousness. Users may feel that they have transcended time and space or encountered their concept of God, or they may feel that they have encountered otherworldly beings, feelings of being at one with the universe, reliving past memories, and so forth. With respect to medical value, this state of consciousness is most closely associated with dramatic therapeutic improvement. Although this phenomenon is more likely to occur after high doses of psychedelics, it can occur at nearly any dose if the set and setting have been optimized to promote such an ASC. These experiences are often characterized as among the most meaningful of the subjects life (e.g., see Griffiths et al., 2006) and can lead to persisting positive effects on attitudes, mood, and behavior.

It was only a decade after the discovery of the remarkable psychopharmacology of LSD that the presence of serotonin was demonstrated in the mammalian brain (Twarog and Page, 1953). A comparison of the chemical structures of LSD and serotonin (shown earlier) led to early hypotheses that the action of LSD was due to an interaction with serotonin systems in the brain. Ten years after the discovery of LSD, Gaddum (1953) reported that LSD antagonized the action of serotonin in peripheral tissues. Only 1 year later, Gaddum and Hameed (1954) and Woolley and Shaw (1954) independently proposed that the effects of LSD might result from serotonin receptor blockade in the CNS. Shaw and Woolley (1956) later modified their hypothesis to include the possibility that LSD might mimic the actions of serotonin. Numerous studies in the subsequent decade examined the possibility that LSD blocked the actions of serotonin, but it was a concept that proved untenable. It was clear, however, that LSD did have a potent effect on brain serotonin systems, elevating whole brain serotonin content (Freedman, 1961) and reducing brain levels of the major metabolite of serotonin, 5-hydroxyindole acetic acid (Rosecrans et al., 1967).

Ultimately, Andn et al. (1968) suggested that LSD might have direct agonist actions at serotonin receptors in the brain. Subsequently, studies from numerous laboratories provided support for that idea, with an initial focus on serotonin 5-HT1A receptors (see discussion in Nichols, 2004). When serotonin receptorselective antagonists became available, it was Glennon et al. (1983, 1984) who demonstrated in a rat drug discrimination model that the 5-HT2 antagonists ketanserin and pirenperone blocked the discriminative cue of a psychedelic. Further studies in numerous laboratories over the next 2 decades, primarily with rodents, then focused attention on the 5-HT2A receptor as the primary target for psychedelics. Agonist or partial agonist activity at the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor was ultimately concluded to be a necessary pharmacology for psychedelic effects, but it may not be sufficient to explain all of the qualitative differences between different drugs. As Ray (2010) pointed out, different molecules may also have significant affinity for other types of brain receptors.

The first definitive experiment pointing to the central role of the 5-HT2A receptor for the action of psychedelics in humans came from a clinical study by Vollenweider et al. (1998), who showed that the effects of psilocybin were blocked by the 5-HT2A receptorselective antagonist ketanserin or the atypical antipsychotic risperidone but were enhanced by the dopamine antagonist and typical antipsychotic haloperidol. These data provided the first evidence that psilocybin-induced effects in humans were due to 5-HT2A receptor activation. Subsequently, Vollenweider and colleagues have carried out several additional clinical studies, discussed later, of various aspects of the action of psilocybin and have shown that ketanserin can block most of those effects.

Kometer et al. (2012) carried out a randomized, double-blind study in 17 healthy human subjects. On 4 separate days, subjects received placebo, psilocybin (215 g/kg), the 5-HT2A antagonist ketanserin (50 mg, p.o.), or psilocybin plus ketanserin. Mood states were assessed, and behavioral and event-related potential measurements were used to quantify facial emotional recognition and goal-directed behavior toward emotional cues. Psilocybin was found to enhance positive mood and attenuate negative facial expression recognition. Furthermore, psilocybin increased goal-directed behavior toward positive compared with negative cues, facilitated positive but inhibited negative sequential emotional effects, and valence-dependently attenuated the P300 component. Ketanserin given alone had no effect but blocked the psilocybin-induced mood enhancement and decreased recognition of negative facial expression. This study demonstrated that psilocybin shifts the emotional bias across various psychologic domains and that activation of 5-HT2A receptors is central in mood regulation and emotional face recognition in healthy subjects. The authors suggest that their findings have implications not only for the pathophysiology of dysfunctional emotional biases, but they may also provide a framework to delineate the mechanisms underlying psilocybins putative antidepressant effects.

Quednow et al. (2012) investigated the role of 5-HT2A receptors in automatic (sensorimotor gating) and controlled (Stroop interference) inhibition processes in a model psychosis approach using psilocybin (260 g/kg) in 16 healthy humans pretreated either with the 5-HT2Aselective receptor antagonist ketanserin (40 mg) or placebo, using a placebo-controlled, crossover, counterbalanced, and double-blind design. They found that psilocybin-induced deficits in automatic and controlled inhibition were significantly attenuated by ketanserin. They also replicated their previous findings that most of the subjective hallucinogenic effects of psilocybin were abolished by ketanserin.

Kometer et al. (2013) assessed the effects of psilocybin (215 g/kg) on both oscillations that regulate cortical excitability and early visual evoked P1 and N170 potentials in 16 healthy human subjects. They employed a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subject, randomized design. Psilocybin generally significantly increased 5D-ASC scores after placebo pretreatment, but not after ketanserin pretreatment. Psilocybin strongly decreased both prestimulus parieto-occipatal power and decreased N170 potentials associated with the appearance of visual perceptual alterations, including visual hallucinations. Preadministration of the 5-HT2A antagonist ketanserin (50 mg) blocked all of these effects. The authors conclude that 5-HT2A receptor activation by psilocybin profoundly modulates the neurophysiological and phenomenological indices of visual processing. They further propose that 5-HT2A receptor activation may induce a processing mode in which stimulus-driven cortical excitation is overwhelmed by spontaneous neuronal excitation through modulation of oscillations.

Indirect evidence for a role of 5-HT2A receptors in mediating psychedelic-induced hallucinations comes from a study by Huot et al. (2010). In that study, [3H]ketanserin binding was used to compare 5-HT2A receptor density in postmortem brains of patients with Parkinsons disease (PD) who experienced visual hallucinations with the brains of PD patients who did not experience hallucinations. Six brains from patients with idiopathic PD who experienced visual hallucinations were compared with six PD patients without visual hallucinations and five healthy, age-matched controls. In PD patients with visual hallucinations, [3H]ketanserin binding was increased 45.6% in inferolateral temporal cortex compared with PD patients who did not have visual hallucinations. The authors suggest that increased 5-HT2A density in the inferolateral temporal cortex may be the basis for visual hallucinations in PD patients and that 5HT2A antagonists may alleviate this symptom.

Similarly, Ballanger et al. (2010) measured 5-HT2A binding in vivo using [18F]setoperone PET in brains of seven PD patients with visual hallucinations and seven age-matched PD patients without visual hallucinations. Patients with visual hallucinations had significantly increased 5-HT2A receptor binding in several cortical regions and one subcortical region. These increased levels of 5-HT2A receptor expression were clustered mainly in the ventral visual pathway. With the evidence of increased 5-HT2A receptor expression as a possible basis for visual hallucinations in PD patients, a serotonin 5-HT2A inverse agonist, perhaps not surprisingly, demonstrated phase 3 clinical efficacy in treating several symptoms of PD psychosis, including visual hallucinations (Hacksell et al., 2014).

Halberstadt et al. (2011a) examined the effects of several psychedelics on the mouse head twitch response (HTR) in wild-type (WT) male C57BL/6J or 5-HT2A knockout (KO) mice. They also assessed investigatory and locomotor activity in the mouse behavioral pattern monitor (BPM). Psilocin and 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) produced the HTR in WT mice but not in KO mice. Psilocin and 5-MeO-DMT reduced locomotor activity, investigatory behavior, and center duration in the BPM, and these effects were blocked by the selective 5-HT1A antagonist WAY-100635 (N-[2-[4-(2-methoxyphenyl)-1-piperazinyl]ethyl]- N-(2-pyridyl)cyclohexanecarboxamide), indicating that psilocin and 5-MeO-DMT act as mixed 5-HT1A/5-HT2A agonists. Halberstadt and Geyer (2011) reviewed the extensive literature covering various indoleamines as well as LSD and concluded that although the phenethylamines primarily exert their effects through activation of 5-HT2A receptors, indoleamines can have a significant behavioral component mediated by activation of 5-HT1A receptors.

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Psychedelics - Pharmacological Reviews

Psychedelia – Wikipedia

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Psychedelia is the subculture, originating in the 1960s, of people who often use psychedelic drugs such as LSD, mescaline (found in peyote) and psilocybin (found in some mushrooms). The term is also used to describe a style of psychedelic artwork and psychedelic music. Psychedelic art and music typically try to recreate or reflect the experience of altered consciousness. Psychedelic art uses highly distorted and surreal visuals, bright colors and full spectrums and animation (including cartoons) to evoke and convey to a viewer or listener the artist's experience while using such drugs, or to enhance the experience of a user of these drugs. Psychedelic music uses distorted electric guitar, Indian music elements such as the sitar, electronic effects, sound effects and reverberation, and elaborate studio effects, such as playing tapes backwards or panning the music from one side to another.

The term "psychedelic" is derived from the Ancient Greek words psych (, "soul") and dloun (, "to make visible, to reveal"),[1] translating to "soul-revealing".

A psychedelic experience is characterized by the striking perception of aspects of one's mind previously unknown, or by the creative exuberance of the mind liberated from its ostensibly ordinary fetters. Psychedelic states are an array of experiences including changes of perception such as hallucinations, synesthesia, altered states of awareness or focused consciousness, variation in thought patterns, trance or hypnotic states, mystical states, and other mind alterations. These processes can lead some people to experience changes in mental operation defining their self-identity (whether in momentary acuity or chronic development) different enough from their previous normal state that it can excite feelings of newly formed understanding such as revelation, enlightenment, confusion, and psychosis.

Psychedelic states may be elicited by various techniques, such as meditation, sensory stimulation[2] or deprivation, and most commonly by the use of psychedelic substances. When these psychoactive substances are used for religious, shamanic, or spiritual purposes, they are termed entheogens.

The term was first coined as a noun in 1956 by psychiatrist Humphry Osmond as an alternative descriptor for hallucinogenic drugs in the context of psychedelic psychotherapy.[3] Seeking a name for the experience induced by LSD, Osmond contacted Aldous Huxley, a personal acquaintance and advocate for the therapeutic use of the substance. Huxley coined the term "phanerothyme," from the Greek terms for "manifest" () and "spirit" (). In a letter to Osmond, he wrote:

To make this mundane world sublime,Take half a gram of phanerothyme

To which Osmond responded:

To fathom Hell or soar angelic,Just take a pinch of psychedelic[4]

It was on this term that Osmond eventually settled, because it was "clear, euphonious and uncontaminated by other associations."[5] This mongrel spelling of the word 'psychedelic' was loathed by American ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, but championed by Timothy Leary, who thought it sounded better.[6] Due to the expanded use of the term "psychedelic" in pop culture and a perceived incorrect verbal formulation, Carl A.P. Ruck, Jeremy Bigwood, Danny Staples, Jonathan Ott, and R. Gordon Wasson proposed the term "entheogen" to describe the religious or spiritual experience produced by such substances.[7]

From the second half of the 1950s, Beat Generation writers like William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg[8] wrote about and took drugs, including cannabis and Benzedrine, raising awareness and helping to popularise their use.[9] In the same period Lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD, or "acid" (at the time a legal drug), began to be used in the US and UK as an experimental treatment, initially promoted as a potential cure for mental illness.[10] In the early 1960s the use of LSD and other hallucinogens was advocated by proponents of the new "consciousness expansion", such as Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley and Arthur Koestler,[11][12] their writings profoundly influenced the thinking of the new generation of youth.[13] There had long been a culture of drug use among jazz and blues musicians, and use of drugs (including cannabis, peyote, mescaline and LSD[14]) had begun to grow among folk and rock musicians, who also began to include drug references in their songs.[15][nb 1]

By the mid-1960s, the psychedelic life-style had already developed in California, and an entire subculture developed. This was particularly true in San Francisco, due in part to the first major underground LSD factory, established there by Owsley Stanley. There was also an emerging music scene of folk clubs, coffee houses and independent radio stations catering to a population of students at nearby Berkeley, and to free thinkers that had gravitated to the city.[18] From 1964, the Merry Pranksters, a loose group that developed around novelist Ken Kesey, sponsored the Acid Tests, a series of events based around the taking of LSD (supplied by Stanley), accompanied by light shows, film projection and discordant, improvised music known as the psychedelic symphony.[19] The Pranksters helped popularize LSD use through their road trips across America in a psychedelically-decorated school bus, which involved distributing the drug and meeting with major figures of the beat movement, and through publications about their activities such as Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).[21]

Leary was a well-known proponent of the use of psychedelics, as was Aldous Huxley. However, both advanced widely different opinions on the broad use of psychedelics by state and civil society. Leary promulgated the idea of such substances as a panacea, while Huxley suggested that only the cultural and intellectual elite should partake of entheogens systematically.[citation needed]

In the 1960s the use of psychedelic drugs became widespread in modern Western culture, particularly in the United States and Britain. The movement is credited to Michael Hollingshead who arrived in America from London in 1965. He was sent to the U.S. by other members of the psychedelic movement to get their ideas exposure.[22] The Summer of Love of 1967 and the resultant popularization of the hippie culture to the mainstream popularized psychedelia in the minds of popular culture, where it remained dominant through the 1970s.[citation needed]

The impact of psychedelic drugs on western culture in the 1960s led to semantic drift in the use of the word "psychedelic", and it is now frequently used to describe anything with abstract decoration of multiple bright colours, similar to those seen in drug-induced hallucinations. In objection to this new meaning, and to what some[who?] consider pejorative meanings of other synonyms such as "hallucinogen" and "psychotomimetic", the term "entheogen" was proposed and is seeing increasing use. However, many consider the term "entheogen" best reserved for religious and spiritual usage, such as certain Native American churches do with the peyote sacrament, and "psychedelic" left to describe those who are using these drugs for recreation, psychotherapy, physical healing, or creative problem solving. In science, hallucinogen remains the standard term.[23]

Advances in printing and photographic technology in the 1960s saw the traditional lithography printing techniques rapidly superseded by the offset printing system. This and other technical and industrial innovations gave young artists access to exciting new graphic techniques and media, including photographic and mixed media collage, metallic foils, and vivid new fluorescent "DayGlo" inks. This enabled them to explore innovative new illustrative styles including highly distorted visuals, cartoons, and lurid colors and full spectrums to evoke a sense of altered consciousness; many works also featured idiosyncratic and complex new fonts and lettering styles (most notably in the work of San Francisco-based poster artist Rick Griffin). Many artists in the late 1960s and early 1970s attempted to illustrate the psychedelic experience in paintings, drawings, illustrations, and other forms of graphic design. In the modern era, computer graphics may be used to produce psychedelic effects for artwork.[citation needed]

The counterculture music scene frequently used psychedelic designs on posters during the Summer of Love, leading to a popularization of the style. The most productive and influential centre of psychedelic art in the late 1960s was San Francisco; a scene driven in large measure by the patronage of the popular local music venues of the day like the Avalon Ballroom and Bill Graham's Fillmore West, which regularly commissioned young local artists like Robert Crumb, Stanley Mouse, Rick Griffin and others. They produced a wealth of distinctive psychedelic promotional posters and handbills for concerts that featured emerging psychedelic bands like Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Many of these works are now regarded as classics of the poster genre, and original items by these artists command high prices on the collector market today. Peter Max's psychedelic poster designs helped popularize brightly colored spectrums widely, especially among college students.[citation needed]

Contemporary with the burgeoning San Francisco scene, a smaller but equally creative psychedelic art movement emerged in London, led by expatriate Australian pop artist Martin Sharp, who created many striking psychedelic posters and illustrations for the influential underground publication Oz magazine, as well as the famous album covers for the Cream albums Disraeli Gears and Wheels of Fire. Other prominent London practitioners of the style included: design duo Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, whose work included numerous famous posters, as well as psychedelic "makeovers" on a piano for Paul McCartney and a car for doomed Guinness heir Tara Browne, and design collective The Fool, who created clothes and album art for several leading UK bands including The Beatles, Cream, and The Move. They painted psychedelic designs on musical instruments for John Lennon and Cream, created psychedelic murals for the Surrey home of Beatle George Harrison, and designed the famous psychedelic mural on the facade of the short-lived Apple Boutique in Baker St, London.[citation needed]

The trend also extended to motor vehicles. The earliest, and perhaps most famous of all psychedelic vehicles was the famous "Further" bus, driven by Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters, which was painted inside and out in 1964 with bold psychedelic designs (although these were executed in primary colours, since the DayGlo colours that soon became de rigueur were then not widely available). Another very famous example is the Rolls Royce owned by John Lennon - originally black, he had it repainted in 1967 in a vivid psychedelic gypsy caravan style, prompting bandmate George Harrison to have his Mini Cooper similarly repainted with logos and devices that reflected his burgeoning interest in Indian spirituality. Other notable examples include several cars re-painted in psychedelic style by Hapshash & The Coloured Coat and the famous psychedelic Porsche owned by American singer Janis Joplin.[citation needed]

The fashion for psychedelic drugs gave its name to the style of psychedelia, a term describing a category of rock music known as psychedelic rock, as well as visual art, fashion, and culture that is associated originally with the high 1960s, hippies, and the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, California.[24] It often used new recording techniques and effects while drawing on Eastern sources such as the ragas and drones of Indian music.

One of the first uses of the word in the music scene of this time was in the 1964 recording of "Hesitation Blues" by folk group the Holy Modal Rounders.[25] The term was introduced to rock music and popularized by the 13th Floor Elevators 1966 album The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators.[25] Psychedelia truly took off in 1967 with the Summer of Love and, although associated with San Francisco, the style soon spread across the US, and worldwide.[26]

The counterculture of the 1960s had a strong influence on the popular culture of the early 1970s. It later became linked to a style of electronic dance music known as psychedelic trance.

A psychedelic festival is a gathering that promotes psychedelic music and art in an effort to unite participants in a communal psychedelic experience.[27] Psychedelic festivals have been described as "temporary communities reproduced via personal and collective acts of transgression...through the routine expenditure of excess energy, and through self-sacrifice in acts of abandonment involving ecstatic dancing often fuelled by chemical cocktails."[27] These festivals often emphasize the ideals of peace, love, unity, and respect.[27] Notable psychedelic festivals include the biennial Boom Festival in Portugal,[27] OZORA Festival in Hungary, Universo Paralello in Brazil as well as Nevada's Burning Man[28] and California's Symbiosis Gathering in the United States.[29]

In recent years there has been a resurgence in interest in psychedelic research and a growing number of conferences now take place across the globe.[30] The psychedelic research charity Breaking Convention have hosted one of the worlds largest since 2011. A biennial conference in London, UK, Breaking Convention: a multidisciplinary conference on psychedelic consciousness[31] is a multidisciplinary conference on psychedelic consciousness. In the US MAPS held their first Psychedelic Science conference,[32] devoted specifically to research of psychedelics in scientific and medical fields, in 2013.

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Psychedelia - Wikipedia

Donald Trump Moves to Deport Vietnam War Refugees – The Atlantic

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The White House unilaterally reinterpreted the agreement in the spring of 2017 to exempt people convicted of crimes from its protections, allowing the administration to send back a small number of pre-1995 Vietnamese immigrants, a policy it retreated from this past August. Last week, however, James Thrower, a spokesperson for the U.S. embassy in Hanoi, said the American government was again reversing course.

Washington now believes that the 2008 agreement fails to protect pre-1995 Vietnamese immigrants from deportation, Thrower told The Atlantic. This would apply to such migrants who are either undocumented or have committed crimes, and this interpretation would not apply to those who have become American citizens.

The United States and Vietnam signed a bilateral agreement on removals in 2008 that establishes procedures for deporting Vietnamese citizens who arrived in the United States after July 12, 1995, and are subject to final orders of removal, Thrower said. While the procedures associated with this specific agreement do not apply to Vietnamese citizens who arrived in the United States before July 12, 1995, it does not explicitly preclude the removal of pre-1995 cases.

The about-turn came as a State Department spokesperson confirmed that the Department of Homeland Security had met with representatives of the Vietnamese embassy in Washington, D.C., but declined to provide details of when the talks took place or what was discussed.

Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for DHS said: We have 5,000 convicted criminal aliens from Vietnam with final orders of removalthese are non-citizens who during previous administrations were arrested, convicted, and ultimately ordered removed by a federal immigration judge. Its a priority of this administration to remove criminal aliens to their home country.

Spokespeople for the Vietnamese embassy did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

But the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group, said in a statement that the purpose of the meeting was to change the 2008 agreement. That deal had initially been set to last for five years, and was to be automatically extended every three years unless either party opted out. Under those rules, it was set to renew next month. Since 1998, final removal orders have been issued for more than 9,000 Vietnamese nationals.

When it first decided to reinterpret the 2008 deal, Donald Trumps administration argued that only pre-1995 arrivals with criminal convictions were exempt from the agreements protection and eligible for deportation. Vietnam initially conceded and accepted some of those immigrants before stiffening its resistance; about a dozen Vietnamese immigrants ended up being deported from the United States. The August decision to change course, reported to a California court in October, appeared to put such moves at least temporarily on ice, but the latest shift leaves the fate of a larger number of Vietnamese immigrants in doubt. Now all pre-1995 arrivals are exempt from the 2008 agreements protection.

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Donald Trump Moves to Deport Vietnam War Refugees - The Atlantic

Ron Paul: Market meltdown could spark depression-like conditions

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Ron Paul is warning this year's corrections could be a precursor to an epic market collapse that may come sooner than investors think.

According to the former Republican presidential candidate, Wall Street is becoming more vulnerable to near-depression conditions within the next 12 months.

"Once this volatility shows that we're not going to resume the bull market, then people are going to rush for the exits," Paul said Thursday on CNBC's "Futures Now." The relentlessly bearish former congressman added that "It could be worse than 1929."

During that year, the stock market began hemorrhaging, falling almost 90 percent and sending the U.S. economy into a tailspin.

Paul, a well-known Libertarian, has been warning Wall Street a massive market plunge is inevitable for years. He's currently projecting a 50 percent decline from current levels as his base case, citing the ongoing U.S.-China trade war as a growing risk factor.

"I'm not optimistic that all of the sudden, you're going to eliminate the tariff problem. I think that's here to stay," he said. "Tariffs are taxes."

The scenario is exacerbating Paul's chief reason behind his bearish call: 2008 financial crisis easy money policies. He contended the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing has caused the "biggest bubble in the history of mankind."

"It's so important to understand the original cause of the problem, and that is the Federal Reserve running up debt and letting politicians spend money," he added.

Paul argued that Washington lawmakers do not have an ability to effectively fix the debt problem, and he's been highly critical of the 2017 Trump tax cuts for creating a dire debt situation.

The White House is estimating this year's budget deficit will total $1.09 trillion. The Obama administration saw deficits just as large while trying to solve the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent recession.

However, there may be a silver lining in Paul's forecast.

Unlike the Great Depression, Paul said the next historic downturn doesn't have to last a decade as long as Fed policy and lawmakers don't make the same financial mistakes.

"If you allow the liquidation, it doesn't last long," Paul said.

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Ron Paul: Market meltdown could spark depression-like conditions

The Ron Paul Revolution – Taki’s Magazine – takimag.com

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It would have been beyond belief just six months ago. I speak, of course, of the Ron Paul Revolutionand for purposes of this piece, I shall refer to it as exactly that, for at once it has been bringing revolutionary change to American politics, and most especially American radical politics, and is doing so at what increasingly looks like a revolutionary moment in American history. I write this as a member of the young generation that has been rallying to Ron Paul, creating a youth movement that is at least the rival of Gene McCarthys, as someone who has watched this movement emerge from a variety of angles as perhaps few who have been more intensely associated with it have been able to. I watch the rise of the Ron Paul Revolution as someone who has studied in vast detail the history of third parties and radical movements in America, and with that knowledge is only all the more awestruck by the novelty of the Paul phenomenon.

I write, also, as a Kirkianand Burkean, skeptical of libertarian gospel and loathing of revolution, yet by the very fact that I have been, however peripherally, a participant in this revolution, keenly aware of the revolutionary situation we are now in. Surely, by prudential standards, this late stage of the Bush imperium has been the most just cause for rebellion since the Wilson tyranny during and after World War I. Add to this ethical dimension the present prospect of war with Iran, and as I write this possibly with Turkey as well, with a ruling class finally awakened to the madness of the war party with its finger on the button and yet unable to stop it, but with a military which just might be compelled to intervene politically to save itself from the slaughter Bush, Cheney, Lieberman, and Podhoretz have planned for it. This, very simply, is a revolutionary situation, and the Ron Paul Revolution is a response to it.

I first became aware that something was actually happening when I attended the Future of Freedom Foundation conference early in June, and listened to Lew Rockwell discuss the incredible opportunity that now faces us. The pandemonium which followed when Ron Paul himself came to the conference was as great as it was predictableit was this speech, which became popular on YouTube, which was followed by Andrew Napolitanos fiery oratory in which he declared Paul to be the Thomas Jefferson of our day. I left this event with a very cynical analysis which nonetheless remains aptnamely that most Americans oppose just about everything for which the larger libertarian movement, except for its opposition to the Iraq war. So just as Lenin was wrong about everything but the one issue which could rally the people to him, the war, so I figured it just might be with Ron Pauls libertarian cadre.

OK, I thought, but I was with the choir when I first came to hear Ron Paul preach. Just because he became the toast of a surprising collection of talking heads after he stood his ground, Gandhian in his simple forcefulness, against the embodiment of police/state brutality, this did not a movement make. But boy, did turn out to be wrong! Less than two weeks later, I tried to attend Ron Pauls appearance on The Colbert Report, but was unable to get in at the very front of the standby line. Instead, I was treated for my efforts by an enormous ballyhoo outside The Report, where I met the Ron Paul grassroots. It was wonderful to be at an old-fashioned radical right-wing hootenanny like I had not seen since I was a teenager. Disillusioned capital-L Libertarians, Birchers, disillusioned College Democrats, conspiracy nuts, and just plain folks from the great unwasheda delightful group! Also notable for its diversity by PC standards, this group charged into Times Square after Ron Paul left The Colbert Report, chanting at the top of their lungs, with placards flailing wildly like lefties. It was glorious, and it was only the beginning.

From just that occasion, I left feeling that the Ron Paul Revolution was proving itself to be the fulfilment of an historical analogy whose possibility I had been anticipating for some years. In the first decade of the 20th century, many and varied radical movements were prospering in Russia, but were driven underground by Russias entry into the First World War, only to massively rise up from the ashes once the mustard gas hit the fan. Likewise, there were many and varied populist and patriot movements flourishing in the 90s, only to be driven underground by 9/11 and the Iraq War. I have long wondered if they also might arise, once the army found itself inevitably broken in Iraq. So what, then, was the political opening which made way for this revolution? Well recall that, late last spring, Ron Pauls stand against Giuliani at Champaran occurred within days of the first and foremost capitulation of Nancy Pelosi and the other Democratic leaders in Congress on the Bush war budget.

But something more fundamental, and intimately related, had happened as well. The leftist antiwar movement, such as it was, came as close as any movement or organization in the history of the American left, or for that matter, in politics generally, to abject surrender. This occurred directly in response to the Pelosi capitulation, at which time it became clear that the major umbrella group, United for Peace and Justice, was serving completely at the behest of the Democrats. Furthermore, and most damningly of all, this occurred largely with the takeover of the organization by the Communist Party USA, guided by the lunatic delusions of the Popular Front stratagem with its demands for rival priorities (hence the cloying insistence on Peace and Justice) all dictated by ultimate fealty to the Democratic Party. There could not have been a more a stunning monument to the failures of the past than the takeover of a seemingly genuine antiwar movement by the cult, many generations ossified, which was largely responsible for pushing American entry into the Second World War and thus ushering in the epoch of perpetual war.

In response to Pelosis surrender, the venerable Alexander Cockburn dedicated a whole issue of his Counterpunch newsletter to what he frankly entitled the failure of the antiwar movement. It was only natural in the wake of this betrayal that the masses in their frustration over this no-win war to end all no-win wars should turn to the first person they should then see speaking truth to powewhich just happened to be, by the everlasting grace of God, Ron Paul. For indeed, if the Ron Paul Revolution achieves nothing else, it will accomplish the complete remaking and realignment of the spectrum of American radical politicsin other words, the death of the left, accompanied by the complete discrediting and repudiation of Beltway libertarianism, a partisan of which actually had the unmitigated chutzpah to ask when the Revolution was first getting off the ground, Will libertarianism survive Ron Paul? If by libertarianism he meant the varied strands of apologists for the empire calling themselves libertarians Randroidism, liberventionism, Catoism, and the utterly appalling and affronting redefinition of libertarianism as pro-war liberalism by Dennis Miller and the creators of South Park, then we can now joyfully answer a resounding no!

The profound ramifications for the future of American radicalism leave, however, one section of the political spectrum deeply impacted by the Ron Paul Revolution unaccounted for, and that is, the conservative movementspecifically the element which has come to be represented by its younger members generally and YAF today in particular. By August, I had caught on C-SPAN a YAF convention in which I was struck to find the attendees overwhelmingly disillusioned by Bush and his war, with this sentiment encouraged by the speaker, Bob Novak, who with the release of his memoirs around that time had freed the same instincts in himself (though it remains baffling how one who speaks of his political awakening coming from reading Witness could remain unapologetic for his unwitting service as a lackey for the Alger Hiss of our day, Scooter Libby). Novak and his audience, in their give and take, had only kind things to say about Ron Paul, suggesting that at least some nominally principled conservatives might want to get behind him.

Now, when it comes to the conservative movement, I continue to echo John McLaughlin. When Crossfires guests were offering their New Years Resolutions for 2004, Pat Buchanan announced his resolve to write the book which became Where The Right Went Wrong. McLaughlin, in his delightful way, scolded Buchanan: The conservative movement! Youre still riding that old horse Pat?!! This sentiment was only confirmed for me late in August when I attended the disappointing proceedings of the Robert Taft Club. Richard Viguerie was entertaining if nothing else, Terry Jeffery of Human Events was surprisingly sensible until he invoked the Supreme Court bugaboo with respect to Hillary, an equally annoying practice by both the left and right/ I later had the tactile pleasure of admonishing Jeffery to his face that, contrary to his opening remarks, FDR was not a socialist, he was a fascist.

Paul Gottfried and Jim Antle were more sober about the future of the right, if at the same time they kept playing to the prejudices of this crowd, which consisted mostly of aspiring young men and women of the emerging Beltway right. My worst suspicions about this crowd were confirmed when I later learned that the one person in the crowd who was unqualified in touting Ron Paul and the now much confirmed potential of his campaign was the communications director of the National Right To Work Committee. My more recent observations of scenes from the Ron Paul Revolution, as it has totally come into its own on the heels of the stunning third quarter fundraising, have more than assured me that this curious species of post-Bush YAFism has, at best, a minor supporting role in Ron Pauls coalition, but it is nevertheless a significant phenomenon which must be addressed.

My observations of the present YAF and related conservative movement crowd from early on reminded me a great deal of the analogous phenomenon on the left, as liberalism declined and fell in the 70s and 80s the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) of Michael Harrington. This group was most notable for essentially reuniting the old and new left in the wake of McCarthy and McGovernsomething which, incidentally, I feel can go far in explaining liberal/Vietnam generation assent to the Iraq War. Murray Rothbard very aptly labeled this collection of battle-scarred, mostly young McGovernites ready to take on Washington the new Browderism, referring to the Popular Front era American Communist leader Earl Browder, known for such slogans as Communism is 20th Century Americanism! Likewise it follows that these bright young things who roundly reject neo-conservatism and are now enthusiastically boring from within the conservative policy apparatus are practicing an equally foolhardy Browderism of the right. Significantly, Rothbards naming of the new Browderism came in a column in which he juxtaposed it with the newly ascendant new right in the late 70s to forecast the then-bleak future of American politics.

The bottom line in all this inside-baseball analysis of factions is that, in the end, while I am certainly optimistic about the potential of the Ron Paul Revolution, it simply can not and will not have a lasting impact on the Republican Party. This was more or less made clear to me around the same time I was closely observing the Browderism of the right with Ron Pauls relatively poor showing in the Ames Straw Poll. That Paul came in behind Nuke Mecca Tancredo is as solid an indicator as any that, at the end of the day, the Republican Party remains the War Party, Tancredos later descent into obscurity notwithstanding. And the rise of Mike Huckabee, much as it may be little more than a convenient invention of the media, is not insignificant. Even as Ron Paul shall surely be vindicated, the future of the Republican Party, if indeed it even has one, is with the left-turning Christian right which at least has the potential to adapt to America after the fall. I personally, however, foresee the Republicans literally committing suicide in 2012 running David Petraeus on a stabbed-in-the-back platform, to be succeeded in 2016 by the rise of the Spitzer-Huckabee party.

So even with setbacks like the Ames Straw Poll, the Ron Paul Revolution just kept on walking, kept on talking, marching on to freedom land. All the way, indeed, to its breathtaking and historic $5 million raised in the third quarter of 2007. Which finally brings us to October, when I attended the Mises Institute 25th Anniversary festivities in New York, the events of which disabused me of any doubt that we are indeed entering a revolutionary situation. The question which had been most pressing on my mind in the weeks and months leading up to the Mises conference was whether or not the youthful masses were being educated and having their consciousness raised by the larger foundations on which the Ron Paul Revolution stood. The answer, as ever since this Revolution began, was a resounding yes. I was stunned to see meet at this conference roughly 200 my own age and younger, many of whom I had seen before at random Ron Paul events in New York. It was also moving to see at the event a close friend of mine, a senior in high school who is probably in the top five leading the Ron Paul Revolution in the Big Apple. All in all, this was a generational moment. It dispelled any doubt Id had that this youth movement was easily the equal of Gene McCarthys.

The most surreal and breathtaking event of the weekend was going from the conference to a party being held at the then-still under construction Ron Paul HQ in New York, arriving in the middle of an impromptu appearance by Paul himself, in which he was addressing a large and tightly packed throng of mostly young people, again diverse by PC standards, with great uproar and chanting by the crowd with fists raised. In this darkened room in the Meatpacking District, I could not help but have come to mind that most vivid cinematic depiction of the romance of the Russian Revolution, the scene in the film Reds when John Reed is addressing a crowded factory at midnight debating whether to strike. This is an entirely new and novel phenomenon which not even most old fighters of the right, to say nothing of the mainstream media and establishment, has at all come to terms with if it has even grasped it at alla radical youth movement which in rallying behind a man and a platform which, while ostensibly libertarian, has more in common with the John Birch Society than with most self-identified libertarians. Could this have ever been imagined in the case of Pat Buchanan, or reaching further back in history, for that matter, of John Schmitz?

I was motivated, in part, to write these observations after reading in this journal the 1053rd rant by Paul Gottfried about how the left needs the neocons, finally taking the cake when he called John Mearsheimer a man of the left. (For the record, a very good mutual friend of both Mearsheimer and myself tells me he is quite certain Mearsheimer voted straight Republican until 2004). Specifically here, I sense that much of the failure to appreciate just what is happening out there is symptomatic of the enduring power of old grudges and old wounds. When Norah ODonnell bitterly called Ron Paul an isolationist, she was not trying to summon the ghost of Max Lerner; indeed, she probably spoke out of total ignorance of the words history, and her magnanimity on the matter when she interviewed Paul later would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. No doubt, it drives the neocons absolutely mad that the media today have not memorized Daniel Bells The Radical Right, nor do I doubt that they will very soon have some choice words to that effect. You know that Commentary, when it deigns to speak about Ron Paul, will serve up a genunine whopper!

If I should come across here as perhaps a bit too optimistic about the media and the culture, this goes to the heart of the matter of why I speak with such gusto about the Ron Paul Revolution. Whatever Ron Paul may or may not achieve in politicsmy own Burkean hope has always been that he will play the same role in this election as Norman Thomas in 1932, that is, to run on the platform closer to what would actually transpire in the next administration than the Democratic platform in each respective campaignthe true revolution that is occurring is in popular consciousness if not more broadly in culture. This is what was so stunning about what I myself witnessed in the way of raised consciousness among the Ron Paul Revolutionaries at the Mises conference, along with such instances as 2,500 Michigan students chanting at Ron Pauls prompting for the gold standard, and many such instances since and many more to come. Imagine in the wake of the 2008 election if just one in five of the number now rallying for Ron Paul go out in protest actions against the Lincoln bicentennial. Even as I write this, we are approaching the 5th of November, when the most ambitious fundraising drive for Ron Paul yet is being held on a day to honor the martyrdom of a Catholic monarchist. Who would have ever dreamed?

I write not only in approach of Guy Fawkes Day, but, just two days later, the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. We do well, first, to consider just how analogous our situation has become. All too akin to the surge were several key events of the latter half of World War I the Russian spring offensive against the Austrians in 1916 which won important tactical victories but broke the army and led directly to the revolution, the simultaneous French pushback against the Germans which staved off looming defeat but led directly to the 1917 mutiny, and the German last rally of early 1918 which led directly to defeat, the Spartacist uprising, and ultimately, the Nazis. It is already a great irony that this anniversary is being marked by a pivotal and treacherous moment for the neo-conservatives, which history shall surely record as Trotskys greatest legacy (instead of his relatively petty dissent from Stalin). But the supreme irony would be if the most successful Leninists in history (yes, more than Lenin himselfif only the neocons had had to face down the White Army and the Kronstadt Sailors) were brought down by the very chain of events which led to the Bolshevik Revolution in the first place. For the record, I am not predicting that Ron Paul will lead a pitchfork wielding mob on the White House. But if Hillary is president and insists on continuing the war a la Kerensky, anything is possible.

You say you want a revolution, well, ya know . . . .

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The Ron Paul Revolution - Taki's Magazine - takimag.com

Ron Paul’s LANDSLIDE VICTORY! (327-98) | SVTPerformance.com

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Ron Paul first entered congress because of the removal of the gold standard.

That was his driving motivation for entering politics, to help stop the monetary destruction we were to face.

During multiple stints in congress amid his personal obgyn practice, Ron has fought HARD for the Auditing of the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve has NEVER been audited completely. While some small audits take place, the very things we need to know have been kept as "inauditable".

Ron Paul has introduced audit the fed bills and even with overwhelming congressional support, they have been magically stuck in subcommittees until they disappear.

Well today, is VICTORY.

No longer is it stuck in committee. Paul's entire congressional career goal, to audit the monster that ruins our money, the Fed, has been completed as a congressman in the House of Representatives.

And not only was it a victory, it was a LANDSLIDE!

327-98

Naturally, all the MSM sites I had checked (wsj, nbc news, etc.) had nothing of this massive career victory.

It is up to us to reassert ourselves, Rep. Paul said during a House debate on Tuesday.

The legislation requires the Government Accountability Office to carry out comprehensive audits of the bank. It passed easily but faces an uncertain future in the Senate.

We should have privacy for the individual, but we should have openness of government all the time. Weve drifted a long way from that, Rep. Paul said Tuesday.

I think when people talk about independence and having this privacy of the central bank, it means they want secrecy, he added.

Opposition to the bill came mostly from Democrats.

It seems to me what were talking about is taking some fake punches at the Federal Reserve but not doing anything serious, said Rep. Barney Frank.

The three-time presidential candidate Paul, who is retiring at end of this session, has made a career of trying to do away with the Fed, which he blames for the government growth. Failing to accomplish that, he has pushed to make the independent central banks operations more transparent.

The Fed is already subject to annual audits, but Pauls bill goes further in requiring inspections of the banks monetary policy decision-making. And although Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has opposed the legislation, that didnt stop it from being passed 327 to 98.

The bill will now be sent to the Senate where it falls into the hands of Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).

Oh, it might be interesting to note that all but one Republican voted for the bill. The one who felt Rep. Pauls bill wasnt worth his vote was Rep. Bob Turner of New York.

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RON PAUL! :rockon:

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Ron Paul's LANDSLIDE VICTORY! (327-98) | SVTPerformance.com

In Depth | Leonids Solar System Exploration: NASA Science

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A burst of 1999 Leonid meteors as seen at 38,000 feet from Leonid Multi Instrument Aircraft Campaign (Leonid MAC) with 50 mm camera. Image Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/ISAS/Shinsuke Abe and Hajime Yano

The Leonids, which peak during mid-November each year, are considered to be a major shower though meteor rates are often as low as about 15 meteors per hour. The Leonids are bright meteors and can also be colorful. They are also fast: Leonids travel at speeds of 44 miles (71 kilometers) per second, and are considered to be some of the fastest meteors out there.

Every 33 years, or so, viewers on Earth may experience a Leonid storm that can peak with hundreds to thousands of meteors seen per hour depending on the location of the observer.

A meteor storm versus a shower is defined as having at least 1,000 meteors per hour. Viewers in 1966 experienced a spectacular Leonid storm: thousands of meteors per minute fell through Earth's atmosphere during a 15 minute period. There were so many meteors seen that they appeared to fall like rain. The last Leonid meteor storm took place in 2002.

Leonids are also known for their fireballs and earthgrazer meteors. Fireballs are larger explosions of light and color that can persist longer than an average meteor streak. This is due to the fact that fireballs originate from larger particles of cometary material. Fireballs are also brighter, with magnitudes brighter than -3. Earthgrazers are meteors that streak close to the horizon and are known for their long and colorful tails.

The Leonids are best viewed starting at about midnight local time. Find an area well away from city or street lights. Come prepared for winter temperatures with a sleeping bag, blanket or lawn chair. Orient yourself with your feet towards east, lie flat on your back, and look up, taking in as much of the sky as possible. In less than 30 minutes in the dark, your eyes will adapt and you will begin to see meteors. Be patient -- the show will last until dawn, so you have plenty of time to catch a glimpse.

Meteors come from leftover comet particles and bits from broken asteroids. When comets come around the sun, the dust they emit gradually spreads into a dusty trail around their orbits. Every year the Earth passes through these debris trails, which allows the bits to collide with our atmosphere where they disintegrate to create fiery and colorful streaks in the sky.

The pieces of space debris that interact with our atmosphere to create the Leonids originate from comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle. It takes comet Tempel-Tuttle 33 years to orbit the sun once.

Comet Tempel-Tuttle was discovered twice independentlyin 1865 and 1866 by Ernst Tempel and Horace Tuttle, respectively. Tempel-Tuttle is a small cometits nucleus measures only about 2.24 miles (3.6 kilometers) across.

You should not look only to the constellation of Leo to view the Leonidsthey are visible throughout the night sky. It is actually better to view the Leonids away from the radiant: They will appear longer and more spectacular from this perspective. If you do look directly at the radiant, you will find that the meteors will be shortthis is an effect of perspective called foreshortening.

Determine Meteor Shower Activity for Where You Live

http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/estimator.html

Eyewitness Accounts of the 1966 Storm

http://leonid.arc.nasa.gov/1966.html

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In Depth | Leonids Solar System Exploration: NASA Science

MIT Figured out a Way to Shrink Objects to Nanoscale

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Birth of an Idea

A new nanotech breakthrough comes courtesy of a material you’d likely find in any nursery.

A team from MIT has figured out a way to quickly and inexpensively shrink objects to the nanoscale. It calls the process implosion fabrication, and it all starts with polyacrylate — the super-absorbent polymer typically found in baby diapers.

Size Matters

According to the MIT team’s paper, published Thursday in Science, the first step in the implosion fabrication process is adding a liquid solution to a piece of polyacrylate, causing it to swell.

Next, the team used lasers to bind fluorescein molecules to the polyacrylate in a pattern of their choosing. Those molecules acted as anchor points for whatever material the researchers wanted to shrink to the nanoscale.

“You attach the anchors where you want with light, and later you can attach whatever you want to the anchors,“ researcher Edward Boyden said in an MIT news release. “It could be a quantum dot, it could be a piece of DNA, it could be a gold nanoparticle.“

The researchers then dehydrated the polyacrylate scaffold using an acid. That caused the material attached to the polyacrylate to shrink in an even way to a thousandth of its original size.

Shrink Away

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of implosion fabrication is its accessibility — according to the MIT press release, many biology and materials science labs already have the necessary equipment to beginning shrinking objects to the nanoscale on their own.

As for what those researchers might shrink, the MIT team is already exploring potential uses for implosion fabrication, including in the fields of optics and robotics. But ultimately, they see no limit to the technique’s possible applications.

“There are all kinds of things you can do with this,” Boyden said. “Democratizing nanofabrication could open up frontiers we can’t yet imagine.”

READ MORE: Team Invents Method to Shrink Objects to the Nanoscale [MIT News]

More on nanotech: Australian Scientists Have Developed a New Tool for Imaging Life at the Nanoscale

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For the First Time, a Startup Grew a Steak in a Lab

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Israeli startup Aleph Farms has unveiled what appears to be the world's first lab-grown steak, a cut of meat produced from cells taken from a live animal.

High Steaks

An Israeli startup appears to have achieved a landmark accomplishment in the fake meat industry: lab-grown steak.

On Wednesday, Aleph Farms announced that it had grown a steak in a lab using cells extracted from a living cow. In a video shared alongside the announcement, a chef cooks up what looks like a regular beef steak, albeit one on the smaller side.

“The initial products are still relatively thin,” Aleph Farms CEO Didier Toubia acknowledges in a press release, “but the technology we developed marks a true breakthrough and a great leap forward in producing a cell-grown steak.”

Fresh Meat

It’s been five years since the public reveal of the first lab-grown hamburger. Since then, researchers have been able to dramatically improve upon the process of growing meat. What they haven’t been able to do is replicate the texture and structure of the specific cuts you’d find at a butcher.

“Making a patty or a sausage from cells cultured outside the animal is challenging enough,” Toubia said. “Imagine how difficult it is to create a whole-muscle steak.”

But that’s what Aleph Farms has seemingly done.

The key was finding a nutrient combination that would encourage the extracted animal cells to grow into a tissue structure comparable to that found in an actual cow. The company managed this using a bio-engineering platform co-developed with the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

The Real Question

In an interview published by Business Insider on Wednesday, Toubia revealed that a steak like the one highlighted in Aleph Farms’s video takes two to three weeks to grow and costs about $50.

He also answered the question no doubt on the mind of anyone who watched the video of his company’s lab-grown steak sizzling in a skillet: whether it tastes good.

“The smell was great when we cooked it, exactly the same characteristic flavor as a conventional meat cut,” Toubia said. “It was a little bit chewy, same as meat. We saw and felt the fibers when we cut it with a knife.”

READ MORE: An Israeli Startup With Ties to America’s Most Popular Hummus Brand Says It Made the World’s First Lab-Grown Steak — a Holy Grail for the Industry [Business Insider]

More on lab-grown meat: We’re About to Get Many More Meat Alternatives

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For the First Time, a Startup Grew a Steak in a Lab

Look at These Incredibly Realistic Faces Generated By A Neural Network

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Researchers at NVIDIA created a neural network that can come up with incredibly realistic faces on the spot.

Faking It

We officially can no longer trust anything we see on the internet. From whole-body deep fakes to AI-based translation dubbing, technology is starting to distort reality — all with the help of machine learning.

Case in point: researchers at NVIDIA have harnessed the power of a generative adversarial network (GAN) — a class of neural network — to generate some extremely realistic faces. The results are more impressive than anything we’ve seen before. Take a look below, bearing in mind that none of these faces are real.

Image Credit: NVIDIA

Fake Faces

A GAN can iteratively generate images based on genuine photos it learns from. Then it evaluates the new images against the original. In this instance, the researchers taught a GAN a number of “styles” — faces modeled after subjects who were old, young, wearing glasses, or had different hair styles.

The results are spectacular. Even small seemingly random details like freckles, skin pores or stubble are convincingly distributed in the images the project generated.

The network even took a crack at generating fake pictures of cats. They didn’t turn out quite as well.

Image Credit: NVIDIA

AI Rising

It’s not the first time a GAN has been used to generate pictures of people. Last year, the same group of NVIDIA researchers created a neural-network-based image generator. But results were far less impressive: faces appear distorted and unnatural. The results are also of a much lower resolution.

Neural networks are becoming incredibly good at faking human faces. Will we be able to tell them apart in the future? At this rate, they could become indistinguishable from reality.

READ MORE: A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks [arXiv]

More on neural network-generated faces: These People Never Existed. They Were Made by an AI.

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This Neptune-Sized Exoplanet Is Being Melted Away By Its Star

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A newly-discovered planet, orbiting a distant star, is approximately the size of Neptune — but the red dwarf it orbits is boiling it away.

Melted Away

A newly discovered gas planet, orbiting a distant star, is approximately the size of Neptune — but it’s so close to the red dwarf it orbits that it’s literally boiling away.

“This is the smoking gun that planets can lose a significant fraction of their entire mass,” Johns Hopkins planetary scientist David Sing, who helped find the exoplanet, said in a news release. He added that it’s “losing more of its mass than any other planet we seen so far; in only a few billion years from now, half of the planet may be gone.”

Nature Is Metal

The planet, which is called GJ 3470b and described in a new paper in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, is what’s known as a “hot Neptune.” That means that it’s a gas giant, like our own solar system’s Neptune or Jupiter, but it’s far closer to its host star than either of those planets.

GJ 3470b is so close to its star, in fact, that it’s boiling away into space. To make matters worse, it’s not a very heavy planet, meaning that its gravitational pull on its own atmosphere is comparatively weak.

Mysteries of the Cosmos

The rapidly vanishing GJ 3470b could provide an important clue about the nature of gas planets outside our solar system. Though the Kepler mission has found many smaller “mini-Neptunes” sprinkled throughout the galaxy, hot Neptunes are rare. The new theory: we’re not finding as many hot Neptunes because, like GJ 3470b, they tend to boil away into mini-Neptunes.

“It’s one of the most extreme examples of a planet undergoing a major mass-loss over its lifetime,” University of Geneva astronomer Vincent Bourrier, another researcher on the hot Neptune project, said in the same news release. “This sizable mass loss has major consequences for its evolution, and it impacts our understanding of the origin and fate of the population of exoplanets close to their stars.”

READ MORE: Astronomers Have Detected a Planet That’s Actually Evaporating Away at Record Speed [Science Alert]

More on hot Neptunes: Researchers Found a Treasure Trove of Planets Hiding in Dust

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Porsche and BMW’s New EV Chargers Are 3x Faster Than Tesla’s

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BMW and Porsche's new 450 kW

Who’s in Charge?

Driving an electric car (EV) saves money and helps the environment. But charging it is a pain — almost like back when every cellphone needed a different charger.

There are a bunch of different charging standards, power outputs, and EV battery types. Charging at home can take forever, and charging at a roadside stop — if you can even find a compatible station — can take hours.

But Porsche and BMW’s brand new charger could be a game-changer. The FastCharge charger could provide enough juice for 62 miles (100 km) of range in just three minutes. That’s not that much slower than filling up a gasoline tank at the pump — and it’s up to three times faster than Tesla’s Supercharger network.

Ultra Charger

Tesla’s Supercharger network only charges at speeds of up to 145 kW — although in many areas it’s a lot slower than that. Other “rapid” — or Type 2 — chargers provide between 43 and 120 kW. To reach 450 kW, Porsche had to develop a special cooling system to make sure every cell remains at an efficient, operable temperature.

It’s not the only charger of its kind: in April, Swiss company ABB Group launched what it called the “world’s fastest” EV charger — a 350 kW charger that can extend your range by 120 miles (193 km) in just three minutes. Bear in mind that ABB likely arrived at those figures by considering different EV battery voltages than Porsche. Futurism has reached out to Porsche to clarify how it arrived at FastCharge’s charging time estimate.

And Tesla’s Superchargers might also get an upgrade to speeds of up to 250 kW some time next year, Electrek reports.

A Charger Near You

So far, only two prototypes of Porsche and BMW’s “FastCharger” exist in Germany.

It’s hard to say whether similar chargers will ever become commonplace at gas stations near you. But if they ever do, EVs could start looking a lot more practical to potential buyers.

READ MORE: Porsche plugs into 450 kW EV charging station [The Verge]

More on EV chargers: EV-Charging Roads Have Arrived. Here’s Why We Do (and Don’t) Need Them.

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Biologists Engineered An Assassin Virus to Kill Bacteria on Command

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Listening In

Different viruses attack different types of cells. A flu virus, for example, attacks lung cells, while the HIV virus attacks immune-system cells. Some viruses, known as phages, attack bacteria — and, it turns out, they don’t all do so randomly.

A team from Princeton has discovered that some phages actually “listen” to the conversations that take place between bacteria to identify the ideal time to strike — and we might be able to use this discovery in the battle against antibiotic resistance.

Tiny Spy

We’ve long known that bacteria can communicate through the release of molecules. In a paper published in the journal Cell on Thursday, the Princeton researchers describe a finding that builds on that mechanism: a virus called VP882, which “listens” for those molecules in order to know when there are enough bacteria around to justify attacking, a process that involves creating many replicas of itself.

This eavesdropping is a survival technique — if there aren’t enough bacteria around, the VP882 virus and its replicas will all die after the attack. It turns out, VP882 isn’t unique, either. The Princeton team discovered that other viruses also spy on bacteria in various ways to determine when to strike.

“It’s brilliant and insidious!” researcher Bonnie Bassler said in a press release. It’s also the first known example of such radically different organisms listening to one another’s communications.

Assassins Freed

Once the Princeton team figured out VP882’s eavesdropping ability, it set out to use that ability against bacteria. By re-engineering VP882 in the lab, graduate student Justin Silpe was able to get the virus to attack when it sensed any input he chose, not just the communication molecule that naturally set it off.

And VP882 itself is unique in that it can infect multiple types of cells, unlike the flu and HIV viruses mentioned above. In tests, Silpe manage to get VP882 to attack cholera, salmonella, and E. coli — three very different types of bacteria.

The medical community already knew it could use some phages to treat bacterial diseases. Now that we know we can turn a least one phage into an assassin, we might be able to find a way to use it against the antibiotic-resistant bacteria currently threatening global health.

READ MORE: Biologists Turn Eavesdropping Viruses Into Bacterial Assassins [Princeton University]

More on antibiotic resistance: A World Without Antibiotics? The UN Has Elevated the Issue of Antibiotic Resistance

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A Waymo Rider Talked Publicly About the Service — Even Though He Wasn’t Supposed To

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Contract, Schmontract

Michael Richardson is one lucky guy.

In mid-September, self-driving car company Waymo accepted the technologist and entrepreneur into its early rider program in Phoenix, Arizona.

Like all riders, Richardson signed a nondisclosure agreement (NDA), a legal contract forbidding him from talking about his experience as a Waymo rider. Now he’s getting away with violating that contract, and what he had to say answers several key questions about the service — while leaving many others unanswered.

Good Guy Waymo

On Wednesday, Richardson agreed to an interview with Ars Technica, telling the publication that Waymo had freed him from his NDA. It turns out he was mistaken — Richardson was still legally bound to keep quiet about the rides he’d taken in the company’s autonomous vehicles.

Nevertheless, Waymo agreed to let Ars run its story. And in a move that surely caused Richardson to breathe a huge sigh of relief, it also promised it wouldn’t pursue legal action against him.

First Impression

That bit of goodwill on the part of Waymo should temper some of the not-so-positive news in the Ars story.

As part of the early rider program, Richarson took two round-trip rides with Waymo: one on September 28 and another on October 6. During his interview, the Waymo rider noted multiple limitations with the service, including a small coverage area, a higher cost than Uber and Lyft, and restricted pick-up and drop-off locations. He also claimed his vehicles took longer routes than necessary to avoid a freeway and a tricky left turn.

Perhaps most troubling, he also initially told Ars that he saw safety drivers take control of the vehicles on multiple occasions. According to Waymo’s records, however, a safety driver only took over once, and Richardson later admitted that he may have misremembered.

More to Come

Of course, if Richardson got one part of his story wrong, there’s a chance the rest of it isn’t airtight. He also hasn’t ridden with Waymo since it launched its commercial service, Waymo One, meaning the company could have already worked out some of the kinks he noticed two-plus months ago.

Waymo does plan to lift the NDA restriction on riders who transition to Waymo One, so we should be getting a wider range of views on the company’s vehicles in the near future.

Still, this is our first look inside one of Waymo’s cars from the perspective of a Waymo rider, and it certainly wasn’t all negative.

“I’m impressed by what the vehicle can do and how well it gets around,” Richardson told Ars. “It’s very, very impressive.”

READ MORE: We Finally Talked to an Actual Waymo Passenger—here’s What He Told Us [Ars Technica]

More on Waymo One: Waymo Has Officially Launched a Self-Driving Taxi Service

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Scammers Sent Hoax Bomb Threats Worldwide Demanding Bitcoin

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This week, scammers have started emailing hoax bomb threats to schools and hospitals, demanding bitcoin payments in exchange for not setting off explosives.

Bomb Threats

Ransomware that demands cryptocurrency payments in exchange for releasing infected computers is an old phenomenon.

Now that practice has a dark new twist. This week, scammers have started emailing bomb threats to hundreds of schools, hospitals, businesses and other public and private institutions in multiple countries, demanding bitcoin payments in exchange for not setting off seemingly made-up explosives. The threats caused mayhem. Entire blocks were shut down in several cities — a dark testament to the power of online anonymity.

No Terrorism Here

Emergency responders were dispatched in multiple cities across North America to investigate the threats — including a dozen threats in DC alone. Not a single bomb has been found at press time, leading authorities to believe the threats were an elaborate bluff.

The advice from the U.S. government: tell the FBI, and do not pay the ransom of $20,000 U.S. in Bitcoin.

The cryptic emails demanded that victims send the payment to a bitcoin address.

“If you are late with the transaction,” the email says, “the bomb will explode.”

Hitting Bitcoin While It’s Down

The value of Bitcoin took a substantial hit in the wake of the bomb threats. That’s bad news, since Bitcoin was already slouching. Bitcoin Cash also fell 13 percent, and many other major cryptocurrencies followed.

The takeaway: advocates have long predicted that blockchain technology is about to go mainstream, but to date the technology hasn’t strayed far from its early roots in crime and drug sales. Only time will tell whether the tech will eventually shed that identity.

READ MORE: Bitcoin scammers send bomb threats worldwide, causing evacuations [The Verge]

More on bitcoin: Here’s The Conspiracy Tearing Bitcoin Crypto Communities Apart

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