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Ketamine has been called the biggest thing to happen to psychiatry in 50 years, due to its uniquely rapid and sustained antidepressant effects. It improves symptoms in as little as 30 minutes, compared with weeks or even months for existing antidepressants, and is effective even for the roughly one third of patients with so-called treatment-resistant depression. Although there are multiple theories, researchers do not quite know how ketamine combats depression. Now, new research has uncovered a mechanism that may, in part, explain ketamine’s antidepressant properties....

Little is known about how the parasitic Rafflesia—a genus that produces the world’s largest and stinkiest flower—infects its host plants. Rafflesia spends most of its life span as a tangle of strandlike cells lurking inconspicuously underneath the bark of a woody vine called Tetrastigma, before emerging as drab, golf ball–sized buds. These eventually burst into fleshy blooms that smell like rotting meat and can reach 20 pounds and three feet across....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Last week I did an episode on some of the best apps for your Android device. For one of those apps, called Titanium Backup, I mentioned that in order to install it, you needed to “root” your Android. This opened up the floodgates of questions. Hopefully in today’s episode I can answer many of these questions and shed some light on the mysterious workings of “rooting....

Capturing a near-Earth asteroid and dragging it into orbit around the moon could help humanity put boots on Mars someday, proponents of the idea say. NASA is considering a $2.6 billion asteroid-retrieval mission that could deliver a space rock to high lunar orbit by 2025 or so, New Scientist reported last week. The plan could help jump-start manned exploration of deep space, carving out a path to the Red Planet and perhaps even more far-flung destinations, its developers maintain....

The Intermountain West is positively littered with dinosaur boneyards. In Late Jurassic rock layers from New Mexico to Montana, paleontologists have uncovered deposits that look like skeletal logjams. Whether connected or jumbled in a pile, the bones of prehistoric icons such as Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Diplodocus, and more are often found in abundance—the result of Jurassic monsoon floods that washed multiple individuals and species together into great heaps, covering them with sediment that let them petrify....

The first randomized controlled trial to compare the illicit psychedelic psilocybin with a conventional selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant found that the former improved symptoms of depression just as well on an established metric—and had fewer side effects. The study was fairly small, however, and was not explicitly intended to show how well the drugs stacked up on other measures of well-being. In a study published on Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, psychiatrist David Nutt, psychologist Robin Carhart-Harris and other researchers, all then at Imperial College London, conducted a six-week trial of 59 participants split into two groups....

APPS iBird Explorer PRO. Mitch Waite Group, 2011 ($2.99). For iPhone/iPad. This top-rated app for bird lovers (right) features 924 North American and Hawaiian birds and their songs. LeafSnap. Columbia University, University of Maryland and Smithsonian Institution, 2011 (free). For iPhone/iPad. Snap a picture of almost any leaf, and this cool app will help you identify it by bringing up images and names of possible matches. Particle Zoo. Richard Burgess, 2011 (free)....

In April of 2018, we described in this magazine our effort to enlist colleagues in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to sign a “Statement to Restore Science-Based Policy in Government.” This statement was an urgent call for scientific input in federal policymaking. Now we find ourselves in dismay as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to engulf the nation—dismay over the suffering of our citizens who have been infected, as well as the economic hardships so many must endure....

Our ability to pilot a car or airplane—or even to walk through city streets—has been completely transformed by the invention of the Global Positioning System (GPS). How did we navigate, though, before we had GPS? Recent work has shown that the mammalian brain uses an incredibly sophisticated GPS-like tracking system of its own to guide us from one location to the next. Like the GPS in our phones and cars, our brain’s system assesses where we are and where we are heading by integrating multiple signals relating to our position and the passage of time....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. When President Donald Trump announced on June 1 that he had decided to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, he asserted that staying in the pact would prevent our nation from further developing its fossil fuel reserves. Critics understandably have called this a setback for global efforts to curb greenhouse gas pollution....

Something in elderly blood is bad for brains. Plasma from old mice or humans worsens cognition and biological indicators of brain health, when infused into young mice. Conversely, plasma from young mice (or humans) rejuvenates old brains. Much of this research has come from neurobiologist Tony Wyss-Coray’s group at Stanford University, which is pursuing what constituents of blood might be responsible. One previous study identified a protein, which declines with age, that has powerful beneficial effects....

Physicists have reported what could be the first incontrovertible evidence for the existence of unusual particle-like objects called anyons, which were first proposed more than 40 years ago. Anyons are the latest addition to a growing family of phenomena called quasiparticles, which are not elementary particles, but are instead collective excitations of many electrons in solid devices. Their discovery—made using a 2D electronic device—could represent the first steps towards making anyons the basis of future quantum computers....

Recently I entered a bookstore. After ambling by the coffee and dessert area and passing the CDs and DVDs, I found actual books! The title of one of them stopped me: What Is Your Dangerous Idea? Potential answers came quickly: Test the hypothesis first posited as a child that a red towel tied around the neck will indeed confer the ability to fly. Go all in against a poker player named after a city or state, such as Amarillo or Colorado....

Scientists and medical researchers in the United States have been studying the health benefits and risks of marijuana for decades. But despite the increasing availability of legal marijuana, scientists have been forced to obtain the drug from a single source—the University of Mississippi in Oxford, which grows pot for research on a campus farm under a contract with the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Now, the university’s monopoly is coming to an end....

Millions of patients benefit from opioids such as morphine and codeine, but the pain relief they provide often comes with intense itching. In some cases, the irritation is so bad that patients will opt to cut back on painkillers. Now a study in the October 14 issue of Cell has found a possible explanation—the first step to creating drugs that will not make patients choose between experiencing itchiness and pain. Until recently, many experts had assumed that itching from opioids was unavoidable because it is a common side effect of drugs that interact with the nervous system....

CLIMATEWIRE | Kentucky residents who are struggling to rebuild after devastating flooding face huge financial obstacles because almost nobody in the state has flood insurance. The area hit by the flash floods that began in late July and killed at least 37 people has a large concentration of low-income families. Only 17,250 property owners in Kentucky have federal flood insurance, government records show. The public program provides the vast majority of flood policies in the United States....

Floating tongues of ice known as ice shelves function like gatekeepers, holding back massive land-based glaciers that stand to boost global sea levels as they melt. But ice shelves are prone to cracking and breaking, which was spectacularly demonstrated in 2002 when Antarctica’s Larsen B Ice Shelf—larger than the state of Rhode Island—suddenly collapsed. Scientists have investigated a couple of possible culprits for shelf destabilization: warmer ocean waters that eat away at them from below; light-absorbing debris such as rocks and soil on the shelves’ surfaces that can kick-start melting; and transient lakes of meltwater that absorb more sunlight than ice does and also exert stress on their surfaces....

In the first few seconds of video taken at the Arecibo radio telescope on December 1, 2020, everything looks normal. Sure, support cables had broken the previous August and November, damaging the 300-meter-wide dish. And sure, the National Science Foundation was already planning to decommission Arecibo, an instrument that began scanning the sky in 1963. So things weren’t great for the telescope. But it was at least still there. That changed just before 8 A....

Senior moments, those pesky instances of not so total recall—forgetting where we left our keys or what we did last weekend—are a subtle but significant part of the aging process. Another effect of growing old: rising blood sugar levels, which typically take off in our late 30s or early 40s as our bodies become less adept at metabolizing glucose in the bloodstream. Now a study has linked these rising levels with momentary forgetfulness, pinpointing exactly where in the brain the aging process acts—a finding that could help the elderly ward off memory lapses....

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has announced its first pilot projects to treat metal pollution in soil and prevent farmland from further contamination, but critics say the government’s overall efforts are underfunded and inefficient. The Ministry of Finance will subsidize soil pollution prevention and treatment in three cities in the central province of Hunan, state media reported, as pilot efforts to halt developments that have rendered 3.33 million hectares (8 million acres) of Chinese farmland too polluted to grow crops on....