Methane drives sudden creation of monstrous crater in Russia

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by Jennifer Leman

A 164-foot crater appeared along the Yamal Peninsula in Russia.
A team of journalists from Vesti Yamal spotted the crater—caused by an explosive pocket of methane—and alerted scientists.
Russia’s northern latitudes have seen record temperatures this year, a harbinger of doom for thawing permafrost in the region.

A 164-foot crater burst open in a desolate region of the Siberian tundra, according to the Russian news agency Vesti Yamal. Journalists from the publication spotted the crater during an assignment on the Yamal Peninsula in July and released their footage this week.

This is the 17th such feature, called a hydrolaccolith, that scientists have found across the thawing Siberian tundra, according to The Siberian Times. Researchers discovered the first one in 2014. They believe pockets of methane gases trapped beneath Earth’s surface bulge and eventually explode as carbon-rich permafrost in the region begins to melt, releasing trapped gases.

“Warming and thawing of surface soil weakens the frozen ‘cap,’ resulting in the blowout that causes the craters,” Sue Natali, Arctic program director at Woodwell Climate Research Center, told Gizmodo.

It’s been a hot, hot summer in Siberia. The small town of Verkhoyansk, Russia, which lies north of the Arctic Circle, recorded its highest-ever temperature, 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, on June 20, according to National Geographic.

Scientists suspect thawing permafrost caused a Siberian diesel storage tank to collapse and dump over 20,000 tons of fuel into local river. As permafrost continues to melt, it could destabilize infrastructure—buildings, roads and, critically, oil pipelines—across the Arctic.

But residents who live along the Arctic tundra aren’t the only ones who should be concerned. Methane’s release into the atmosphere can have global impacts.

The colorless, odorless and highly flammable gas is one of the most potent greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere. (Try 30 times stronger than carbon dioxide.) So as more of the gas is released into the atmosphere, its effects could serve to accelerate warming and may even spur a perilous feedback loop.

There’s more work to be done to understand exactly what is happening at blast sites like the one discovered in July by Vesti Yamal’s journalists. Vasily Bogoyavlensky, a researcher with the Russian Oil and Gas Research Institute in Moscow, told Vesti Yamal his team plans to investigate the structure and submit its findings to an academic journal.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a33864835/crater-methane-eruption-russia/

There’s a Theory Beyond Relativity That Would Allow You to Fly Through a Wormhole

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By Matt Williams

Wormholes are a popular feature in science fiction, the means through which spacecraft can achieve faster-than-light (FTL) travel and instantaneously move from one point in spacetime to another.

And while the General Theory of Relativity forbids the existence of “traversable wormholes”, recent research has shown that they are actually possible within the domain of quantum physics.

The only downsides are that they would actually take longer to traverse than normal space and/or likely be microscopic.

In a new study performed by a pair of Ivy League scientists, the existence of physics beyond the Standard Model could mean that there are wormholes out there that are not only large enough to be traversable, but entirely safe for human travelers looking to get from point A to point B.

The study, titled “Humanly traversable wormholes,” was conducted by Juan Maldacena (the Carl P. Feinberg Professor of theoretical physics from the Institute of Advanced Study) and Alexey Milekhin, a graduate of astrophysics student at Princeton University. The pair have written extensively on the subject of wormholes in the past and how they could be a means for traveling safely through space.

The theory regarding wormholes emerged in the early 20th century in response to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The first to postulate their existence was Karl Schwarzschild, a German physicist and astronomer whose solutions to Einstein’s field equation (the Schwarzschild metric) resulted in the first theoretical basis for the existence of black holes.

A consequence of the Schwarzschild metric was what he referred to as “eternal black holes,” which were essentially connections between different points in spacetime. However, these Schwarzschild wormholes (aka. Einstein–Rosen bridges) were not stable as they would collapse too quickly for anything to cross from one end to the other.

As Maldacena and Milekhin explained to Universe Today via email, traversable wormholes require special circumstances in order to exist. This includes the existence of negative energy, which is not permissible in classic physics – but is possible within the realm of quantum physics.

A good example of this, they claim, is the Casimir Effect, where quantum fields produce negative energy while propagating along a closed circle:

“However, this effect is typically small because it is quantum. In our previous paper [“Traversable wormholes in four dimensions”] we realized that this effect can become considerable for black holes with large magnetic charge. The new idea was to use special properties of charged massless fermions (particles like the electron but with zero mass). For a magnetically charged black hole these travel along the magnetic field lines (In a way similar to how the charged particles of the solar wind create the auroras near the polar regions of the Earth).”

The fact that these particles can travel in a circle by entering one spot and emerging where they started in ambient flat space, implies that the “vacuum energy” is modified and can be negative.

The presence of this negative energy can support the existence of a stable wormhole, a bridge between points in spacetime that won’t collapse before something has a chance to traverse it.

Such wormholes are possible based on matter that is part of the Standard Model of particle physics. The only problem is, these wormholes would have to be microscopic in size and would only exist over very small distances.

For human travel, the wormholes would have to be large, which requires that physics beyond the Standard Model be employed.

For Maldacena and Milekhin, this is where the Randall-Sundrum II model (aka. 5-dimensional warped geometry theory) comes into play. Named after theoretical physicists Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum, this model describes the Universe in terms of five-dimensions and was originally proposed to solve a hierarchy problem in particle physics.

“The Randall-Sundrom II model was based on the realization that this five-dimensional spacetime could also be describing physics at lower energies than the ones we usually explore, but that it would have escaped detection because it couples with our matter only through gravity. In fact, its physics is similar to adding many strongly interacting massless fields to the known physics. And for this reason it can give rise to the required negative energy.”

From the outside, Maldacena and Milekhin concluded that these wormholes would resemble intermediately-sized, charged black holes that would generate similarly-powerful tidal forces that spacecraft would need to be wary of. To do that, they claim, a potential traveler would need a very large boost factor as they pass through the center of the wormhole.

Assuming that can be done, the question remains of whether or not these wormholes could act as a shortcut between two points in spacetime? As noted, previous research by Daniel Jafferis of Harvard University (which also considered the work of Einstein and Nathan Rosen) showed that while possible, stable wormholes would actually take longer to traverse than normal space.

According to Maldacena and Milekhin’s work, however, their wormholes would take almost no time to traverse from the perspective of the traveler. From the perspective of an outsider, the travel time would be much longer, which is consistent with General Relativity – where people traveling close to the speed of light will experience time dilation (i.e. time slows down). As Maldacena and Milekhin put it:

“]F]or astronauts going through the wormhole it would take only 1 second of their time to travel 10,000 light-year distance (approximately 5000 billion miles or 1/10 of Milky Way size). An observer who does not go through the wormhole and stays outside sees them taking more than 10,000 years. And all this with no use of fuel, since the gravity accelerates and decelerates the spaceship.”

Another bonus is that traversing these wormholes could be done without the use of fuel since the gravitational force of the wormhole itself would accelerate and decelerates the spaceship. In a space exploration scenario, a pilot would need to navigate the tidal forces of the wormhole to position their spacecraft just right, and then let nature do the rest.

A second later, they would emerge on the other side of the galaxy!

While this might sound encouraging to those who think wormholes could be a means of space travel someday, Maldacena and Milekhin’s work presents some significant drawbacks as well.

For starters, they emphasize that traversable wormholes would have to be engineered using negative mass since no plausible mechanism exists for natural formation.

While this is possible (at least in theory), the necessary spacetime configurations would need to be present beforehand. Even so, the mass and size involved are so great that the task would be beyond any practical technology we can foresee. Second, these wormholes would only be safe if space were cold and flat, which is not the case beyond the Randall Sundrum II model.

On top of all that, any object that enters the wormhole would be accelerated and even the presence of pervasive cosmic background radiation would be a significant hazard.

However, Maldacena and Milekhin emphasize that their study was conducted for the purpose of showing that traversable wormholes can exist as a result of the “subtle interplay between general relativity and quantum physics.”

In short, wormholes are not likely to become a practical way to travel through space – at least, not in any way that’s foreseeable. Perhaps they would not be beyond a Kardashev Type II or Type III civilization, but that’s just speculation. Even so, knowing that a major element in science fiction is not beyond the realm of possibility is certainly encouraging!

https://www.sciencealert.com/there-s-a-theory-of-relativity-that-could-allow-you-to-fly-through-a-wormhole

A Strange Form of Life Could Flourish Deep Inside of Stars, Physicists Say

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by Michelle Starr

When searching for signs of life in the Universe, we tend to look for very specific things, based on what we know: a planet like Earth, in orbit around a star, and at a distance that allows liquid surface water. But there could, conceivably, be other forms of life out there that look like nothing that we have ever imagined before.

Just as we have extremophiles here on Earth – organisms that live in the most extreme and seemingly inhospitable environments the planet has to offer – so too could there be extremophiles out there in the wider Universe.

For instance, species that can form, evolve, and thrive in the interiors of stars. According to new research by physicists Luis Anchordoqui and Eugene Chudnovsky of The City University of New York, such a thing is indeed – hypothetically, at least – possible.

It all depends on how you define life. If the key criteria are the ability to encode information, and the ability for those information carriers to self-replicate faster than they disintegrate, then hypothetical monopole particles threaded on cosmic strings – cosmic necklaces – could form the basis of life inside stars, much like DNA and RNA form the basis of life on Earth.

“Information stored in the RNA (or DNA) encodes the mechanism of self-replication,” Chudnovsky told ScienceAlert.

“Its emergence must have been preceded by the massive formation of random RNA sequences until a sequence was formed capable of self-replication. We believe that a similar process would occur with necklaces in a star, leading to a stationary process of self-replication.”

Strings and monopoles are thought to have emerged in the early Universe, as it cooled down from the Big Bang, and the particle soup of quark-gluon plasma that filled it underwent a symmetry-breaking phase transition and condensed into matter – like vapour condensing into liquid.

Although we have yet to detect cosmic strings (one-dimensional linear objects) or monopoles (elementary particles with only one magnetic pole), a lot of thought has gone into how they might behave.

In 1988, Chudnovsky and his colleague, theoretical physicist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University, predicted that cosmic strings could be captured by stars. There, the turbulence would stretch the string until it formed a network of strings.

According to the new study, cosmic necklaces could form in a sequence of symmetry-breaking phase transitions. In the first stage, monopoles emerge. In the second, strings.

This can produce a stable configuration of one monopole bead and two strings, which in turn could connect to form one-, two-, and even three-dimensional structures – much like atoms joined by chemical bonds, the researchers say.

A one-dimensional necklace would be unlikely to carry information. But more complex structures potentially could – and they could survive long enough to replicate, feeding off the fusion energy generated by the star.

“Compared to the lifetime of a star, its lifetime is an instantaneous spark of light in the dark. What is important is that such a spark manages to produce more sparks before it fades away, thus providing a long lifespan of the species,” the researchers write.

“The complexity evolving through mutations and natural selection increases with the number of generations passed. Consequently, if lifetimes of self-replicating nuclear species are as short as lifetimes of many unstable composite nuclear objects are, they can quickly evolve toward enormous complexity.”

Hypothetically speaking, it’s perhaps possible that such a life-form could develop intelligence, and maybe even serious smarts, Chudnovsky says.

What such a species would look like is a feast for the imagination. But we don’t have to know what they look like to search for signs of their presence. Because such organisms would use some of the energy of their host star to survive and propagate, stars that seem to cool faster than stellar models can account for could be hosts for what the researchers call “nuclear life”.

Several such stars have been observed, and their slightly accelerated cooling is still a mystery. Stars that dim erratically without explanation could be a good place to look, too – like EPIC 249706694. The researchers are careful to note that to link these stars to nuclear life would be an extremely long bow to draw. But there are interesting anomalies out there. And interesting possibilities too.

“Since they would be evolving very fast, they could find a way to explore the cosmos beyond their star, as we have done,” Chudnovsky told ScienceAlert. “They could establish communication and travel between stars. Maybe we should look for their presence in space.”

It’s all extremely theoretical, but wild ideas can be a good way to make new discoveries. The researchers plan to continue their line of inquiry by developing simulations of cosmic necklaces in stars. It may not lead us to glittering star aliens – but even if it doesn’t, it could give us a better understanding of cosmic strings and monopoles.

“It is a fascinating thought that the Universe may be packed with intelligent life that is so different from ours that we failed to recognise its existence,” Chudnovsky said.

The research has been published in Letters in High Energy Physics.

https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-argue-that-life-based-on-cosmic-strings-may-be-possible-inside-stars

Study finds evidence of fecal aerosol COVID-19 transmission

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An outbreak of COVID-19 in an apartment building in China may have been caused by fecal aerosol transmission through bathrooms connected by drainage pipes, according to research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

“To prevent such transmission, bioaerosols can be controlled at the source by avoiding any potential gas leaks from the drainage system to indoor spaces,” Min Kang, MSc, of the Guangdong Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention in China, and colleagues wrote.

Kang and colleagues conducted an epidemiologic survey and a quantitative reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction analysis on throat swabs obtained from study participants to evaluate the temporal and spatial distributions of infected families living in a high-rise apartment building in Guangzhou, China. They also sought to identify environmental variables that may confirm the role of fecal aerosols in these transmissions.

The researchers collected the dates of symptom onset in nine residents from three families in vertically aligned apartments who were infected from January 26 to February 13. They also collected data on travel and exposure history, demographic information and any symptoms experienced by infected residents. Additionally, they examined floor plans, site plans, drainage system information, weather data and CCTV records from elevators in the building.

Later, Kang and colleagues performed airflow and dispersion tests using a tracer gas to mimic SARS-CoV-2 droplets in gas in the drainage systems.

They found that one of the three families with infected persons had traveled to the COVID-19 epicenter in Wuhan, while the other two families did not have a history of travel and developed symptoms later than the first family. The families did not know each other, and CCTV records showed that they did not use the elevator at the same time when they were potentially infectious.

None of the other 217 residents and staff who participated tested positive for COVID-19, according to the researchers.

All but one SARS-CoV-2-positive environmental samples were taken from master bathrooms in the apartments, suggesting that exposure likely occurred there. All three apartments with residents who had COVID-19 were connected through drainage stacks and vents.

Kang and colleagues did not identify evidence of transmission in the elevator or in other locations in the building.

After releasing the tracer gas into the drainage stack through a pipe in a toilet, the researchers determined that bioaerosols could travel to other apartments through the drainage pipes.

Kang and colleagues concluded that the identified infections and locations where SARS-CoV-2-positive samples were taken were consistent with vertical spread of aerosols with the virus through vents. They added that the fecal aerosols containing the virus were likely produced in the vertical stack connecting the apartments when a toilet was flushed after being used by an infected patient.

In an editorial accompanying the study, Michael Gormley, PhD, CEng, director of the Institute for Sustainable Building Design at Heriot-Watt University in the United Kingdom, said, “Kang and colleagues describe a situation in which infectious aerosols may have been formed as the result of turbulent flows within a wastewater plumbing system containing virus-laden feces.”

Gormley said the research adds “to the growing body of evidence that wastewater plumbing systems, particularly those in high-rise buildings, deserve closer investigation, both immediately in the context of SARS-CoV-2 and in the long term, because they may be a reservoir for other harmful pathogens.”

References:
Kang M, et al. Ann Intern Med. 2020;doi:10.7326/M20-0928.
Gormley M. Ann Intern Med. 2020;doi: 10.7326/M20-6134.

https://www.healio.com/news/primary-care/20200903/study-finds-evidence-of-fecal-aerosol-covid19-transmission?utm_source=selligent&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=news&m_bt=1162769038120

Watch a toy boat float upside down in levitating liquid

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Shaking a liquid fast enough allows it to levitate, and a toy boat can float on top of the levitating fluid – or upside down beneath it.

When a viscous fluid like silicone oil is shaken up and down around 100 times a second, resulting pressure waves can cause air bubbles in the fluid to pulsate, wobble and sink. If the bubbles are big enough, this can lead to a layer of air beneath the fluid, making a sort of strange floating pond.

When Emmanuel Fort at the Langevin Institute in Paris and his colleagues poured beads into one of these floating ponds, they found that rather than falling straight through the liquid and the air below it to the bottom of the vibrating container, some beads seemed to “float” at the bottom of the liquid.

“We were playing with the experiment,” says Fort. “We had this liquid layer and some beads, and we were surprised to see the beads floating on the lower interface. At first, it was not meant to be applied to anything practical, we were just amazed by the system and how counter-intuitive it was.”

They found that the shaking of the container stabilises the bottom of the liquid, vibrating any droplets that might start to form back into the bulk of the puddle. This also creates a stable point for floating objects at the bottom of the liquid: the researchers floated small toy boats on both the top and the bottom.

Their container levitated about half a litre of silicone oil or glycerol, but a bigger shaker could in theory make just about any amount of liquid levitate, says Fort. “There is no size limit as long as the liquid is viscous enough, so if you wanted to swim on the bottom of a levitating liquid layer you would be swimming through something more viscous like honey, which would be entertaining to watch,” he says.

More practically, he says that this method of levitating liquid and floating objects beneath it could be used for processes that involve sorting and transporting solid objects in fluids, like some kinds of mining or waste-water treatment.

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2643-8

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2253283-watch-a-toy-boat-float-upside-down-in-a-levitating-puddle/#ixzz6X4iWwCLK

Does washing clothes kill all the germs?

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BY MARKHAM HEID

Laundry serves far nobler purposes than stamping out body odor. It also protects you from getting sick. (Brace yourself, because this is going to get gross in a hurry.)

Imagine that someone who lives in your house is ill. A single gram of his fecal matter contains millions of viruses, and exposure to just a hundred of those viruses can make you sick, says Kelly Reynolds, a germ researcher and associate professor of environmental health at the University of Arizona.

Regardless of how assiduously he wipes, the average person has about a tenth of a gram of fecal residue in his underwear, says Chuck Gerba, a professor of microbiology at Arizona. If you’re washing that sick person’s underwear with your own, chances are very good that his sickness-causing organisms are going to make their way onto your clothing.

“We’ve found that one germy item in the washer will spread to 90% of the other items,” Reynolds says. And no, it doesn’t matter how hot you set the water temperature on your machine. “When it comes to molds that cause skin or respiratory infections, or organisms that cause colds, flu and stomach flu, most of them will survive the wash cycle,” she says.

It’s the dryer—not the washing machine—that lays waste to harmful microorganisms. “High heat drying for at least 28 minutes is the most effective way to kill viruses,” Reynolds says. The “high heat” setting is key. Energy efficient, low-heat settings may not get the job done, she says.

You’re not even safe if you wash your sick housemate’s clothing separately from your own, since his germs will hang out in the washer even after the clothing is gone. Run a wash cycle with bleach or another type of disinfectant to clean it of sickness-cause organisms, Reynolds says.

The good news is that if no one in your household is sick, you can relax a bit about killing the germs in your load. “It’s when someone is ill that you really want to up your game,” Reynolds says. If your housemate catches something, have him or her wear clothing and sleep on sheets that you can wash and dry using high heat.

And yes—it’s ok to spare your expensive, line-dry only gym gear from the dryer. Your big worry there is probably foul odors, not viral pathogens. If you’re diligent about washing your hands (and wiping down the machines at the gym before you climb aboard) you shouldn’t have much to worry about, Reynolds says. Just be sure to wash your duds soon after you finish exercising. “The longer those clothes remain damp with sweat, the more mold and bacteria are going to proliferate,” she says.

If your first instinct after reading this is to double down on detergent, don’t. A washing machine’s cycles are designed to break up and wash away only so much cleaning agent, says Jolie Kerr, an author, cleaning expert and host of the podcast Ask a Clean Person. If you have a heavy hand with the pump or scoop, the excess detergent can build up on your clothing and lock in bacteria and odors, she says. (Fabric softener, too, can coat your clothing in a residue that traps smells, she adds.)

If you can’t dry your stuff on high heat—or at all—hang it up outdoors or in direct sunlight. The sun’s ultraviolet light has disinfecting properties, Reynolds says.

Finally, be mindful of transferring your clothes from the washer to the dryer. “Unless you’ve used bleach or some other disinfectant, those items are not sanitized,” Reynolds says, so be sure to wash your hands after handling them.

https://time.com/4676920/washing-machine-germs/

Thanks to Mr. C for bringing this to the It’s Interesting commmunity.

2 College Students Dreamed Up an A.L.S. Treatment. The Results Are In.

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Amylyx co-founders Joshua Cohen, left, and Justin Klee in their company’s new Cambridge offices.


Mike Teal, who lives in Tallahassee, began developing symptoms of A.L.S. in 2016. He takes an experimental drug called AMX0035 which aims to slow the progression of the disease.

Seven years ago, Joshua Cohen, then a junior at Brown University majoring in biomedical engineering, was captivated by the question of why people develop brain disorders. “How does a neuron die?” he wondered.

After poring over scientific studies, he sketched out his ideas for a way to treat them. “I was sitting in my dorm room and I had kind of written out the research on these crazy-looking diagrams,” he recalled.

A study published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that the experimental treatment he and another Brown student, Justin Klee, conceived might hold promise for slowing progression of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the ruthless disease that robs people of their ability to move, speak, eat and ultimately breathe.

More than 50 clinical trials over 25 years have failed to find effective treatments for A.L.S., also called Lou Gehrig’s disease, which often causes death within two to five years. But now, scientific advances and an influx of funding are driving clinical trials for many potential therapies, generating hope and intense discussion among patients, doctors and researchers.

The new study reported that a two-drug combination slowed progression of A.L.S. paralysis by about six weeks over about six months, approximately 25 percent more than a placebo. On average, patients on a placebo declined in 18 weeks to a level that patients receiving the treatment didn’t reach until 24 weeks, said the principal investigator, Dr. Sabrina Paganoni, a neuromuscular medicine specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Healey & AMG Center for A.L.S.

“It’s such a terrible disease and as you can imagine, for the folks who have it or the family members, it’s just desperation that something’s going to work,” said Dr. Walter Koroshetz, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, who wasn’t involved in the new study. “Any kind of slowing of progression for a patient with A.L.S. might be valuable even though it’s not a big effect.”

He and other experts were careful not to overstate the results and noted that the drug wasn’t shown to improve patients’ condition or halt decline. The study evaluated safety and efficacy in a Phase 2 trial with 137 participants, not as large and long as many Phase 3 trials often required for regulatory approval. Experts and the authors themselves said further trials were necessary.

Still, doctors and advocates said the relentlessness of the illness and the availability of only two approved A.L.S. medications, neither significantly effective, gives urgency to finding additional treatments. The A.L.S. Association, an advocacy group, said that since the study found the drug to be safe and patients can die waiting for other trials, it should be made available to people with the disease as soon as possible.

“That can mean the difference between being able to feed yourself versus being fed or not needing a wheelchair versus needing a wheelchair, and if we can delay that level of disability, that’s a big deal for our community,” said Neil Thakur, chief mission officer of the association, which helped finance the study.

The association will urge the Food and Drug Administration to grant approval as soon as the company applies for it, and then require rigorous follow-up studies. The group will also urge the company, Amylyx, a Massachusetts start-up the students founded, to seek the agency’s permission to provide the drug for compassionate use while it is still being evaluated.

A.L.S., the most common motor neuron disorder, diagnosed in about 6,000 people worldwide each year, has drawn greater attention of late, bolstered by prominent people with the disease, like Stephen Hawking, the astrophysicist who died in 2018; Steve Gleason, a former professional football player; and Ady Barkan, a health care activist who used a computer-generated voice at this year’s Democratic National Convention because he can no longer speak.

There is now legislation in Congress to accelerate A.L.S. therapy access and a $25 million federal research program. The Ice Bucket Challenge, a 2014 fund-raising juggernaut featuring celebrities and others dumping icy water on their heads, generated about $220 million. More than 20 treatments are being tested, including stem cells, immunotherapy and genetic therapies for the 10 percent of cases caused by known mutations. Results from other trials are expected soon.

“This is a really exciting time,” said Dr. Robert Miller, director of clinical research at Forbes Norris MDA/A.L.S. Research Center at California Pacific Medical Center, who is involved in several trials, but not the new study.

Most of the study’s participants were already taking one or both of the approved A.L.S. medications: riluzole, which can extend survival by several months, and edaravone, which can slow progression by about 33 percent. It’s possible the new drug, AMX0035, provided additional benefit. Dr. Merit Cudkowicz, the Healey Center’s director and the study’s senior author, said she envisioned the new drug combination would be taken alongside existing medications.

The study is the first clinical trial supported by Ice Bucket Challenge money to publish results, said the A.L.S. Association. Amylyx financed the bulk of the study and agreed to use a percentage of income from sales of the drug to repay 150 percent of the association’s grant to fund more research.

Mr. Cohen’s idea in 2013 was that a combination of taurursodiol, a supplement, and sodium phenylbutyrate, a medication for a pediatric urea disorder, could safeguard neurons by preventing dysfunction of two structures in cells, mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum.

He quickly involved Mr. Klee, a senior neuroscience major who was a fraternity brother and fellow player on the university’s club tennis team. Over cheap sparkling wine, “we both said ‘let’s start a company,’” Mr. Klee said. “We had no idea what we were doing.”

They heard skepticism from several experts they consulted until they met with Rudolph Tanzi, a prominent Alzheimer’s expert who had belonged to their fraternity.

Dr. Tanzi told them to test whether the drug combination protected rat neurons from a bleach-like chemical that kills them. With $8,000 from a university grant, their parents (two of whom are physicians) and savings, they hired a professional lab, which found that their combination salvaged 90 percent of neurons, Dr. Tanzi said.

“’That’s impossible,’” he said he told them, urging more tests, which showed 95 percent of neurons were saved.

“Guys, you got something here,” Dr. Tanzi told them. He became an Amylyx co-founder and leads its scientific advisory board.

The combination was christened AMX0035 because 3 and 5 are the favorite numbers of Mr. Cohen’s fiancée. During YMCA basketball sessions with Dr. Tanzi, they discussed trying it for Alzheimer’s. But investors weren’t interested.

Dr. Tanzi introduced the young men to Dr. Cudkowicz, who had once studied sodium phenylbutyrate and convinced them to test it for A.L.S. It’s now also in an Alzheimer’s trial.

The A.L.S. study, called Centaur, conducted across the country by leading A.L.S. researchers, involved patients who developed symptoms within 18 months before the trial and were affected in at least three body regions, generally signs of fast-progressing disease. Two-thirds received AMX0035, a bitter-tasting powder they mixed with water to drink or ingest through a feeding tube twice daily.

The primary goal was slowing decline on a 48-point A.L.S. scale rating 12 physical abilities, including walking, speech, swallowing, dressing, handwriting and breathing. Over 24 weeks, patients on placebo declined 2.32 points more than those taking the drug combination. Fine motor skills benefited most.

“The data that we see here indicates there may be some beneficial effect but it doesn’t look like what you’d call a home run,” Dr. Koroshetz said.

Some patients experienced gastrointestinal side effects like nausea and diarrhea, but after three weeks those effects largely subsided, and overall, the drug was safe, researchers said.

In most secondary measures, including muscle strength, respiratory ability and whether patients were hospitalized, AMX0035 appeared better than placebo, although it wasn’t statistically significant. Another measure, a biomarker of neurodegeneration, didn’t seem significantly affected. A few patients died in both groups, but experts said identifying the impact on mortality would require evaluation over a longer period.

“This is very encouraging,” said Dr. Neil Shneider, director of the Eleanor and Lou Gehrig A.L.S. Center at Columbia University, who was not involved. “The question is, is the effect on function sustained beyond the six-month trial period and does it have an effect on survival?”

Researchers said they would soon publish longer-term data because most participants opted to take the drug combination after the trial, and some have now taken it for over two years.

Experts were torn about whether F.D.A. approval should be granted, since Phase 3 results are often required.

“From my heart, I’d say we are so desperate for meaningful treatment for A.L.S. that something that looks as promising as this might well be approved,” Dr. Miller said. “From my head, I’d say it could be chance. We’ve seen that before where Phase 2 looked really good.”

Dr. Shneider noted that some patients have already been obtaining one or both components from Europe or Asia and taking it themselves. “There’ll be a lot of interest from patients and families to get out this drug,” he said.

But experts also said that making the drug available soon might make it difficult to recruit patients for subsequent trials. And insurers may not cover drugs approved based on Phase 2 results, Dr. Koroshetz said. Some patients have had difficulty getting insurance coverage for edaravone, which costs about $148,000 a year and was approved after a Phase 3 trial of the same size and duration as Centaur. Amylyx officials declined to provide a price estimate for their treatment.

In interviews, two trial participants said they believed AMX0035 was beneficial. Given the unpredictable trajectory of the disease, they said any specific effects were hard to describe. Neither knows if they received the drug or placebo during the trial, but they’ve received the treatment since.

Mike Teal, 52, of Tallahassee, Fla., began having symptoms in 2016 and has taken the drug since at least the spring of 2018, when his trial ended. Soon after, he also started edaravone.

He currently has limited speech, needs a feeding tube, often uses a wheelchair and requires a breathing machine every few hours. Last year, he had to stop working at the gift and accessories store he owns with his wife, Lauren.

He said he’s had no negative side effects and believes the drug may have eased cramps in his neck, abdomen and legs.

“I’m confident it has slowed my progression,” he wrote in an email. “But it’s difficult to measure.”

Jeff Derby, 61, a retired forest products company manager in Cloverdale, British Columbia, said that when he was diagnosed in July 2018, doctors described his disease as relatively slow-progressing. He thinks his decline has become more gradual in the 18 months he’s been taking the drug since his trial ended. Mr. Derby, who also takes the two approved medications, said weakness in his left hand isn’t worsening as quickly.

“I think AMX0035 will ultimately be part of a treatment cocktail like there is for other diseases where you’ll take three, four or five different things, and as a group, they will help slow the progression to the point where you can live a somewhat normal life,” he said.

Long-term usage of antidepressant medications may protect from dementia

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Long-term treatment with certain antidepressants appeared associated with reduced dementia incidence, according to results of a case-control study published in Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

“Depression could represent one of these potentially modifiable risk factors for all-cause dementia,” Claudia Bartels, PhD, of the department of psychiatry and psychotherapy at University Medical Center Goettingen in Germany, and colleagues wrote. “Numerous studies have concordantly demonstrated a strong association between depression and an increased risk [for] subsequent dementia. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are commonly used to treat depressive symptoms in [Alzheimer’s disease] dementia.

“Preclinical research in recent years has suggested that SSRIs reduce amyloid plaque burden in transgenic mouse models of [Alzheimer’s disease] and in cognitively healthy humans, attenuate amyloid-[beta]1-42–induced tau hyperphosphorylation in cell culture and improve cognition in mice.”

However, the effects of SSRIs on cognition in Alzheimer’s disease dementia were linked mostly to negative results in randomized clinical trials; research is sparse regarding which antidepressants may influence risk for developing dementia; and evidence is particularly rare for treatment duration effects on this risk. Thus, Bartels and colleagues sought to determine the effects of antidepressant drug classes and individual compounds with various treatment durations on the risk for developing dementia. The researchers analyzed data of 62,317 individuals with an incident dementia diagnosis who were included in the German Disease Analyzer database, and they compared outcomes to those of controls matched by age, sex and physician. They conducted logistic regression analyses, which were adjusted for health insurance status and comorbid diseases linked to dementia or antidepressant use, to evaluate the association between dementia incidence and treatment with four major classes of antidepressant drug, as well as 14 of the most commonly prescribed individual antidepressants.

Results showed an association between treatment for 2 years or longer with any antidepressant and a lower risk for dementia vs. short-term treatment among 17 of 18 comparison. Particularly for long-term treatment, herbal and tricyclic antidepressants were linked to a decrease in incidence of dementia. Long-term treatment with escitalopram (OR = 0.66; 95% CI, 0.5-0.89) and Hypericum perforatum (OR = 0.6; 95% CI, 0.51-0.7) were associated with the lowest risks for dementia on an individual antidepressant basis.

“Clinical trials — although well acknowledged as the gold standard procedure — have debunked numerous promising compounds and become increasingly challenging with longer treatment durations,” Bartels and colleagues wrote. “Thus, and in awareness of the controversy of this suggestion, analyzing data from registries in a naturalistic setting may be an attractive and feasible alternative. If individual datasets could be combined in a multinational effort, even more powerful analyses of merged big databases could be performed and an additive contribution with naturalistic data could be made.”

https://www.healio.com/news/psychiatry/20200828/longterm-treatment-with-certain-antidepressants-may-reduce-dementia-incidence

A new blood test may predict the onset of psychotic disorders years in advance, during childhood

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By Rich Haridy

An international team of researchers has used machine learning to produce a novel blood test that can predict a young person’s risk of developing a psychotic disorder, such as schizophrenia, years before the condition develops.

Only around a quarter of young people who display mild, transitory psychotic symptoms at an early age ultimately go on to develop a serious psychotic disorder. Schizophrenia, for example, is generally not clinically diagnosed until a person reaches their twenties. However, the condition is known to present a number of signs and symptoms than can precede the full-blown psychotic episodes often needed for clinical diagnosis.

This early pre-clinical phase of a psychotic disorder is often referred to as the prodromal stage. In the case of schizophrenia, prodromal symptoms appear in nearly three quarters of patients up to five years before the first episode of psychosis occurs.

David Cotter, a molecular psychiatrist from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and senior author on the new study, suggests early detection of those most at risk of developing psychotic disorders is vital for administering preventative treatments.

“Ideally, we would like to prevent psychotic disorders, but that requires being able to accurately identify who is most at risk,” says Cotter.

The new study first looked at blood samples from a number of 12-year-olds classified as at a clinically high-risk of psychosis. Over recent years several tools have been developed to identify adolescent subjects at the highest risk of developing psychosis.

The 12-year-old subjects were followed until around the age of 18, so the researchers were able to differentiate blood samples between those who went on to suffer a psychotic episode and those who didn’t. Using machine learning, the researchers homed in on a unique pattern of proteins that distinguished those who ultimately went on to develop a psychotic disorder.

Ten particular proteins were identified as most predictive, and the test was subsequently validated in a separate dataset. Using the most accurate protein pattern, the researchers were able to correctly determine which high-risk subjects would go on to develop a psychotic disorder by the age of 18 with a 93-percent accuracy.

The test was less accurate in predicting those high-risk 12-year-olds that did not go on to develop a psychosis by the age of 18. However, considering only between 16 and 35 percent of young people considered at clinical high risk ultimately transition to a full psychotic disorder, even this low level of accuracy could be useful in stratifying those younger patients more likely to develop psychosis.

“Our research has shown that, with help from machine learning, analysis of protein levels in blood samples can predict who is at truly at risk and could possibly benefit from preventive treatments,” says Cotter. “We now need to study these markers in other people at high risk of psychosis to confirm these findings.”

Another compelling insight offered by this new study is the finding that many of these protein markers predicting psychosis are linked with inflammatory processes. There is a small, but burgeoning, body of study finding links between psychosis and autoimmune conditions, suggesting systemic inflammation can influence a number of psychiatric illnesses.

The new research was published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-08/r-sub082620.php

Elon Musk’s Euralink soon to reveal a working brain-computer chip for “human-AI symbiosis”

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By Anthony Cuthbertson

Elon Musk has said he will demonstrate a functional brain-computer interface this week during a live presentation from his mysterious Neuralink startup.

The billionaire entrepreneur, who also heads SpaceX and Tesla, founded Neuralink in 2016 with the ultimate aim of merging artificial intelligence with the human brain.

Until now, there has only been one public event showing off the startup’s technology, during which Musk revealed a “sewing machine-like” device capable of stitching threads into a person’s head.

The procedure to implant the chip will eventually be similar in speed and efficiency to Lasik laser eye surgery, according to Musk, and will be performed by a robot.

The robot and the working brain chip will be unveiled during a live webcast at 3pm PT (11pm BST) on Friday, Musk tweeted on Tuesday night.

In response to a question on Twitter, he said that the comparison with laser eye surgery was still some way off. “Still far from Lasik, but could get pretty close in a few years,” he tweeted.

He also said that Friday’s demonstration would show “neurons firing in real-time… the matrix in the matrix.”

The device has already been tested on animals and human trials were originally planned for 2020, though it is not yet clear whether they have started.


A robot designed by Neuralink would insert the ‘threads’ into the brain using a needle


A fully implantable neural interface connects to the brain through tiny threads


Neuralink says learning to use the device is ‘like learning to touch type or play the piano’


Neuralink says learning to use the device is ‘like learning to touch type or play the piano’

In the build up to Friday’s event, Musk has drip fed details about Neuralink’s technology and the capabilities it could deliver to people using it.

In a series of tweets last month, he said the chip “could extend the range of hearing beyond normal frequencies and amplitudes,” as well as allow wearers to stream music directly to their brain.

Other potential applications include regulating hormone levels and delivering “enhanced abilities” like greater reasoning and anxiety relief.

Earlier this month, scientists unconnected to Neuralink unveiled a new bio-synthetic material that they claim could be used to help integrate electronics with the human body.

The breakthrough could help achieve Musk’s ambition of augmenting human intelligence and abilities, which he claims is necessary allow humanity to compete with advanced artificial intelligence.

He claims that humans risk being overtaken by AI within the next five years, and that AI could eventually view us in the same way we currently view house pets.

“I don’t love the idea of being a house cat, but what’s the solution?” he said in 2016, just months before he founded Neuralink. “I think one of the solutions that seems maybe the best is to add an AI layer.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-computer-chip-ai-event-when-a9688966.html