Tag: science

Researchers Announce They’ve Discovered A New Cannabinoid In Marijuana

Researchers have announced that they’ve successfully identified a new cannabinoid—cannabielsoxa—produced by the marijuana plant as well as a number of other compounds “reported for the first time from the flowers of C. sativa.”

The team of government and university researchers out of South Korea also evaluated 11 compounds in cannabis for antitumor effects in neuroblastoma cells, finding that seven “revealed strong inhibitory activity.”

Authors said the findings represent “an initial step toward developing a product for the treatment of neuroblastoma,” a cancer they note “is the most common solid tumor in children and the most frequent malignancy in the first year of life.”

Published this month in the journal Pharmaceuticals, the paper says researchers used chromatographic techniques to isolate the compounds. They then examined their molecular structures and used a metabolic testing method to assess their toxicity to neuroblastoma cells.

“This study successfully isolated a new cannabinoid and six known cannabinoid compounds, along with a new chlorin-type compound and three additional chlorine-type compounds,” the study says, “which were reported for the first time from the flowers of C. sativa.”

Two of the compounds identified for the first time in cannabis—132-hydroxypheophorbide b ethyl ester and ligulariaphytin A—are described as “chlorin-type compounds.”

They, along with five other known cannabinoids—cannabidiol (CBD), cannabidiolic acid (CBDA), cannabidiolic acid methyl ester (CBDA-ME), delta-8 THC and cannabichromene (CBG)—”could be considered as the potential compounds for antitumor effects against neuroblastomas,” researchers found.

Results of the antitumor analyses “demonstrated that cannabinoid compounds had stronger inhibitory effects on neuroblastoma cells than chlorin-type compounds,” the paper notes.

The new cannbinoid, cannabielsoxa, was not among the compounds that researchers identified as potentially toxic to neuroblastoma cells, however.

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Scientists spark major breakthrough with ‘blanket’ that makes rivers drinkable: ‘We are the only ones who have made these structures’

Ohio State University researchers have developed a way to supercharge titanium oxide nanoparticles, creating a light-absorbing blanket that can clean water and generate power.

The process starts with electrospinning — a method of applying electrical force to create small fibers — in order to develop fiber-like strips of titanium dioxide (TiO2). This material is often used in solar cells, gas sensors, and various self-cleaning technologies, as the school reported.

The power generation abilities of TiO2 have previously been limited since the necessary chemical reactions only occur through the use of non-visible UV light.

Following the addition of copper, however, these new nanomat structures are able to absorb enough light energy to break down pollutants in air and water, according to Professor Pelagia-Iren Gouma, the lead author of this study.

“There hasn’t been an easy way to create something like a blanket that you can lay on water and start creating energy,” she said. “But we are the only ones who have made these structures and the only ones to demonstrate that they actually work.”

When it absorbs light, the report explained, TiO2 forms electrons that oxidize water and break down pollutants until they’re benign. The addition of copper was able to supercharge the process and optimize the material’s effectiveness.

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Scientists claim to have discovered ‘new colour’ no one has seen before

A team of scientists claim to have discovered a new colour that no human has ever seen before.

The research follows an experiment in which researchers in the US had laser pulses fired into their eyes.

By stimulating specific cells in the retina, the participants claim to have witnessed a blue-green colour that scientists have called “olo”, but some experts have said the existence of a new colour is “open to argument”.

The findings, published in the journal Science Advances on Friday, have been described by the study’s co-author, Prof Ren Ng from the University of California, as “remarkable”.

He and his colleagues believe that the results could potentially further research into colour blindness.

Prof Ng, who was one of five people to take part in the experiment, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday that olo was “more saturated than any colour that you can see in the real world”.

“Let’s say you go around your whole life and you see only pink, baby pink, a pastel pink,” he said.

“And then one day you go to the office and someone’s wearing a shirt, and it’s the most intense baby pink you’ve ever seen, and they say it’s a new colour and we call it red.”

During the team’s experiment, researchers shone a laser beam into the pupil of one eye of each participant.

There were five participants in the study – four male and one female – who all had normal colour vision. Three of the participants – including Prof Ng – were co-authors of the research paper.

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Curious Grad Student Accidentally Discovers Shape-Changing Liquid That Bends the Laws of Thermodynamics

University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers have discovered a surprising “shape-changing” liquid that seems to bend the laws of thermodynamics.

The strange compound—made of oil, water, and magnetic nickel particles—was first assembled by a graduate student who was merely curious to see what might happen. To his surprise, when the liquid was shaken, the magnetic particles quickly reformed into a shape resembling a Greek urn.

Emulsion and Thermodynamics

“Imagine your favorite Italian salad dressing,” says Thomas Russell, Silvio O. Conte Distinguished Professor of Polymer Science and Engineering at UMass Amherst and one of the paper’s senior authors. “It’s made up of oil, water and spices, and before you pour it onto your salad, you shake it up so that all the ingredients mix.”

While water and oil normally separate, they can combine through a process called emulsion, where small bits of a third material enter the mix, reducing surface tension between the two normally incompatible substances. The emulsion process works as described by the laws of thermodynamics.

Playing Around in the Lab

A wide range of technologies and applications make use of emulsification. While experimenting with emulsions in the lab, UMass Amherst graduate student Anthony Raykh mixed magnetized nickel with oil and water just to see what might happen.

“Because you can engineer all sorts of interesting materials with useful properties when a fluid contains magnetic particles,” says Raykh. “And, in a complete surprise, the mixture formed this beautiful, pristine urn-shape.”

Despite repeated, vigorous shaking, the mixture consistently returned to a shape resembling an urn. Even altering the size of the magnetic particles did not change the effect.

“I thought ‘what is this thing?’ So, I walked up and down the halls of the Polymer Science and Engineering Department, knocking on my professors’ doors, asking them if they knew what was going on,” Raykh continued.

None of the UMass Amherst researchers could immediately explain the phenomenon. Two of Raykh’s professors, David Hoagland and Thomas Russell, took an interest and joined the investigation.

Investigating a Perplexing Liquid

As the small team began conducting experiments, they expanded their collaboration to include researchers from Tufts and Syracuse universities for help with simulations. The growing team of experts across the Northeast ultimately concluded that strong magnetism was behind the liquid’s unusual behavior.

“When you look very closely at the individual nanoparticles of magnetized nickel that form the boundary between the water and oil,” says Hoagland, “you can get extremely detailed information on how different forms assemble. In this case, the particles are magnetized strongly enough that their assembly interferes with the process of emulsification, which the laws of thermodynamics describe.”

The liquid’s magnetic action reverses the normal emulsion process. Instead of decreasing the tension between oil and water, as normally occurs when introducing a third particle, the magnets increase the surface tension. As a result, the boundary separating the oil and water forms a curve.

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The Return of the Dire Wolf

Romulus and Remus are doing what puppies do: chasing, tussling, nipping, nuzzling. But there’s something very un-puppylike about the snowy white 6-month olds—their size, for starters. At their young age they already measure nearly 4 ft. long, tip the scales at 80 lb., and could grow to 6 ft. and 150 lb. Then there’s their behavior: the angelic exuberance puppies exhibit in the presence of humans—trotting up for hugs, belly rubs, kisses—is completely absent. They keep their distance, retreating if a person approaches. Even one of the handlers who raised them from birth can get only so close before Romulus and Remus flinch and retreat. This isn’t domestic canine behavior, this is wild lupine behavior: the pups are wolves. Not only that, they’re dire wolves—which means they have cause to be lonely.

The dire wolf once roamed an American range that extended as far south as Venezuela and as far north as Canada, but not a single one has been seen in over 10,000 years, when the species went extinct. Plenty of dire wolf remains have been discovered across the Americas, however, and that presented an opportunity for a company named Colossal Biosciences. 

Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished. TIME met the males (Khaleesi was not present due to her young age) at a fenced field in a U.S. wildlife facility on March 24, on the condition that their location remain a secret to protect the animals from prying eyes.

The dire wolf isn’t the only animal that Colossal, which was founded in 2021 and currently employs 130 scientists, wants to bring back. Also on their de-extinction wish list is the woolly mammoth, the dodo, and the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. Already, in March, the company surprised the science community with the news that it had copied mammoth DNA to create a woolly mouse, a chimeric critter with the long, golden coat and the accelerated fat metabolism of the mammoth.

If all this seems to smack of a P.T. Barnum, the company has a reply. Colossal claims that the same techniques it uses to summon back species from the dead could prevent existing but endangered animals from slipping into extinction themselves. What they learn restoring the mammoth, they say, could help them engineer more robust elephants that can better survive the climatic ravages of a warming world. Bring back the thylacine and you might help preserve the related marsupial known as the quoll. Techniques learned restoring the dire wolf can similarly be used to support the endangered red wolf.

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Science Stopped Believing in Porn Addiction. You Should, Too

Though porn addiction is not diagnosable, and never has been, there is a large self-help industry surrounding the concept. Mostly online (though in religious areas, such as Utah, there are numerous in-person treatment sites), this industry promotes the idea that modern access to the Internet, and the porn that thrives there, has led to an epidemic of dysregulated, out-of-control porn use, and significant life problems as a result.

Over recent years, numerous studies have begun to suggest that there is more to the story than just porn. Instead, we’ve had growing hints that the conflicts and struggles over porn use have more to do with morality and religion, rather than pornography itself. I’ve covered this surge of research in numerous posts and articles.

Now, researchers have put a nail in the coffin of porn addiction. Josh Grubbs, Samuel Perry and Joshua Wilt are some of the leading researchers on America’s struggles with porn, having published numerous studies examining the impact of porn use, belief in porn addiction, and the effect of porn on marriages. And Rory Reid is a UCLA researcher who was a leading proponent gathering information about the concept of hypersexual disorder for the DSM-5. These four researchers, all of whom have history of neutrality, if not outright support of the concepts of porn addiction, have conducted a meta-analysis of research on pornography and concluded that porn use does not predict problems with porn, but that religiosity does.

The researchers lay out their argument and theory extremely thoroughly, suggesting that Pornography Problems due to Moral Incongruence (PPMI) appear to be the driving force in many of the people who report dysregulated, uncontrollable, or problematic pornography use. Even though many people who grew up in religious, sexually conservative households have strong negative feelings about pornography, many of those same people continue to use pornography. And then they feel guilty and ashamed of their behavior, and angry at themselves and their desire to watch more.

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US Peanut Allergy Epidemic Sprang From Experts’ Exactly-Wrong Guidance

In the 1980s, peanut allergies were almost entirely unheard-of. Today, the United States has one of the highest peanut-allergy rates in the world. Disturbingly, this epidemic was precipitated by institutions that exist to promote public health. The story of their malpractice illuminates the fallibility of respected institutions, and confirms that public health’s catastrophically incorrect guidance during the Covid-19 pandemic wasn’t an isolated anomaly.

The roots of this particular example of expert-inflicted mass suffering can be found in the early 1990s, when the existence of peanut allergies — still a very rare and mostly low-risk phenomenon at the time — first came to public notice. Their entry into public consciousness began with studies published by medical researchers. By the mid-1990s, however, major media outlets were running attention-grabbing stories of hospitalized children and terrified parents. The Great Parental Peanut Panic was on.

As fear and dread mounted, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a professional association of tens of thousands of US pediatricians, felt compelled to tell parents how to prevent their children from becoming the latest victims. “There was just one problem: They didn’t know what precautions, if any, parents should take,” wrote then-Johns Hopkins surgeon and now-FDA Commissioner Marty Makary in his 2024 book, Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.

Ignorance proved no obstacle. Lacking humility and seeking to bolster its reputation as an authoritative organization, the AAP in 2000 handed down definitive instructions: Parents should avoid feeding any peanut product to children under 3 years old who were believed to have a high risk of developing a peanut allergy; pregnant and lactating mothers were likewise cautioned against consuming peanuts.

The AAP noted that “the ability to determine which infants are at high risk is imperfect.” Indeed, simply having a relative with any kind of allergy could land a child or mother in the “high risk” category. Believing they were erring on the side of caution, pediatricians across the country started giving blanket instructions that children shouldn’t be fed any peanut food until age 3; pregnant and breastfeeding mothers were told to steer clear too.

What was the basis of the AAP’s pronouncement? The organization was simply parroting guidance that the UK Department of Health had put forth in 1998. Makary scoured that guidance for a scientific rationale, and found a declaration that mothers who eat peanuts were more likely to have children with allergies, with the claim attributed to a 1996 study. When he checked the study, however, he was shocked to find the data demonstrated no such correlation. The study’s author, Irish pediatric professor Jonathan Hourihane, was himself shocked to see his study used to justify the policy. “It’s ridiculous,” he told Makary. “It’s not what I wanted people to believe.”

Despite the policy’s lack of scientific foundation, the US government’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) fully endorsed the AAP guidance. In time, it would be all too apparent that — as with public health’s later response to Covid-19 — the experts weren’t erring on the side of caution, they were erring on the side of catastrophe.

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The 3 Myths Supporting NIH Funding

The Trump administration’s proposal to cut National Institutes of Health (NIH) indirect funds has been widely attacked, with heated claims it will annihilate biomedical scientific research in the United States. Leading with a picture of a 12-year-old child with muscular dystrophy, Shetal Shah, a neonatology professor, argued in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that the cuts would “hobble” vital medical research, and a Time magazine interviewee went as far as to call it the “apocalypse” of U.S. science writ large. While the funding cut has been blocked by federal judges for now, the future fiscal status of the NIH, and the university researchers that depend on it, remains uncertain.

Pundits discussing the cuts nearly universally agree that federally funded science is a crucial component of lifesaving medical therapies, innovative technology, and the ongoing status of the U.S. as a scientific superpower. These assertions are repeated ad nauseam despite history telling a different story. Promulgating three core myths, advocates for maintaining the status quo of public funding have been active in the media, but none of their key assertions withstand considering the historical record.

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After Trump’s Election, Several NSF-Funded Censorship Tools Go Missing

The National Science Foundation (NSF) claims to be the place “where discoveries begin” — but it funded programs where free speech ends. When The Federalist asked if it still funds anti-“misinformation” tools, a representative simply pointed to its public grants database, which lists censorship projects funded during the Biden administration.

The public-interest law firm Alliance Defending Freedom sent NSF records requests in February to uncover any coordination between the federal agency and internet communications monopolies such as Google and Facebook.

NSF funds one-quarter of all federally funded academic fundamental research projects at U.S. higher education institutions, and funds technology development at approximately 400 “small businesses” each year. It has an annual budget of $8.5 billion. It also funds programs that exclude recipients based on race, according to an NSF factsheet.

The NSF’s “Convergence Accelerator,” which funds special research projects, launched a “cohort track” in 2021 for “Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems.” Recipients developed software to control online speech labeled “misinformation” about politically sensitive topics including Covid-19 treatments and election integrity.

Twelve “teams” were selected for “phase 1” of the project, according to the House Judiciary Committee, and six were selected for “phase 2” funding at $5 million each. In total, the NSF awarded $39 million total to projects in this “track” of the program.

The NSF-funded projects include the Analysis and Response Toolkit for Trust (ARTT), Co-Designing for Trust, Co:Cast, Co-Insights, CommuniTies, CourseCorrect, Expert Voices Together, Search Lit, TrustFinder, and WiseDex. Projects had ties to infamous pro-censorship organizations including Google, Meta, Snopes, Wikimedia, the World Economic Forum, and the World Health Organization.

The Federalist asked NSF how much total funding each project received from the agency, and if there have been any “cohorts dedicated to developing anti-misinformation projects since ‘track F.’” An NSF spokesman replied that, “in recent years,” Congress asked NSF to “identify and address issues of safety, ethics and adversarial influence online” through funding bills and the IOGAN Act. So the Convergence Accelerator “initiated Track F.”

“This program has not made an award since 2021 and will not be making any awards in the future,” the representative said. “NSF invests in research, innovation, and workforce development that accelerates the development, testing, and understanding of technology. NSF plays no role in content policies nor content regulations.”

The Federalist again asked “how much total NSF funding each project received” and “whether NSF helped develop other anti-misinformation projects aside from Track F.” The spokesman simply pointed to the agency’s “award search page,” and said, “[o]ther than that, I don’t have anything else to add.” A search for active NSF awards regarding “misinformation” yields more than 100 results.

ADF also filed public records requests for documents regarding the NSF Convergence Accelerator, as The Federalist previously reported. Mathew Hoffman, legal counsel for ADF’s Center for Free Speech, said at the time the group was investigating “where our tax dollars are being spent to fund censorship” — and “if anyone’s rights have been violated by the censorship-industrial complex, that litigation will certainly be an option.”

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Ethically sourced “spare” human bodies could revolutionize medicine

Why do we hear about medical breakthroughs in mice, but rarely see them translate into cures for human disease? Why do so few drugs that enter clinical trials receive regulatory approval? And why is the waiting list for organ transplantation so long? These challenges stem in large part from a common root cause: a severe shortage of ethically sourced human bodies. 

It may be disturbing to characterize human bodies in such commodifying terms, but the unavoidable reality is that human biological materials are an essential commodity in medicine, and persistent shortages of these materials create a major bottleneck to progress.

This imbalance between supply and demand is the underlying cause of the organ shortage crisis, with more than 100,000 patients currently waiting for a solid organ transplant in the US alone. It also forces us to rely heavily on animals in medical research, a practice that can’t replicate major aspects of human physiology and makes it necessary to inflict harm on sentient creatures. In addition, the safety and efficacy of any experimental drug must still be confirmed in clinical trials on living human bodies. These costly trials risk harm to patients, can take a decade or longer to complete, and make it through to approval less than 15% of the time. 

There might be a way to get out of this moral and scientific deadlock. Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain. Many will find this possibility disturbing, but if researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create “spare” bodies, both human and nonhuman.

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