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The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. An Arizona man died, and his wife was hospitalized, after taking a form of chloroquine, which President Trump has touted as an effective treatment for COVID-19. The couple decided to self-medicate with chloroquine phosphate, which they had on hand to kill parasites in their fish, after hearing the president describe the drug as a “game changer....

Thinking about a professor just before you take an intelligence test makes you perform better than if you think about football hooligans. Or does it? An influential theory that certain behavior can be modified by unconscious cues is under serious attack. A paper published in PLoS ONE last week reports that nine different experiments failed to replicate this example of ‘intelligence priming’, first described in 1998 by Ap Dijksterhuis, a social psychologist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and now included in textbooks....

Individual expectations of rewards may explain why some people feel better after receiving fake drug treatments—a phenomenon known as “the placebo effect.” A new study using different brain imaging techniques linked the intensity of an individual’s placebo effect to the amount of dopamine (a neurotransmitter involved in the pleasure and reward pathway) released in a midbrain region called the nucleus accumbens. Researchers at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor specifically demonstrated that those who were more responsive to phony pills were also more likely to expect to win big in a gambling game....

The placenta is unique among organs—critical to human life yet fleeting. In its short time of duty, it serves as a vital protective barrier to the fetus. The organ’s blood vessels—which resemble tree roots in this image by Norman Barker, associate professor of pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine—also deliver essential oxygen and nutrients from the mother to her developing baby. Still, the placenta has been vastly underappreciated....

By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - A global fund should be created to speed development of much-needed new antibiotics to counter the growing threat of drug-resistant superbugs, a British-government backed review said on Thursday. The review, headed by the leading economist and former Goldman Sachs chief Jim O’Neill, said far too little is currently invested in research that could lead to new drugs to fight drug-resistant bacterial and viral infections. “A lot of innovative thinking is happening in infectious disease research at the moment....

In the Halloween season, American culture briefly participates in an ancient tradition of making the world of the dead visible to the living: Children dress as skeletons, teens go to horror movies and adults play the part of ghosts in haunted houses. But what if the dead played a more active, more participatory role in our daily lives? It might appear to be a strange question, but as a scholar of late medieval literature and art, I have found compelling evidence from our past that shows how the dead were well-integrated into people’s sense of community....

THE WOODLANDS, Tex.—Back in late 2018 Earth dodged a bullet. Well, almost—a hefty space rock streaked through the upper atmosphere, detonating with the power of a nuclear bomb over an isolated stretch of the Bering Sea, between Russia and Alaska. The blast occurred roughly 16 miles above the ocean, creating a high-altitude airburst with perhaps 40 percent of the energy released by the destructive February 2013 meteor over Chelyabinsk, Russia. This late-breaking bombshell was unveiled here by Kelly Fast, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations program manager, during a media briefing on the agency’s planetary defense programs prior to the start of this week’s 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference....

An ambitious 3D-printed heart project aims to make a natural organ replacement for patients possible within a decade. But the researcher heading the “moonshot” effort also believes 3D-printing technology must harness the self-organizing power of biology to get the job done. The idea of a 3D-printed heart grown from a patient’s own fat stem cells comes from Stuart Williams, executive and scientific director of the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute in Louisville, Ky....

(Credit: Netflix) Netflix and Comcast have reached an agreement aimed at smoothing the streaming of Netflix content to the cable company’s customers, ending a dispute that included suggestions of throttled traffic. The video-rental company has agreed to pay Comcast for direct access to its broadband network, sources told The Wall Street Journal, which was first to report the deal. The agreement comes less than two weeks after Comcast announced a $45 billion deal for Time Warner Cable, a merger that if approved could create a cable empire serving 33 million customers across the country....

In 2011 a team of researchers at CERN near Geneva sent a beam of neutrinos on a 730-kilometer journey to Gran Sasso National Laboratory in L’Aquila, Italy. When the researchers clocked that trip, it appeared as though the neutrinos had somehow surpassed the speed of light in a vacuum. How did the scientific community respond to this surprising result? Almost everyone, rather than abandoning the well-established teachings of Albert Einstein—who said that nothing travels faster than light—argued that the researchers’ measurements had to be wrong (as, indeed, they turned out to be)....

What does the cheeseburger say about our modern food economy? A lot, actually. Over the past several years blogger Waldo Jaquith (http://waldo.jaquith.org) set out to make a cheeseburger from scratch, to no avail. “Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical—nearly impossible—to make a cheeseburger from scratch,” he writes. “Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Large mammals are slaughtered in early winter....

BEIJING (Reuters) - The Tibetan plateau, whose glaciers supply water to hundreds of millions of people in Asia, were warmer over the past 50 years than at any stage in the past two millennia, a Chinese newspaper said, citing an academic report. Temperatures and humidity are likely to continue to rise throughout this century, causing glaciers to retreat and desertification to spread, according to the report published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research....

Moms who have just given birth need good nutrition to support their healing and recovery. And for mothers who are breast-feeding, their diet also has a direct impact on their baby’s health and growth. Registered Dietitian Melissa Mitri specializes in nutrition counseling for busy moms, helping them move away from restrictive, fad diets and find more sustainable ways of meeting their health goals. Today, she joins me to talk specifically about special nutritional needs during the postpartum period....

That’s the conclusion of a new report released by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, which ranks the world’s 16 largest economies based on 31 different measurements of efficiency, including national energy savings targets, fuel economy standards for vehicles, efficiency standards for appliances, average vehicle mpg, and energy consumed per square foot of floor space in residential buildings, among other metrics. The ACEEE report ranked the U.S. 13th overall, with Germany, Italy, smaller European Union nations, France and China making up the top five most energy efficient economies in the world....

America’s national parks might seem like an obvious refuge from city smog. Not so, according to new research that finds popular parks’ levels of ozone—a major air pollutant—match those of the country’s largest metropolitan areas. The study, published Wednesday in Science Advances, also suggests national park visitation drops when ozone levels soar. But some experts argue it is too early to determine whether air quality warnings influence the travel decisions of park-goers....

The Early Start Denver Model (ESDM), featured in the article “Intensive, Early Therapy Helps Children with Autism Improve Communication Skills” in the October issue, addresses the problems a child with autism has in paying attention to social cues—facial expressions, gestures and spoken words. Sally J. Rogers, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of California, Davis, works with 17-month-old Logan in this video, entitled Patty Feet, in one-on-one play activities intended to develop a range of social skills, including fostering of responses from the child, communicating feelings and learning through imitation....

LONDON (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence robots are turbo-charging the race to find new drugs for the crippling nerve disorder ALS, or motor neurone disease. The condition, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, attacks and kills nerve cells controlling muscles, leading to weakness, paralysis and, ultimately, respiratory failure. There are only two drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to slow the progression of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), one available since 1995 and the other approved just this year....

Caffeine keeps people alert—a prized quality in an always-on world. It also stimulates the brain’s pleasure centers, and it is mildly addictive—two possible reasons to add it to foods and drinks. The burgeoning caffeinated-foods industry has raised eyebrows at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Although the fda does not regulate caffeine—and says less than 400 milligrams a day “is not generally associated with dangerous, negative effects”—it is reconsidering regulation because manufacturers are putting caffeine in many products, at high doses (vertical axis) and large serving sizes (horizontal axis)....

More than 15 years after a genetic variant was shown to predispose its carriers to schizophrenia, scientists have finally uncovered how the chromosomal abnormality might cause symptoms of the brain disorder. By studying mice with a similar gene defect, the research team from Columbia University Medical Center linked abnormalities in behavior to a faulty connection between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex—two brain areas important for learning and memory. “We know that this genetic deficit predisposes us to schizophrenia, and now we have identified a clear pathophysiological mechanism of how [it] confers this risk…,” Maria Karayiorgou, co-author on the study published April 1 in Nature and lead author on the 1994 publication identifying the genetic variant in Brain Research, said in a prepared statement....

Surgeons have performed the first U.S. face transplant, transferring most of the visage of a corpse onto a woman who was missing most of her own face, doctors said today. “I’m very proud and emotional today to share with you that we have finally done it,” Maria Siemionow, who led the operation at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, said at an afternoon news conference. Siemionow, director of plastic surgery research at the hospital, worked with a dozen specialists to rebuild the face of a woman who was missing her right eye, nose and upper jaw....