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(Lightspring/Shutterstock) For some people with autism, the idea of facing social situations can be so unnerving it impairs their ability to finish school, hold a job or form relationships. And conventional medications and psychotherapy for anxiety often fail. But early results from a new study suggest that MDMA — commonly known as Ecstasy or Molly — may help adults with autism manage disabling social phobias. Feeling Connected MDMA is unique among psychedelics for its ability to h ...read more

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A mother-calf pair in Exmouth Gulf (Credit: Fredrik Christiansen) Humpback whale babies don’t scream for their mothers’ attention — they whisper. Researchers who listened in on communications between humpback whale mothers and their calves believe they recorded what amounts to a whale whisper. Using detachable acoustic tags, the researchers followed eight calves and two mothers for 48 hours each as they swam near their breeding grounds off Australia&r ...read more

Mastodon ribs and vertebrae from a site in southern California that may contain evidence that the First Americans were here more than 100,000 years ago. (Credit San Diego Natural History Museum) Is the conventional chronology of human migration little more than a house of cards? Maybe. And there’s a strong wind (or at least a tantalizing breeze) blowing in from southern California, where researchers say they have evidence that the First Americans may have arrived on the continen ...read more

New Horizons visits a Kuiper Belt Object. If astronomers luck out,they might net a third flyby target for the well-traveled spacecraft. (Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Steve Gribben) The eyes of the world turned from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft after its 2015 flyby at Pluto. But on New Year’s Eve next year, the space probe will zoom past another object unlike any astronomers have ever seen before. This world, current ...read more

This artist’s rendering shows NASA’s Cassini spacecraft above Saturn’s northern hemisphere, heading toward its first dive between Saturn and its rings on April 26, 2017. (Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech) On July 1, 2004, Cassini became the first spacecraft ever to orbit Saturn. And today, the spacecraft has likely achieved another milestone: Using its 13-foot-wide high-gain antenna as a shield, it probably has made the first ever dive between the rings and the giant gaseous planet it ...read more

Neuroscientists have launched an assault on the American Psychiatric Association headquarters and are engaged in bitter, boardroom-to-boardroom fighting. Psychiatrists have captured the leader of a militant pro-brain faction. A ceasefire, brokered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is due to come into effect at midnight. Yes, indeed. A blog post by Daniel Barron in Scientific American yesterday claimed that there is a War between Neuroscience and Psychiatry Here’ ...read more

Tal Danino explores the diversity of the microbial world through synthetic biology and artistic projects, like “Microuniverse,” above. (Image: Ana Pantelic) Bacteria are – like nearly every other life form – social beings, responding to their neighbors and surroundings in intricate ways. Modifying metabolism based on nearby organisms allows single celled creatures to have outsized impact, by making extensive biofilms or swarming to degrade a new food source, for example ...read more