Ten years ago, ketamine was a drug best known for its popularity on the rave scene. Yet it has since enjoyed a remarkable rebirth – as an antidepressant. Starting out with a handful of small clinical trials, there are now numerous reports that ketamine produces rapid antidepressant effects. In the US, various clinics have sprung up offering ketamine treatment to depressed patients – at least the ones able to pay the bill, because insurance doesn’t tend to cover it.
Now, a grou ...read more
The Earth from the Moon on Apollo 8, 1968. NASA.
You might think the story of the Space Race is straightforward. That NASA was created one day so the United States could start sending things and people into space, and when it turned out that the Soviet Union had more advanced technologies — it did get the first satellite and human into orbit — President Kennedy decided we should go to the Moon. By the end of the decade, no less. Then NASA did what it does best: solved the problem. I ...read more
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
A push to renew research into an understudied gut organ is gaining momentum.
The organ in question? The omentum. It’s a curtain of fatty tissue that hangs down from our stomach and liver and wraps around the intestines, and is known to play a role in immune responses and metabolism, although exactly how that happens is only dimly understood.
Because the omentum doesn’t have a discrete function like, say, our stomach, it can be easy to overlook. But, ...read more
Methane still seeps from these craters on the Barents Sea floor, formed some 12,000 years ago when pent-up methane burst from sediment. (Illustration Credit: Andreia Plaza Faverola/CAGE)
A massive reserve of methane — a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide — is trapped deep within the seafloor.
In northern latitudes, thick ice sheets act as a lid sequestering gases at the right temperature and pressure. But when that ice melts, it’s akin to popping a cork on a press ...read more
More than a year after detecting the first confirmed gravitational waves, researchers were busy at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in Livingston, La., upgrading the massive instrument. (LIGO lab)
Our sun was still dim. Waves crashed on martian beaches. Life was emerging on Earth.
That’s when the ghosts of two dead stars — black holes dozens of times more massive than our sun — merged in a far-off corner of the universe. In their final moments, t ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
