An anonymous reader quotes a report from STAT News: Amid what he called the worst youth mental health crisis in recent memory, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory Tuesday warning about social media's impact on developing young brains. "Through the last two and a half years I've been in office, I've been hearing concerns from kids and parents," Murthy told STAT. "Parents are asking 'Is social media safe for my kids?' Based on our review of the data, there isn't enough evidence that it is safe for our kids."

The advisory calls on policymakers and technology companies to take steps to minimize the risks of social media. "This is not going to be an issue that we solve with one sector alone," Murthy said. Policymakers, according to the report, need to develop age restrictions and safety standards for social media -- much like the regulations that the U.S. has in place for everything from cars to medicine. Specifically, Murthy would like to see policymakers require a higher standard of data privacy for children to protect them from potential harms like exploitation and abuse. Technology companies, meanwhile, need to be more transparent about the data they share, according to Murthy. He calls on companies to assess the potential risks of online interactions and take active steps to prevent potential misuse. He also suggests the establishment of scientific advisory committees to inform approaches and policies aimed at creating safe online environments for children.

The advisory also suggests families attempt to protect young people's mental health by developing a family media plan aimed at establishing healthy technology boundaries at home, such as creating "tech-free zones" that restrict phone use during certain hours or family mealtime. But Murthy noted that parents are already at the end of their rope in trying to manage how their children are exposed to and using this rapidly evolving technology. That responsibility has fallen entirely on them up to this point. "We've got to move quickly," he said. "None of us should be satisfied until we have clear evidence that these platforms are safe." The surgeon general's report comes two weeks after the American Psychological Association issued a health advisory on teens and social media use. The group noted the increased risk of anxiety and depression among adolescents who are exposed to discrimination and bullying online. "Other research has shown that adolescents ages 12-15 who spent more than three hours per day on social media face a heightened risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes compared to those who spent less time online," adds STAT News.

Longtime Slashdot reader Okian Warrior writes: There's been a lot of discussion about regulating AI in the news recently, including Sam Altman going before a Senate committee begging for regulation. So far I've seen only calls for regulation, but not suggestions on what those regulations should be. Since Slashdot is largely populated with experts in various fields (software, medicine, law, etc.), maybe we should begin this discussion. And note that if we don't create the reasonable rules, Congress (mostly 80-year old white men with conflicts of interest) will do it for us.

What are some good AI regulation suggestions?

I'll start: A human (and specifically, not an AI system) must be responsible for any medical treatment or diagnosis. If an AI suggests a diagnosis or medical treatment, there must be buy-in from a human who believes the decision is correct, and who would be held responsible in the same manner as a doctor not using AI. The AI must be a tool used by, and not a substitute for, human decisions. This would avoid problems with humans ignoring their responsibility, relying on the software, and causing harm through negligence. Doctors can use AI to (for example) diagnose cancer, but it will be the doctor's diagnosis and not the AI's.

What other suggestions do people have?

A Phase 1 trail of a universal mRNA-based influenza vaccine is under way at Duke Unversity in Durham, North Carolina. It's being developed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' (NAID) Vaccine Research Center (VRC). New Atlas reports: Some 50 participants aged 18-49 will be split into three groups and given 10, 25 and 50 micrograms of the active drug, respectively. When optimal dosage is then determined, another 10 participants will get this measured jab. There will also be an additional group who will receive a current quadrivalent seasonal flu shot, so researchers have a comparative dataset that takes into account the immune response and safety of readily available influenza vaccines. Those in the trial will then be regularly evaluated over 12 months to see how the drug's immune response has fared and to assess its short-term and long-term safety.

This trial comes after the initial NIAID's Vaccine Research Center study on the safety and immune response of the H1ssF (H1 hemagglutinin stabilized stem ferritin) nanoparticle vaccine. The Phase 1 trial, from April 2019 to March 2020, delivered broad antibody responses in the 52 participants aged 18-70. The results of the trial were published last month in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The H1ssF vaccine targets the flu protein hemagglutinin. One section of this protein -- the 'head' -- changes as the virus evolves into different strains, but the stem of the protein is much slower to be altered and remains fairly constant throughout influenza mutations. The researchers believe herein lies the key to a long-lasting, effective universal preventative vaccine. The new trial combines the H1ssF nanoparticle vaccine with messenger RNA (mRNA) as the platform, with the end goal that it'll deliver a more efficient, targeted immune response.

Marines and sailors who were exposed to toxic water at Camp Lejeune, N.C., are much more likely to suffer from Parkinson's disease than their counterparts who were stationed elsewhere, according to a study published Monday. From a report: Troops stationed at Camp Lejeune for even just a few months during the years 1975-85 are 70% more likely to suffer from Parkinson's disease than troops who were at Camp Pendleton, Calif., according to findings from researchers who accounted for other factors in making their determination. Their report was published by the Journal of the American Medical Association. The Department of Veterans Affairs-funded study was led by Dr. Samuel Goldman, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco Medical School and a staff physician at the San Francisco VA Medical Center.

The Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs have acknowledged for years that troops based at Camp Lejeune and other North Carolina facilities from the early 1950s until the mid-1980s were exposed to a number of harmful chemicals in the drinking water, including the solvents benzene and trichloroethylene, which are linked to Parkinson's. Water processed for the base was contaminated by improper chemical-disposal procedures from an off-base dry cleaner, leaky underground storage tanks, industrial spills and other problems for decades, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A million veterans and family members have been potentially affected, according to the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

Researchers have discovered that a man with a gene mutation that causes early-onset Alzheimer's disease was protected from developing the disease until the age of 67 due to another mutation in a different gene that blocked the disease from affecting his entorhinal cortex, a brain region associated with memory and cognition. This finding could pave the way for new treatments that delay the onset of Alzheimer's and transform the approach to therapeutics for the disease. The New York Times reports: "This really holds the secret to the next generation of therapeutics," said Dr. Joseph F. Arboleda-Velasquez, a cell biologist at Massachusetts Eye and Ear in Boston and a member of the research team. Dr. Arboleda-Velasquez is a co-founder of a biotechnology company looking to produce drugs that could act on this research. A drug that delays the disease by two decades is not out of the question, said Dr. Diego Sepulveda-Falla, a neuropathologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany and a member of the research team. The mutation results in a potent version of a protein, Reelin, in the entorhinal cortex. That super-potent Reelin ultimately prevents tangled strands of tau proteins from sticking together and forming the structures that are a characteristic of Alzheimer's. The idea is to "go in with a syringe and treat only one area" of the brain, he said.

The man with what the researchers are calling "resilience" to Alzheimer's was part of a decades-long study of 6,000 people living in Colombia who have a gene mutation that causes Alzheimer's in middle age. Many have agreed to genetic testing, brain scans and, after they die, brain autopsies. A few years ago, the same research group in the current study identified a woman who also was protected from Alzheimer's. But in her case, resilience was caused by a mutation in a different gene, APOE. Instead of lacking clumps of tau in one small region of her brain, they were missing in her entire brain. But, the researchers say, they think the two patients are revealing a new pathway to treat Alzheimer's. The two genes that are mutated interrupt a molecular cascade of events needed for tau to aggregate in the brain. The findings were published in the journal Nature Medicine.

From a Science magazine report, shared by schwit1: When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was "shocked" by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010 -- and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers' group report. "It is just too hard to believe" at first, says Sabel of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and editor-in-chief of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience. It's as if "somebody tells you 30% of what you eat is toxic." His findings underscore what was widely suspected: Journals are awash in a rising tide of scientific manuscripts from paper mills -- secretive businesses that allow researchers to pad their publication records by paying for fake papers or undeserved authorship.

"Paper mills have made a fortune by basically attacking a system that has had no idea how to cope with this stuff," says Dorothy Bishop, a University of Oxford psychologist who studies fraudulent publishing practices. A 2 May announcement from the publisher Hindawi underlined the threat: It shut down four of its journals it found were "heavily compromised" by articles from paper mills. Sabel's tool relies on just two indicators -- authors who use private, noninstitutional email addresses, and those who list an affiliation with a hospital. It isn't a perfect solution, because of a high false-positive rate. Other developers of fake-paper detectors, who often reveal little about how their tools work, contend with similar issues. Still, the detectors raise hopes for gaining the advantage over paper mills, which churn out bogus manuscripts containing text, data, and images partly or wholly plagiarized or fabricated, often massaged by ghost writers.

Some papers are endorsed by unrigorous reviewers solicited by the authors. Such manuscripts threaten to corrupt the scientific literature, misleading readers and potentially distorting systematic reviews. The recent advent of artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT has amplified the concern. To fight back, the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM), representing 120 publishers, is leading an effort called the Integrity Hub to develop new tools. STM is not revealing much about the detection methods, to avoid tipping off paper mills. "There is a bit of an arms race," says Joris van Rossum, the Integrity Hub's product director. He did say one reliable sign of a fake is referencing many retracted papers; another involves manuscripts and reviews emailed from internet addresses crafted to look like those of legitimate institutions. Twenty publishers -- including the largest, such as Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley -- are helping develop the Integrity Hub tools, and 10 of the publishers are expected to use a paper mill detector the group unveiled in April.

A personalized cancer vaccine made by BioNTech, the German company that produced the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, has shown promising results against pancreatic cancer. The vaccine, which teaches patients' immune systems to attack their tumors, provoked an immune response in half of the 16 patients treated, and those patients did not experience relapses of their cancer during the study. The New York Times reports: Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, led by Dr. Vinod Balachandran, extracted patients' tumors and shipped samples of them to Germany. There, scientists at BioNTech, the company that made a highly successful COVID vaccine with Pfizer, analyzed the genetic makeup of certain proteins on the surface of the cancer cells. Using that genetic data, BioNTech scientists then produced personalized vaccines designed to teach each patient's immune system to attack the tumors. Like BioNTech's COVID shots, the cancer vaccines relied on messenger RNA. In this case, the vaccines instructed patients' cells to make some of the same proteins found on their excised tumors, potentially provoking an immune response that would come in handy against actual cancer cells.

The study was small: Only 16 patients, all of them white, were given the vaccine, part of a treatment regimen that also included chemotherapy and a drug intended to keep tumors from evading people's immune responses. And the study could not entirely rule out factors other than the vaccine having contributed to better outcomes in some patients. [...] But the simple fact that scientists could create, quality-check and deliver personalized cancer vaccines so quickly -- patients began receiving the vaccines intravenously roughly nine weeks after having their tumors removed -- was a promising sign, experts said.

In patients who did not appear to respond to the vaccine, the cancer tended to return around 13 months after surgery. Patients who did respond, though, showed no signs of relapse during the roughly 18 months they were tracked. Intriguingly, one patient showed evidence of a vaccine-activated immune response in the liver after an unusual growth developed there. The growth later disappeared in imaging tests. "It's anecdotal, but it's nice confirmatory data that the vaccine can get into these other tumor regions," said Dr. Nina Bhardwaj, who studies cancer vaccines at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "This is the first demonstrable success -- and I will call it a success, despite the preliminary nature of the study -- of an mRNA vaccine in pancreatic cancer," said Dr. Anirban Maitra, a specialist in the disease at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, who was not involved in the study. "By that standard, it's a milestone."

The study has been published in the journal Nature.

The World Health Organization ended the global emergency status for COVID-19 on Friday more than three years after its original declaration, and said countries should now manage the virus that killed more than 6.9 million people along with other infectious diseases. From a report: The global health agency's Emergency Committee met on Thursday and recommended the UN organization declare an end to the coronavirus crisis as a "public health emergency of international concern" -- its highest level of alert -- which has been in place since Jan. 30, 2020. "It is therefore with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, adding that the end of the emergency did not mean COVID was over as a global health threat. During a lengthy conference call to brief the press on the decision, some WHO members became emotional as they urged countries to reflect on lessons learned during the pandemic.

During the pandemic, Wall Street banks and private equity firms invested billions of dollars in startups rolling up popular brands sold on Amazon.com. The bet was that these upstarts, fueled by an online sales boom, would become the next consumer product conglomerates -- like Procter & Gamble or Unilever. Then the pandemic ended, consumers returned to the stores, and Amazon's sales growth cratered -- erasing almost half of its market value. Now the reckoning has arrived for these so-called brand aggregators. From a report: With names like Thrasio, Razor Group and Perch, the companies aren't widely known but over the past few years have shelled out tens of millions of dollars for tea kettles, foot massagers, peppermint-based jock-itch remedies, medicine balls, magnetic eyeglass holders, air purifiers and more. To finance the buying spree, they raised $16 billion -- mostly debt -- from big names like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs Group, BlackRock and Bain Capital, as well as smaller investment funds.

Rising interest rates, higher costs and cooling online demand have pushed some of these upstarts to the edge, forcing them to seek debt relief or merge with one another, according to people familiar with the situation. There are so many aggregators and investors speaking with one another it's difficult to predict which companies will emerge intact and which will get washed out. The consolidation could ding some lenders, which might be forced to write down their investments, a hit that could collectively reach billions of dollars. BlackRock said in February that it wrote down the value of Razor Group, contributing to the investment firm's fourth-quarter decline in assets. The alternative to writedowns could be even more painful: businesses that go broke trying to go it alone and can't pay back anything at all.

An experimental Alzheimer's medication slowed declines in patients' ability to think clearly and perform daily tasks by more than a third in a large clinical trial, drugmaker Eli Lilly said Wednesday. From a report: Based on the results, in people with early symptomatic Alzheimer's disease, Lilly said it plans to file for approval from the US Food and Drug Administration by the end of June. The medicine, donanemab, works by removing plaque buildups in the brain known as amyloid that are a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. However, there were some side effects reported; there were three deaths in the trial among people taking the drug, two of which were attributed to adverse events such as brain swelling or microhemorrhages, known as amyloid-related imaging abnormalities or ARIA. The trial was run in more than 1,700 patients for 18 months.

"For every medicine, for every disease, there are potential risks and potential benefits," said Lilly's chief scientific and medical officer, Dr. Daniel Skovronsky. But he noted that almost half of the participants taking the drug, 47%, showed no decline on a key measure of cognition over the course of a year, compared with 29% of people taking a placebo. That's "the kind of efficacy that's never been seen before in Alzheimer's disease," Skovronsky said. Alzheimer's affects more than 6 million Americans, with an estimated 1.7 million to 2 million people over 65 in the early stages of the disease, according to Lilly. Drug development for Alzheimer's has been riddled with failures, but Lilly's drug is among a new group showing promise. The first, Eisai and Biogen's Leqembi, received accelerated FDA approval in January.

Pilot program aims to see if AI will cut time that medical staff spend replying to online inquiries. From a report: Behind every physician's medical advice is a wealth of knowledge, but soon, patients across the country might get advice from a different source: artificial intelligence. In California and Wisconsin, OpenAI's "GPT" generative artificial intelligence is reading patient messages and drafting responses from their doctors. The operation is part of a pilot program in which three health systems test if the AI will cut the time that medical staff spend replying to patients' online inquiries. UC San Diego Health and UW Health began testing the tool in April. Stanford Health Care aims to join the rollout early next week. Altogether, about two dozen healthcare staff are piloting this tool.

Marlene Millen, a primary care physician at UC San Diego Health who is helping lead the AI test, has been testing GPT in her inbox for about a week. Early AI-generated responses needed heavy editing, she said, and her team has been working to improve the replies. They are also adding a kind of bedside manner: If a patient mentioned returning from a trip, the draft could include a line that asked if their travels went well. "It gives the human touch that we would," Dr. Millen said. There is preliminary data that suggests AI could add value. ChatGPT scored better than real doctors at responding to patient queries posted online, according to a study published Friday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, in which a panel of doctors did blind evaluations of posts.

Yesterday, Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed the My Health, My Data bill into law, requiring companies to receive a user's explicit consent before they can collect, share, or sell their health data. When the law comes into effect in March 2024, users will have the right to withdraw consent at any time and have their data deleted. The Verge reports: The law should help shield users' health data from the companies and organizations not included under the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which prevents certain medical providers from disclosing "individually identifiable" health information without consent. The HIPAA Privacy Rule doesn't cover many of the health apps and sites that collect medical data, allowing them to freely collect and sell this information to advertisers.

Under Washington's new law, which comes into effect in March 2024, medical apps and sites must ask a user for permission to collect their health data in a nondeceptive manner that "openly communicates a consumer's freely given, informed, opt-in, voluntary, specific, and unambiguous written consent." The site and apps must also disclose what kind of data they plan to collect and if they plan to sell it. Additionally, the bill will block medical providers from using geofencing to collect location information about the patients that visit the facility.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Last spring, engineers in Barcelona packed up the sperm-injecting robot they'd designed and sent it by DHL to New York City. They followed it to a clinic there, called New Hope Fertility Center, where they put the instrument back together, assembling a microscope, a mechanized needle, a tiny petri dish, and a laptop. Then one of the engineers, with no real experience in fertility medicine, used a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to position a robotic needle. Eyeing a human egg through a camera, it then moved forward on its own, penetrating the egg and dropping off a single sperm cell. Altogether, the robot was used to fertilize more than a dozen eggs. The result of the procedures, say the researchers, were healthy embryos—and now two baby girls, who they claim are the first people born after fertilization by a "robot."

The startup company that developed the robot, Overture Life, says its device is an initial step toward automating in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and potentially making the procedure less expensive and far more common than it is today. Right now, IVF labs are multimillion-dollar affairs staffed by trained embryologists who earn upwards of $125,000 a year to delicately handle sperm and eggs using ultra-thin hollow needles under a microscope. But some startups say the entire process could be carried out automatically, or nearly so. Overture, for instance, has filed a patent application describing a "biochip" for an IVF lab in miniature, complete with hidden reservoirs containing growth fluids, and tiny channels for sperm to wiggle through.

"Think of a box where sperm and eggs go in, and an embryo comes out five days later," says Santiago Munne, the prize-winning geneticist who is chief innovation officer at the Spanish company. He believes that if IVF could be carried out inside a desktop instrument, patients might never need to visit a specialized clinic, where a single attempt at getting pregnant can cost $20,000 in the US. Instead, he says, a patient's eggs might be fed directly into an automated fertility system at a gynecologist's office. "It has to be cheaper. And if any doctor could do it, it would be," says Munne.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a challenge by computer scientist Stephen Thaler to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's refusal to issue patents for inventions his AI system created. From a report: The justices turned away Thaler's appeal of a lower court's ruling that patents can be issued only to human inventors and that his AI system could not be considered the legal creator of two inventions that he has said it generated. Thaler founded Imagination Engines Inc, an advanced artificial neural network technology company based in Saint Charles, Missouri. According to Thaler, his DABUS system, short for Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience, created unique prototypes for a beverage holder and emergency light beacon entirely on its own.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and a federal judge in Virginia rejected his patent applications for the inventions on the grounds that DABUS is not a person. The patent-focused U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld those decisions last year and said U.S. patent law unambiguously requires inventors to be human beings. Thaler told the Supreme Court that AI is being used to innovate in fields ranging from medicine to energy, and that rejecting AI-generated patents "curtails our patent system's ability - and thwarts Congress's intent - to optimally stimulate innovation and technological progress."

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 spotted this story in today's New York Times. (Also re-published in the Seattle Times.) In early 2020 a team of U.S. and Chinese scientists "released critical data" on the speedy spread and lethality of the coronavirus, remembers Times, "cited in health warnings around the world... Within days, though, the researchers quietly withdrew the paper, which was replaced online by a message telling scientists not to cite it...

"What is now clear is that the study was not removed because of faulty research. Instead, it was withdrawn at the direction of Chinese health officials amid a crackdown on science."

It's not the only retraction. The Times also points out a paper published on March 9 of 2020 relying on patient samples from mid-December of 2019, which "added to evidence that the virus was spreading widely before the Chinese government took action." Two months later the journal that published an update that "said that the Wuhan samples were not collected in December after all, but weeks later, in January... After Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle tweeted about the discrepancy, the journal's editors posted a third version of the paper, adding yet another timeline. This revision says the samples were collected between Dec. 30 and Jan. 1." Beijing's stranglehold on information goes far deeper than even many pandemic researchers are aware of. Its censorship campaign has targeted international journals and scientific databases, shaking the foundations of shared scientific knowledge, a New York Times investigation found. Under pressure from their government, Chinese scientists have withheld data, withdrawn genetic sequences from public databases and altered crucial details in journal submissions. Western journal editors enabled those efforts by agreeing to those edits or withdrawing papers for murky reasons, a review by The Times of over a dozen retracted papers found.

This scientific censorship has not universally succeeded: The original version of the February 2020 paper, for example, can still be found online with some digging. But the campaign starved doctors and policymakers of critical information about the virus at the moment the world needed it most. It bred mistrust of science in Europe and the United States, as health officials cited papers from China that were then retracted. The crackdown continues to breed misinformation today and has hindered efforts to determine the origins of the virus.
The article notes an international team's discovery last month of genetic sequence data collected in January of 2020 at Wuhan market, "withheld from foreign experts for three years — a delay that global health officials called 'inexcusable.'" The sequences showed that raccoon dogs, a fox-like animal, had deposited genetic signatures in the same place that genetic material from the virus was left, a finding consistent with a scenario in which the virus spread to people from illegally traded market animals... Soon after the group alerted Chinese researchers to their findings, the genetic sequences temporarily disappeared from a global database. "It's just pathetic that we're in this stage where we're having cloak-and-dagger conversations about deleted data," said Edward Holmes, a University of Sydney biologist who was part of the group that analyzed the sequences containing raccoon dog DNA.
The Times cites retracted coronavirus papers flagged by Retraction Watch, which tracks withdrawn research. Amid tighting government censorship in 2020, Chinese researchers began asking journals to retract their work, the Times reports, and "a review of more than a dozen retracted papers from China shows a pattern of revising or suppressing research on early cases, conditions for medical workers and how widely the virus had spread — topics that could make the government look bad." Journals are typically slow to retract papers, even when they are shown to be fraudulent or unethical. But in China, the calculus is different, said Ivan Oransky, a founder of Retraction Watch. Journals that want to sell subscriptions in China or publish Chinese research often bend to the government's demands. "Scientific publishers have really gone out of their way to placate the censorship requests," he said...

The journal retractions continued, and for unusual reasons. One group of authors noted that "our data is not perfect enough." Another warned that its paper "cannot be used as the basis for the origin and evolution of SARS-CoV-2." A third said its findings were "incomplete and not ready for publication." Several scientists promised in retraction notices to update their findings but never did.

While medical textbooks teach that our movements are controlled solely by the brain's motor cortex — that may be wrong, reports NPR, with another area keeping track of the entire body.

"Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that previously overlooked areas of the brain's motor cortex appear to link control of specific muscles with information about the entire body and brain." As a result, the act of, say, reaching for a cup of coffee can directly influence blood pressure and heart rate. And the movement is seamlessly integrated into brain systems involved in planning, goals and emotion. Textbooks, though, still portray a motor cortex in which "the region that controls your finger is not going to be connected to a region [that asks], 'what am I going to do today?' " says Dr. Nico Dosenbach, an author of the study and an associate professor of neurology and radiology.

But the MRI data leaves little doubt that "there is this interconnected system," says Evan Gordon, an assistant professor of radiology and the study's first author. "It always was there, but we had not perceived it because of our training, because of the things we learned in the first neuroscience class that we ever took...." There's two interleaved systems," Dosenbach says. So right below an area controlling the fingers, for example, the team would find an area involved in "whole body integrative action...."

The new view of primary motor cortex may help explain how the brain solves a difficult problem, says Peter Strick, chair of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh. "Even simple movements require nuanced control of all organ systems," he says. "You have to control heart rate. You have to control blood pressure. You have to control so called fight and flight responses...." A system that weaves together movement and mental states also could explain why our posture changes with our mood, or why exercise tends to make us feel better.

"How you move can have an impact on how you feel. And how you feel is going to have an impact on how you move," Strick says. "You know, my mother would tell me, 'stand up straight, you'll feel better.' And maybe that's true."
Thanks to Slashdot reader Tony Isaac for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Researchers said on Wednesday they have discovered that parts of the brain region called the motor cortex that govern body movement are connected with a network involved in thinking, planning, mental arousal, pain, and control of internal organs, as well as functions such as blood pressure and heart rate. They identified a previously unknown system within the motor cortex manifested in multiple nodes that are located in between areas of the brain already known to be responsible for movement of specific body parts -- hands, feet and face -- and are engaged when many different body movements are performed together.

The researchers called this system the somato-cognitive action network, or SCAN, and documented its connections to brain regions known to help set goals and plan actions. This network also was found to correspond with brain regions that, as shown in studies involving monkeys, are connected to internal organs including the stomach and adrenal glands, allowing these organs to change activity levels in anticipation of performing a certain action. That may explain physical responses like sweating or increased heart rate caused by merely pondering a difficult future task, they said. "Basically, we now have shown that the human motor system is not unitary. Instead, we believe there are two separate systems that control movement," said radiology professor Evan Gordon of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, lead author of the study.

"One is for isolated movement of your hands, feet and face. This system is important, for example, for writing or speaking -movements that need to involve only the one body part. A second system, the SCAN, is more important for integrated, whole body movements, and is more connected to high-level planning regions of your brain," Gordon said.

"Modern neuroscience does not include any kind of mind-body dualism. It's not compatible with being a serious neuroscientist nowadays. I'm not a philosopher, but one succinct statement I like is saying, 'The mind is what the brain does.' The sum of the bio-computational functions of the brain makes up 'the mind,'" said study senior author Nico Dosenbach, a neurology professor at Washington University School of Medicine. "Since this system, the SCAN, seems to integrate abstract plans-thoughts-motivations with actual movements and physiology, it provides additional neuroanatomical explanation for why 'the body' and 'the mind' aren't separate or separable."

The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

An unprecedented analysis of how cancers grow has revealed an "almost infinite" ability of tumors to evolve and survive, say scientists. The BBC reports: The results of tracking lung cancers for nine years left the research team "surprised" and "in awe" at the formidable force they were up against. They have concluded we need more focus on prevention, with a "universal" cure unlikely any time soon. The study -- entitled TracerX -- provides the most in-depth analysis of how cancers evolve and what causes them to spread. More than 400 people -- treated at 13 hospitals in the UK -- had biopsies taken from different parts of their lung cancer as the disease progressed.

The evolutionary analysis has been published across seven separate studies in the journals Nature and Nature Medicine. The research showed:

- Highly aggressive cells in the initial tumor are the ones that ultimately end up spreading around the body
- Tumors showing higher levels of genetic "chaos" were more likely to relapse after surgery to other parts of the body
- Analyzing blood for fragments of tumor DNA meant signs of it returning could be spotted up to 200 days before appearing on a CT scan
- The cellular machinery that reads the instructions in our DNA can become corrupted in cancerous cells making them more aggressive. "I don't think we're going to be able to come up with universal cures," said Prof Charles Swanton, from the Francis Crick Institute and University College London. "If we want to make the biggest impact we need to focus on prevention, early detection and early detection of relapse."

Last week, Dr Paul Burton, the chief medical officer of pharmaceutical company Moderna, said he believes the firm will be able to offer vaccines for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions by 2030. The new analysis reported on by the BBC casts doubt on that timeline.

"I don't want to sound too depressing about this, but I think -- given the almost infinite possibilities in which a tumor can evolve, and the very large number of cells in a late-stage tumor, which could be several hundred billion cells -- then achieving cures in all patients with late-stage disease is a formidable task," said Swanton.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Millions of lives could be saved by a groundbreaking set of new vaccines for a range of conditions including cancer, experts have said. A leading pharmaceutical firm said it is confident that jabs for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions will be ready by 2030. Studies into these vaccinations are also showing "tremendous promise", with some researchers saying 15 years' worth of progress has been "unspooled" in 12 to 18 months thanks to the success of the Covid jab.

Dr Paul Burton, the chief medical officer of pharmaceutical company Moderna, said he believes the firm will be able to offer such treatments for "all sorts of disease areas" in as little as five years. The firm, which created a leading coronavirus vaccine, is developing cancer vaccines that target different tumor types. Burton said: "We will have that vaccine and it will be highly effective, and it will save many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. I think we will be able to offer personalized cancer vaccines against multiple different tumor types to people around the world."

He also said that multiple respiratory infections could be covered by a single injection -- allowing vulnerable people to be protected against Covid, flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) -- while mRNA therapies could be available for rare diseases for which there are currently no drugs. Therapies based on mRNA work by teaching cells how to make a protein that triggers the body's immune response against disease. Burton said :"I think we will have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously undruggable, and I think that 10 years from now, we will be approaching a world where you truly can identify the genetic cause of a disease and, with relative simplicity, go and edit that out and repair it using mRNA-based technology." But scientists warn that the accelerated progress, which has surged "by an order of magnitude" in the past three years, will be wasted if a high level of investment is not maintained.

Patients diagnosed with conditions like anxiety and sleep disorders have become caught in the crosshairs of America's opioid crisis, as secret policies mandated by a national opioid settlement have turned filling legitimate prescriptions into a major headache. Bloomberg reports: In July, limits went into effect that flag and sometimes block pharmacies' orders of controlled substances such as Adderall and Xanax when they exceed a certain threshold. The requirement stems from a 2021 settlement with the US's three largest drug distributors -- AmerisourceBergen Corp., Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp. But pharmacists said it curtails their ability to fill prescriptions for many different types of controlled substances -- not just opioids. Independent pharmacists said the rules force them come up with creative workarounds. Sometimes, they must send patients on frustrating journeys to find pharmacies that haven't yet exceeded their caps in order to buy prescribed medicines. It's unclear how the thresholds are impacting major chain pharmacies.

The Drug Enforcement Administration regulates the manufacturing, distribution and sale of controlled substances, which can be dangerous when used improperly. Drugmakers and wholesalers were always supposed to keep an eye out for suspicious purchases and have long had systems to catch, report and halt these orders. The prescription opioid crisis, enabled by irresponsible drug company marketing and prescribing, led to a slew of lawsuits and tighter regulations on many parts of the health system, including monitoring of suspicious orders. One major settlement required the three largest distributors to set thresholds on orders of controlled substances starting last July.

The "suspicious order" terminology is a bit of a misnomer, pharmacists said. The orders themselves aren't suspicious, it's just that the pharmacy has exceeded its limit for a specific drug over a certain time period. Any order that puts the pharmacy over its limit can be stopped. As a result, patients with legitimate prescriptions get caught up in the dragnet. Adding to the confusion, the limits themselves are secret. Drug wholesalers are barred by the settlement agreement from telling pharmacists what the thresholds are, how they're determined or when the pharmacy is getting close to hitting them. The exact limit for each pharmacy is kept secret in order to prevent pharmacists from gaming the system, according to Krista Tongring, leader of the DEA compliance practice at Guidepost Solutions and a former agency attorney. The purpose, she said, is to keep pharmacies from manipulating "their ordering patterns so as to get around the thresholds." According to a Cardinal Health document, limits are "calculated on a daily, monthly, and quarterly basis," reports Bloomberg. "But without more detailed information, it's impossible for pharmacists to predict when they are going to have to turn patients away."

"Pharmacies can request increases to their thresholds, but those take time to adjudicate, leaving patients scrambling to find their daily medicines elsewhere in the meantime."