Sarah Okonkwo
270 stories · Page 7 of 12
Europe's Wildfire Smoke Has a Second Blast Radius: Stopped Hearts and Mood-Disorder ER Visits Far From the Flames
When California's wildfire PM2.5 climbed, depression ED visits rose 15 percent and mood-disorder visits 29 percent up to a week later, and per microgram that smoke was tied to larger health effects than ordinary city smog.
Brain & AgingChemists Cracked Unsorted Plastic Into Hydrogen With Lye, and Trapped Three-Quarters of the Carbon Instead of Torching It
Most plastic never gets recycled. It gets burned or buried, and polyethylene keeps turning up in human brain tissue. A UCLA and Ewha team cracked mixed, unsorted trash into more than 90 percent pure hydrogen at low heat and trapped 75 percent of the carbon instead of letting it escape.
Metabolic & WeightThey Gave PTSD Patients THC Drops at Bedtime. More Than a Third Stopped Having Nightmares Entirely.
Dronabinol beat placebo on the nightmare symptom the VA's longtime standby flunked, and the company that sells dronabinol helped fund the trial that found it worked.
Nutrition & FoodCancer Drugs Starve Tumors of Arginine. A Rockefeller Lab Says the Immune System May Need It to See Them.
Some cancer therapies deliberately strip arginine from the body to starve tumors. Rockefeller researchers found that in mice the same depletion can hide tumors, flu, and SARS-CoV-2 from the immune system.
Autoimmune & InflammationA Map of 1.1 Million Lung Immune Cells Finds the Genetic Risk for Autoimmune Disease in Tissue, Not Blood
Researchers at La Jolla mapped genetic activity in 1.1 million lung immune cells and found about 1,000 genes whose activity is tuned by disease-risk variants only inside tissue, plus 1,700 that read differently in women than in men.
Brain & AgingChristof Koch Bet a Case of Wine That Science Would Find Consciousness in the Brain by 2023. He Lost.
At a symposium in Portugal, the neuroscientist who spent 25 years hunting consciousness inside the brain conceded the field's central promise is still unpaid, and floated that consciousness might be fundamental to reality rather than manufactured by neurons.
Metabolic & WeightThe Prescription Vitamin D Added to Protect Failing Kidneys Made Them Decline Four Times Faster
Chasing a parathyroid-hormone target, doctors added active vitamin D to a kidney drug. The hormone dropped 35 percent, and the kidneys declined four times faster.
Autoimmune & InflammationThe Lungs May Be Where Rheumatoid Arthritis Actually Starts
Across Italy, South Korea, and California, higher fine-particle pollution tracks more RA flares and more new cases, and the biology keeps pointing at the airway, not the knee.
Metabolic & WeightThe Fat Rebound Pediatricians Watch For at Age Six: Measure the Waist, and It Turns Out to Be Muscle and Bone
Waist-to-height ratio tracks body fat with about 90 percent accuracy. In 2,410 American kids it kept falling straight through the age when BMI says the fat comes roaring back.
Metabolic & WeightYour Fat Cells Remember Being Fat, and That Memory Outlasts the Weight Loss
Your body defends its heaviest weight for years after you lose it, which is why the rebound isn't weak willpower and why the injection only works while you keep paying for it.
Drugs & FDAU.S. Special Operators Carried French Freeze-Dried Plasma for 15 Years Before the FDA Licensed an American One
Allied militaries and U.S. commandos have relied on freeze-dried plasma for years. Washington licensed its own version this week, decades after an American doctor first invented the powder.
Nutrition & FoodThey Doubled the Recommended Protein This Year. 350 Studies Say That's Backwards for Sedentary Adults.
Federal guidance now tells you to eat nearly twice the protein it used to. A University of Wisconsin review of more than 350 studies argues that for people who don't train hard, the extra may be speeding up the aging they're trying to outrun.
InvestigationsMIT Put an AI Skin Doctor in Front of 776 People. Its Friendliest Feature Fooled the Ones Who Needed Help Most.
623 lay people and 153 doctors used the same AI to read skin conditions. The doctors shrugged off its bad advice. Everyone else trusted it more the more fluently it explained itself.
Brain & AgingThe Fat Molecule That Rides From Your Waistline to Your Brain, and Feeds Alzheimer's Once It Gets There
In obese mice, a membrane fat called phosphatidylethanolamine packed into tiny vesicles, rode to the brain, and sabotaged the immune cells that clear amyloid. An investigational drug reversed it, in mice.
Infectious DiseaseIn Tuberculosis, the Cell We Called 'Neutral' Is the One Torching the Lung
In the people whose latent TB roared into active disease, the airways filled with neutrophils, half of them flipping on an interferon alarm, while their T cells were pushed to exhaustion and death.
CancerGlioblastoma Craves Sugar. Oregon State Coated a Gene Therapy in It and Rode Straight Past the Blood-Brain Barrier.
Glioblastoma overexpresses the same sugar transporter that guards the brain. Oregon State researchers used that greed to smuggle a tumor-suppressor gene into tumors, and mouse survival rose 50 percent.
InvestigationsThe Phone-Radiation Study Everyone Called a Debunking Was Too Small to Find the Tumor
Japan and Korea spent two years 'validating' the NIH finding that cell-phone radiation gave rats heart tumors. They used one dose, one sex, and too few animals to detect it. Korea's rats grew the tumor anyway.
Nutrition & FoodA Microwave Can Fry a Potato That Soaks Up Less Oil: That Isn't the Same as a Healthier Fry
University of Illinois engineers made French fries that hold less oil by frying them from the inside. Nobody ran a taste test, nobody measured the acrylamide, and the pitch was aimed at food manufacturers.
Autoimmune & InflammationA 30-Minute Sauna Floods the Blood With Immune Cells, and the Heat Isn't What Triggers Them
Finnish researchers put 51 people in a 73-degree sauna and watched every class of white blood cell surge, then found the surge had almost nothing to do with how hot anyone actually got.
Brain & AgingSame Diet, Same 15 Pounds: Only the Women Who Ate in an 8-Hour Window Got Sharper
Two groups of older women cut the same calories and lost the same 15 pounds over six months. The ones who packed eating into an 8-hour window still scored better on problem-solving, from a 47-person pilot that hasn't been peer-reviewed.
Drugs & FDARice Chemists Taught an Enzyme to Recycle Drug Synthesis's Most Expensive Ingredient
The chemistry that builds drugs like Spinraza just got cheaper. The $125,000 price tag never had much to do with the chemistry.
Nutrition & FoodNo One Guards the Toddler Food Aisle: 81 Percent of Its Foods Are Ultra-Processed
Parents assume the baby aisle is vetted. It isn't. No US rule makes toddler food meet a nutrient standard, and an Austin audit of 2,783 products marketed for 6-to-36-month-olds found 81 percent ultra-processed and nearly half failing a WHO benchmark.
Nutrition & FoodThe NIH Weighed Every Meal to a Tenth of a Gram. Four AI Calorie Apps Undercounted by up to 345.
In a locked NIH metabolic kitchen where every ingredient was weighed to 0.1 grams, MyFitnessPal, Lose It!, CalAI, and Appediet each read a plate and undercounted it by a quarter to a third, missing the fat most of all.
InvestigationsPregnant Women's Blood Pressure Registers Every Smoke Day. A Federal Rule Lets States Erase Those Days From the Record.
On heavy smoke days, adults' systolic pressure ran nearly 4 mmHg higher; across eight southwestern states, gestational smoke exposure raised the odds of gestational hypertension 12 percent. Since 2016, regulators have won EPA approval to erase wildfire smoke from the Clean Air Act record in more tha