Conditions: Anorexia in Adolescence; Anorexia Nervosa; Anorexia Nervosa, Atypical; Anorexia Nervosa, Binge Eating/Purging Type; Anorexia Nervosa Restricting Type; Anorexia Nervosa With Significantly Low Body Weight; Body Composition Changes; Growth & Development; Malnutrition Severe; Malnutrition, Calorie
Sponsors: University of California, San Francisco; Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD); Denver Health and Hospital Authority; University of Hawaii
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
The power line that could reshape New York’s grid is hitting snags
During a heat wave on July 3, New York State’s grid imported enough electricity from Canada to meet about 9% of its total demand that day.
Some of that power shuttled in on a 339-mile power line stretching from Quebec to Queens. It opened in May and is officially the longest underground transmission line in North America. It could provide up to 20% of New York City’s electricity demand, largely with abundant hydropower from Quebec.
One wrinkle: The line has been down for most of this month, and some experts are concerned about how drought will affect the power supply feeding it.
Still, the line could help shape the future of our grid, if it can overcome these sorts of snags. Read our story to understand how.
—Casey Crownhart
This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 The US Treasury is threatening to sanction Chinese AI companies Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has accused Moonshot of improperly distilling Anthropic’s Fable model. (TechCrunch) + Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is arguing that America has nothing to fear from Chinese AI. (Axios) + Like it or not, Chinese models are now part of the global AI infrastructure. (Rest of World) + China’s AI models have Trump’s AI world at war with itself. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Why the OpenAI hack is the scariest AI mishap yet AI’s capabilities seem to be starting to outpace our current ability to control them. (The Economist $) + Hugging Face had to turn to a Chinese AI model to rescue it from the hack. (BI)
3 Visually impaired Europeans can now get an implant that restores sight And Americans may not have to wait long to receive it, too. (STAT) + This retina implant lets people with vision loss do a crossword puzzle. (MIT Technology Review)
4 A bellwether lawsuit suing Meta for social media addiction has been dropped There are, however, many more waiting in the wings. (NYT $)
5 Here’s how ICE gets its hands on Americans’ data As soon as you open a credit card or phone account, its agents can see where you live. (404 Media) + States are warring with the Trump administration over the right to see ICE agents’ faces. (Wired $)
6 We urgently need to grapple with AI’s environmental impact As the world warms, is the price we’re paying worth it? (The Verge) + We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. (MIT Technology Review)
7 Privacy issues with smart glasses need an industrywide fix That’s according to Samsung, which is unveiling glasses it developed with Google this fall. (Bloomberg $)
8 The US Army is begging soldiers to limit their AI use The token crisis comes for us all eventually, it seems. (Ars Technica)
9 Why does lettuce keep making Americans sick? It’s pretty simple: a lot of people eat it, and it doesn’t get cooked. (Wired $)
10 Pokemon Go is the perfect game to play this summer It’s fun, collaborative, and it gets you outdoors. (Guardian)
Quote of the day
“It went off and did this hack all by itself, as far as we can tell. This is the highest level of autonomy that we’ve seen in the use of a large language model for cyber operations.”
—Colin Shea-Blymyer, a cybersecurity research fellow at Georgetown University, tells NPR why the OpenAI hack on Hugging Face is so alarming.
One More Thing
KAGAN MACLEOD
Welcome to the dark side of crypto’s permissionless dream
Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen is a founder of THORChain, a blockchain through which users can swap one cryptocurrency for another and earn fees from making those swaps.
But is he responsible for what it’s used for? It’s a question that matters because in January last year, its users lost more than $200 million in cryptocurrency after THORChain transactions and accounts were frozen by an admin override, which users believed was not supposed to be possible given the decentralized structure. It’s also been used by North Korean hackers to move $1.2 billion of stolen ethereum.
A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ A musician developed an ingenious way to strum a guitar with an electric fan. + Ukraine’s tunnel of love is a leafy green corridor of romance that’s straight out of a fairy tale. + The driver of a giant banana has been pulled over 100s of times, but still won’t ditch his treasured ride. + Ever wonder which albums and songs truly stand the test of time? The Greatest Music tries to answer that via an algorithm that analyses hundreds of “best of” lists.
Early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is important to ensure timely and accurate treatment. We show that a blood-based circular RNA signature can accurately detect Alzheimer’s disease as well as, or better than, current biomarkers and even predict who will develop symptoms before they appear. This less invasive approach could offer earlier diagnosis and improved monitoring of Alzheimer’s disease.
Background: Parents of very preterm infants admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) experience high levels of psychological distress, yet access to timely, evidence-based mental health support is limited by staffing and resource constraints. Digital mental health interventions offer a scalable approach to addressing this gap; however, their effectiveness has not been well established in NICU caregiver populations, particularly during periods of acute stress. Objective: This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of a self-guided digital acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT)–based intervention combined with NICU-specific education (NICU parent acceptance and commitment therapy [NPACT]). The study explored the intervention’s effects on stress among parents and primary caregivers of very preterm infants, compared to a digital education-only intervention, and active control. Methods: We conducted a 3-arm, single-center, randomized controlled cluster trial in a tertiary NICU. Parents and primary caregivers of very preterm infants (<32 wk’ gestational age,<1 wk old) were randomized by family cluster to (1) NPACT (ACT+ education), (2) a digital education-only intervention, or (3) active control. Digital interventions were delivered via a web-based platform over 2 weeks. The primary outcome was NICU-related stress on the Parent Stressor Scale: Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (PSS:NICU) at 2 weeks postrandomization. Secondary outcomes included caregiver anxiety, depression, perceived stress, and selected neonatal outcomes. Engagement and perceived helpfulness were assessed for digital interventions. Results: A total of 102 caregivers from 68 family clusters (79 infants; mean gestational age 28.1, SD 2.2 wk) were enrolled. There were no statistically significant between-group differences in the mean PSS:NICU scores at 2 weeks (NPACT 3.0, SD 0.9; education-only 2.5, SD 1; active control 2.6, SD 0.9; adjusted mean difference for NPACT vs active control 0.04, 95% CI −0.39 to 0.47). No between-group differences were observed for secondary psychological outcomes at any time point. However, caregivers in both digital intervention groups had higher odds of full breastfeeding at discharge compared with active control. Engagement with the digital interventions was high, with 97% (28/29) of NPACT participants and 76% (19/25) of education-only participants completing at least 5 of 7 modules, and both interventions were rated as very helpful. Conclusions: In this trial, an unguided digital mental health intervention delivered during NICU admission did not reduce NICU-specific parental stress or other psychological outcomes relative to active control. However, the intervention was highly used by caregivers. These findings suggest that while a brief digital mental health intervention can be successfully implemented in a high-stress clinical setting with caregivers, its capacity to reduce acute psychological distress may be limited. Secondary findings indicate potential benefits of the digital intervention on breastfeeding, generating hypotheses for future research. Digital mental health interventions in neonatal settings may be most effective when integrated within hybrid models of care and/or delivered beyond the acute admission phase. Trial Registration: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry ACTRN12623000641695; https://tinyurl.com/2e8677bb International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID): RR2-10.1016/j.cct.2024.107519
In a win for peptide proponents and for health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration recommended on Thursday that compounding pharmacies be allowed to manufacture the drugs BPC-157, KPV, TB-500, and MOTS-c.
The FDA panel will vote on additional compounds on Friday.
The votes are not binding, and the FDA will ultimately decide whether to lift current restrictions on these peptides and make them more easily accessible to people who’ve been turning to the little-researched but highly popular drugs to improve their health. It’s unusual for the FDA to go against the recommendations of the Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee (PCAC), but it has happened at least once before.
The results of a preclinical study led by UCLA Health researchers suggest that inflammation during pregnancy in mice can trigger autism-like brain and behavior changes in offspring, and that the effects may be rapidly but temporarily reversible in adulthood with a short-term dose of the immunosuppressive drug rapamycin.
The study showed that a single dose of rapamycin rapidly improved changes including brain overactivity, seizure risk, sensory sensitivity, repetitive behaviors, and abnormal brain functional network organization. Rapamycin itself is not considered a viable candidate for human therapy, as the effects of the drug were found to be temporary, with repeated dosing losing efficacy, and repeated use also having the potential for toxicity. However, the researchers said the study findings indicate that some autism-related brain changes may still be treatable in adulthood, and point to possible therapeutic approaches that target the underlying pathway rather than only symptoms.
“These results reframe how autism-associated symptoms might be treated,” said Janel Le Belle, PhD, an associate professor in the UCLA Department of Neurosurgery. “If the adult brain remains capable of functional normalization, then some features of autism may be successfully addressed without needing to correct underlying structural differences.” Le Belle is first author of the researchers’ published paper in Nature Communications, titled “Acute rapamycin treatment reveals distinct mechanisms of dysfunction in a maternal inflammation mouse model.”
Neurodevelopmental disorders result from the disruption of brain development in utero or in early life, with genetic, environmental, epigenetic, and immunological factors all potential contributors to complex pathogenesis, the authors wrote. Previous studies have shown that offspring of mothers who experience inflammation while pregnant have a higher likelihood of developing autism-associated traits such as repetitive behaviors and difficulty with social interaction, as well as brain overgrowth and disrupted sensory processing that continue into adulthood. “Maternal inflammatory response (MIR) during early mouse gestation induces a cascade of physiological and behavioral changes associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD),” they stated.
Rapamycin has been shown in previous mouse autism studies to improve symptoms by suppressing an overactive mTOR pathway that signals cell growth and proliferation. What has been less clear is whether these brain changes could still be modifiable in adulthood, and whether rapamycin’s benefits came from long-term structural repair or faster functional changes. “We wanted to understand the mechanisms that underlie the effects of adult mTOR inhibition, where treatment isn’t aimed at preventing or reversing structural brain abnormalities,” the team stated.
For their newly reported study the scientists exposed pregnant mice to a mild inflammatory trigger early in gestation at a dose that was too low to make the mothers significantly ill. The resulting offspring went on to develop chronic brain and body-wide inflammation, mild brain overgrowth, overactive cell-signaling in the mTOR pathway, disorganized brain functional network connectivity and behaviors associated with autism.
When researchers gave adult offspring a single dose of rapamycin they found rapid improvement across nearly every measure. Neurons that had been firing abnormally calmed down, susceptibility to seizures dropped, brain regions that had been miscommunicating reorganized into more typical patterns and repetitive behaviors and sensory over-responsivity eased. These changes occurred within roughly two hours of drug administration, which was too rapid to be explained by the kind of physical rewiring of brain synapses that typically takes longer.
“The level of functional normalization achieved over this short time suggests new mechanisms by which possible treatments may act,” said the study’s senior author Harley Kornblum, MD, PhD, director of the UCLA Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center in the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. “It suggests the adult brain may be more adaptable than we assumed, even when the underlying structural changes from early development are still there. This points us toward the brain’s functional circuitry, not just its physical structure, as a target for future treatment approaches.”
To understand the mechanisms of rapid rapamycin effects, researchers examined gene activity in brain cells before and after treatment. They found that rapamycin reversed abnormal expression of genes tied to autism, epilepsy and ion channel function, particularly in excitatory neurons, suggesting the drug works by quickly rebalancing brain cell excitability rather than by repairing structural brain differences.
The findings suggest that mTOR pathway activity, brain network organization and neuronal excitation levels as potential targets for future therapies aimed at specific autism symptoms such as sensory over-responsivity, a common but difficult-to-treat symptom of autism. “Our findings demonstrate that mTOR dysregulation drives dysfunctional brain development in MIR offspring but the adult brain remains amenable to rapid functional normalization, rescuing core and comorbid ASD associated brain and behavior phenotypes,” the authors stated.
Co-senior author and professor in the UCLA Department of Neurosurgery, Neil Harris, PhD, cautioned that the results showed the treatment effects to be temporary and that daily dosing produced tolerance over several weeks. This, along with rapamycin’s high potential for toxicity and the fact that these studies were performed in mice, makes it unsuitable for broad use in humans. “This points toward new therapeutic targets like sensory circuit neuromodulation or balancing neuronal inhibition and excitation, rather than toward rapamycin itself as a treatment,” Harris said. As the authors further commented in their paper, “Restoring excitatory/inhibitory imbalance and sensory functional network modularity may be important targets for therapeutically addressing multiple ASD phenotypes.”
When it comes to organ donation, time is everything. As soon as an organ has been carefully removed from a donor’s body, it starts to deteriorate. Surgeons have a matter of hours to get it into a recipient. Leave it too long and the organ will become unusable.
In most cases, organs will be kept on ice during that time, at around 4 °C (39 °F). They cannot be frozen—in previous attempts, ice has formed, causing all kinds of damage.
Matthew Powell Palm at Texas A&M University and his colleagues have an alternative solution—a device that allows organs to be cooled to -4 °C (25 °F) without forming any ice.
Now, in new research with pig organs, his team has shown that kidneys, at least, can be supercooled and preserved in the device for days. Once rewarmed, the organs have been successfully transplanted into animals, and they seem to do better than organs kept on ice.
The work represents “a landmark achievement,” says Kevin Myer, president and CEO of LifeGift, an organ procurement organization based in Texas, who was not involved in the research.
Cooling organs
Powell Palm hopes this approach could ultimately help ease the organ shortage crisis. Today, there are more than 104,000 people waiting for a kidney transplant in the US alone. It is estimated that 17 people die every day in the US while waiting for a transplant. That’s partly due to a lack of donated kidneys, but it’s also because many of those that are available never make it to a recipient. In some years, around one in three donated kidneys end up being discarded, often because they end up too degraded to use by the time they reach a recipient. Kidneys can be stored on ice for around 24 hours or placed in devices that aim to mimic the conditions of the body, also for up to around 24 hours. That’s not always long enough to find a suitable recipient and transport the organ, says Myer.
Scientists around the world have been working on ways to store organs for longer by cooling them to even chillier temperatures. Cooling an organ slows its metabolism—the colder you go, the greater the effect, and the longer you can store it.
We’ve long been able to successfully cryopreserve eggs, sperm, and embryos, but it’s much harder to freeze large organs. Teams have been exploring various temperatures and cryoprotectants (chemicals that essentially work like antifreeze), but so far no one has been able to freeze human organs for transplantation.
As a thermodynamicist, Powell Palm explored another approach. By keeping an organ submerged at a constant pressure, it should be possible to prevent the formation of ice at temperatures a little below 0 °C, without the need for cryoprotectants (which might have side effects and would need to be approved before being used in human transplants).
To test this theory, Powell Palm and his colleagues have created a device that does just that. The device itself is essentially a hermetically sealed chamber with a transparent lid. At its base is a device that monitors the organ’s temperature and checks for the formation of ice. Organs are submerged in a solution that is already commonly used to preserve them for transplant. “I always describe this as low-tech high science,” says Powell Palm. “A lot of work has gone into understanding the … kinetics at play in this system, but ultimately … it’s quite simple.”
Supercooled kidneys
To test their device, Powell Palm and his colleagues first removed single kidneys from pigs. The organs were flushed with the same commonly used solution to remove the blood, just as transplant organs are. The team then kept some kidneys on ice for either two hours or 24 hours, to mimic standard conditions used in human transplantation. They also put some of the removed kidneys in their device for 24, 48, or 72 hours.
The stored kidneys were then each transplanted back into the original donor pigs. Each pig’s second kidney was removed in the same procedure, leaving each animal with only the kidney that had been stored, and reimplanted.
Once the 24-hour supercooled kidneys were transplanted, they immediately began producing urine—a key indication that they were working. The team members also measured other markers of kidney function and found that the organs appeared to be working normally within about 10 days of being transplanted.
A kidney that was supercooled for 72 hours recovers once it is transplanted back into a pig.
COURTESY RONALD SELLERS, POWELL-PALM LAB, TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY
That’s slower than kidneys stored on ice for two hours but much quicker than kidneys kept on ice for 24 hours, says Powell Palm.
The organs that were kept supercooled for 48 and 72 hours performed similarly, he says. “Even at three days—triple the clinical standard—we’re getting recovery that is faster than … [what has been] the gold standard for the last three decades,” he says. “So we’re really, really pumped about this.”
“It is impressive,” says Heidi Yeh, a transplant surgeon at Mass General Brigham for Children, who also researches organ preservation technologies. “Often kidneys that have been stored for 48 hours [in other studies] take a week or two before they start working again.”
Organs that grow
The supercooled organs seem to work well in the long term, too. Over a 30-day period, the pigs grew by around 30%—and the kidneys grew with them, almost doubling in size to compensate for both the pigs’ growth and the lack of a second kidney. The team monitored one of the pigs for 200 days before removing and analyzing its kidney. Even at that point the organ looked healthy, says Powell Palm. He and his colleagues presented the findings at the American Transplant Congress in Boston last month.
Earlier this year, researchers in Canada showed they could also cool pig kidneys to below-zero temperatures and transplant them into pigs. The team’s protocol included the use of a cryoprotectant, and organs were stored for up to 48 hours before being transplanted into pigs. Those organs survived for a week.
In supercooling organs for 72 hours and showing that they do well for 30 days or more, Powell Palm and his colleagues have broken new ground. “It’s the first time this has ever been reported in history,” he says.
Those extra hours could make all the difference, says Myer of LifeGift. The advance could give doctors more time to evaluate the kidneys, match them to the most suitable donors, and physically get the organs to their intended recipients in time. It could enable international donations and open up cheaper transport options, he adds. “Right now, with kidney transplantation the assumed limit is 18 to 24 hours,” he says. “If we can get up to 72 hours … that would change everything.”
Powell Palm and his colleagues think they may even be able to go beyond 72 hours. In preliminary studies, organs that had been stored for up to 120 hours appeared healthy, although those organs have not yet been transplanted.
And because the process doesn’t require any cryoprotective chemicals, the team members are hoping for an accelerated approval from the US Food and Drug Administration, which would allow them to test the device in human transplantations.
The storage device is simple and compact, so Powell Palm thinks it will be easy to transport. It hasn’t been tested for air travel yet, but it has been used to take supercooled kidneys across the US in the back of a Kia Sorento, he says: “From a stability perspective, we view this as an even higher bar.”
Powell Palm and his colleague Sebastian Giwa plan to launch a company dedicated to developing the technology, along with other protocols that “stop biological time,” in the coming months, he says.
In a boost for greater clinical trial transparency, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) is taking what consumer advocacy groups are calling unexpectedly “rapid action” to ensure that study results are made public as required by law.
The move comes after a recent analysis found results for less than half of the studies registered in a key European database were reported within the required time frame and complete results were fully reported for only 42%. The researchers contended that overall compliance with legal reporting requirements was weak and regulatory oversight is lacking.
This was the first analysis to examine the Clinical Trial Information System (CTIS) that was created in 2022 as part of an effort to enhance transparency across the European Union and the European Economic Area. The registry contains more than 8,400 mid- and late-stage trials and, in the coming months and years, sponsors will be legally required to make results public.
People with diabetes who use a popular long-acting insulin pen made by Sanofi have had to become pharmacy scouts in recent weeks as they encounter supply issues.
The Lantus Solostar pen containing 3 milliliters of insulin glargine has been running low for several weeks because of increased demand “driven by broader market dynamics,” a Sanofi spokesperson told STAT. The issue is not technically considered a shortage by the Food and Drug Administration, but patients are nonetheless having trouble finding the medication.
“Our priority is ensuring patients have access to their medications,” the spokesperson said. “This is a temporary situation that we anticipate will improve over the coming weeks.”
