Innovative microbiome analysis revealed a part of the gut microbiome that changes coherently from healthy individuals across those with genetic risk of Parkinson’s disease to patients who are symptomatic. A large range of microbiome alterations within each of the three groups enables identification of individuals at greater risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. A healthy diet was inversely associated with these alterations and might mitigate disease risk.
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<![CDATA[DT-120, an optimized LSD formulation, shows lasting anxiety relief and high remission at 12 weeks, as researchers share detailed phase 2b safety insights.]]>
Background: Digital cognitive assessments are increasingly used in large-scale studies to assess brain health, offering scalable, standardized, and self-directed testing solutions. Cognitive function remains a concern for people with HIV despite antiretroviral therapy. The BRACE (BrainBaseline Assessment of Cognition and Everyday Functioning) is a validated tablet-based screener for cognition in people with HIV. Preliminary pilot norms were established in a small sample (n=144), but full regression-based normative data have not yet been developed. Consequently, HIV serostatus differences based on standardized BRACE scores and cognitive correlates have not been systematically examined. Objective: This study aims to develop regression-based normative data for BRACE performance in people without HIV who were demographically and behaviorally comparable to people with HIV within biological sex; to examine differences in cognitive performance by HIV status and biological sex; and to evaluate sociodemographic, behavioral, and clinical correlates of BRACE performance. Methods: A total of 2937 participants (1063 people without HIV [499 women] and 1874 people with HIV [1053 women]) in the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study/Women’s Interagency HIV Study Combined Cohort Study completed BRACE once between November 2020 and March 2025. BRACE includes the Trail Making Test (A and B), Stroop-Color, and visual spatial learning. Regression-based norms were derived from people without HIV using multiple demographic models (eg, age-only, age + education, and age + education + sex). The age + education model was selected for primary analyses because it provided the best balance of interpretability, parsimony, and generalizability while avoiding race-based corrections. HIV serostatus and sex differences were examined using ANOVA and tests, with effect sizes calculated using Cohen’s . Results: Cognitive performance was largely comparable between people with HIV and people without HIV across all BRACE outcome measures. Statistically significant differences were very small in magnitude (all effect sizes<0.11) and primarily observed among men on Stroop-Color. Across groups, older age and fewer years of education were associated with poorer raw BRACE performance, although these associations attenuated after demographic adjustment using T-scores. Most clinical and behavioral factors (eg, hypertension, smoking, and noncannabis substance use) were related to poorer raw scores but not standardized performance. However, diabetes and cannabis use remained independently associated with T-scores across multiple measures—diabetes with poorer scores and cannabis use with higher scores, an association that should be interpreted cautiously. HIV-specific clinical factors, such as nadir CD4 count and antiretroviral therapy duration, were linked primarily to raw scores. Conclusions: This study establishes the first regression-based normative data for BRACE, derived from a large, demographically diverse people without HIV, and demonstrates its applicability for evaluating cognitive function in people with HIV. Findings indicate minimal cognitive differences between people with HIV and people without HIV and highlight the influence of common sociodemographic and metabolic factors. These results support BRACE as a scalable, reliable, and self-administered digital tool for assessing cognitive health in diverse populations and underscore its potential for longitudinal monitoring and precision phenotyping in both research and clinical contexts.
New Child Mind Institute study finds more than one in four youth experienced a negative online experience in the past year, yet only one in five reported the incident through platform tools.
New York, NY — A new study from researchers at the Child Mind Institute finds that negative online experiences are common among children and adolescents with mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions, and that most incidents are not reported through platform reporting tools.
Published in JAACAP Open, the study examined negative online experiences among 1,009 youth ages 9 to 15 with a history of mental health or neurodevelopmental concerns, all of whom were current or previous participants in the Child Mind Institute’s Healthy Brain Network. More than one in four reported at least one negative online experience in the past year. Among those who had such an experience, nearly 69% reported multiple incidents, yet only 20% reported the incident through platform reporting tools.
The study defined “negative online experience” as any unwanted or uncomfortable experience while online, including cyberbullying, cyberstalking, doxxing, impersonation, sexual harassment, and related forms of digital harm. The research used a mixed-methods design, combining a quantitative survey with an in-depth qualitative follow-up involving a three-day moderated online bulletin board with a subset of participants.
“These findings point to a large and often hidden problem,” said Michael P. Milham, MD, PhD, Chief Science Officer at the Child Mind Institute and senior author of the study. “Many young people are encountering harmful or uncomfortable experiences online, but the systems designed to help them often do not receive a report. That creates a major gap for parents, educators, clinicians, and platforms trying to keep children safer online.”
The research team identified three major categories of barriers that prevent youth from reporting negative online experiences: reporting process barriers, such as not knowing how to make a report; reporting policy barriers, including uncertainty about what qualifies for reporting or how platform rules apply; and emotional barriers, such as embarrassment, fear, and worry about consequences.
The study also found that reporting decisions were often shaped by how young people interpreted the incident itself. In the qualitative follow-up, youth considered whether the harmful behavior seemed intentional, how malicious it appeared, and how severe or repeated the harassment was. When those cues were ambiguous, youth were less certain about whether reporting was appropriate.
“Reporting is not simply a matter of telling young people to speak up,” said Mirelle Kass, lead author of the study. “Youth are making complicated judgments about intent, severity, platform rules, and the possible consequences of disclosure. If we want young people to report harmful experiences, the tools and systems around them need to be clearer, safer, and easier to use.”
The findings suggest that online safety efforts should be tailored to the needs of youth who may already be managing mental health, developmental, or social challenges. Social aptitude, mental health symptoms, and parenting style were associated with youths’ likelihood of encountering negative online experiences and with the barriers they faced when deciding whether to report them.
Participants also expressed a clear desire for better tools and guidance. Most youth wanted platforms to provide more information about how to protect themselves online, how to use safety features such as blocking and reporting, and how to access support during and after the reporting process.
“Families, educators, clinicians, policymakers, and technology developers all have a role to play,” said Dr. Milham. “We need reporting systems that children can understand, policies that are transparent, and trusted adults who can respond without blame or overreaction. Safer digital spaces will require more than awareness. They will require systems designed around how young people actually experience online harm.”
The study underscores the importance of developmentally appropriate safety tools, clearer platform policies, and stronger support systems for youth navigating digital spaces. For children and adolescents with mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions, improving reporting pathways may be an important step toward reducing hidden online harms and building safer online environments.
This research was supported by funding from Google LLC’s User Safety team to the Child Mind Institute for work led by Michael P. Milham, MD, PhD.
About the Healthy Brain Network
The Healthy Brain Network is a community-centered research initiative from the Child Mind Institute that collects clinical, cognitive, behavioral, and neurobiological data from children and adolescents in the New York City area. Families who participate receive feedback and diagnostic consultation while contributing to open science research aimed at improving understanding of child and adolescent mental health.
About the Child Mind Institute
The Child Mind Institute is an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to transforming the lives of children and families struggling with mental health and learning disorders. Through cutting-edge research, evidence-based clinical care, and public education, the Child Mind Institute builds open science platforms and digital tools to accelerate discovery and improve youth mental health worldwide.
Background: Older Black adults remain underrepresented in dementia research, particularly in studies using speech-based methods for early cognitive assessment. Understanding how to effectively recruit and engage this population in research involving audio-recorded interactions is critical to ensuring equitable inclusion and developing culturally responsive study designs. However, recruiting older Black adults into dementia research remains a significant challenge. Objective: This study assessed the feasibility of recruiting older Black home health care (HHC) patients into speech-based cognitive research and examined the factors influencing participation and participants’ data collection experiences. Methods: We conducted a convergent mixed methods feasibility study using a 4-component recruitment pipeline at a nonprofit HHC agency: (1) patient identification and study introduction, (2) in-home audio-recorded cognitive assessments, (3) follow-up calls, and (4) audio-recorded patient-clinician encounters. Both patients and their corresponding clinicians were included in this study. Eligible participants were Black adults aged 60 years and older receiving HHC services in New York City. Patient demographic and clinical characteristics were compared between those who consented and those who declined using bivariate analysis. Qualitative feedback was gathered through patient questionnaires and clinician semistructured interviews and was analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results: Of 246 patients contacted, 71 (28.9%) provided verbal consent and 60 (24.4%) completed cognitive assessments. Five patients were excluded due to health conditions or severe cognitive impairment, leaving 55 eligible participants. Among these participants, retention remained high across study components, including follow-up calls (48/55, 87.3%) and audio-recorded clinician visits (54/55, 98.2%). Patients who did not consent were more likely to have greater complex medical profiles, including higher pain interference (=.01), need for assistance with medication reading (=.04), and polypharmacy (≥5 medications; =.01), while no significant differences were observed for age, gender, or functional status. Qualitative findings demonstrated high acceptability and feasibility of audio recording. Patients reported strong motivation to participate, positive and engaging experiences, comfort with recording, and minimal disruption to care. Clinicians reported ease of integration into workflow, initial discomfort that diminished over time, minor technical challenges, and perceived benefits for communication and patient engagement. Conclusions: Recruiting Black older adults receiving HHC into speech-based dementia research was feasible and well accepted. Culturally tailored recruitment may enhance equitable participation and guide future research using audio-recorded speech for early cognitive detection.
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When Craig Spencer contracted Ebola while working in Guinea during the West African outbreak in 2014, he was already back in the United States when he first developed symptoms. He credits the treatment he got at New York’s Bellevue Hospital for his survival.
If Spencer, an emergency medicine physician and an associate professor in Brown University’s School of Public Health, were to contract Ebola in the current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda — if he’d even had high-risk exposures to Ebola patients — he wouldn’t be allowed back into the U.S. for care or quarantine.
Administration officials confirmed Thursday that any Americans who contract Ebola will not be brought to the United States for treatment. Instead, they will be evacuated to as-yet-undetermined locations in Europe. An official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the State Department are working to identify tertiary care facilities that could take Americans needing care. One such case has already occurred.
Biotech is producing scientific breakthroughs that once seemed impossible. But according to longtime industry executive Jeremy Levin, the institutions that support these advances, from regulators, to investors, and even public trust in science itself — are beginning to fracture.
Levin is the founder and chairman of Ovid Therapeutics and former CEO of Teva Pharmaceuticals. In his new book, “Biotech in the Balance: Saving a Strategic Industry in an Age of Distrust,” he argues that political upheaval, weakening institutions, short-term investing, and more are putting the future of the industry at risk, even though the science itself continues to accelerate.
On this week’s episode of “The Readout Loud,” Levin advocates for federal changes that could incentivize biotech investment, and for pharmaceutical companies, in particular, to call out how regulatory upheaval is harming the drug industry. “When an institution such as this, which is critical, is shaken, the industry must stand firm. It must call out why this is a problem. … The titans are dead silent right now,” he said.
Below are highlights from his conversation with hosts Elaine Chen, Adam Feuerstein, and Allison DeAngelis.
This transcript of the interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
On this week’s episode of “The Readout LOUD,” we chat with longtime biotech executive Jeremy Levin about his new book, “Biotech in the Balance: Saving a Strategic Industry in an Age of Distrust.” That sounds alarmist, and it is in some respects, but as Levin explains, the book is also a roadmap to a brighter future for the biotech industry.
Researchers say they’ve found a new way to extract lithium, a crucial metal used in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles and energy storage arrays. This new technique could be more environmentally friendly and cheaper than existing ones.
The research was published today in Science, and a startup called Rock Zero is working to commercialize the process.
“At scale, we believe this will be the lowest-cost way of sourcing lithium in the world,” says Yet-Ming Chiang, one of the study authors, who is an MIT professor and a serial entrepreneur behind climate tech companies including Form Energy and Addis Energy.
The most economical way to get lithium currently is to extract it from brine, salty water that’s pulled the metal out of rock over the course of millennia. But this technique is geographically limited and currently requires vast tracts of land for massive evaporation pools. The more common tactic is hard-rock mining, where large bodies of ore are blasted apart, cooked at high temperatures, and processed using dangerous chemicals.
The researchers’ new method uses a weak acid to dissolve typically nonreactive silicate minerals. That frees not only the lithium but also other useful materials, including alumina and silica.
The origin story for this research, and the resulting company, came from another startup founded by Chiang, Sublime Systems, which makes cement using electrochemistry.
The team was trying to find a source of highly reactive silica in order to form stronger cement. One way to make reactive materials, which can bond easily with other materials, is to take a nonreactive material, dissolve it, and then allow it to become solid in a more reactive form. It’s not impossible to dissolve silicates, but the best-known way is to use hydrofluoric acid, an extremely dangerous chemical. Other fluorine-containing chemicals are candidates too, but some will produce hydrofluoric acid as a side product during reactions.
Chiang drew inspiration from a previous home renovation project involving glass, which is made of silica. “I was remodeling a shower in Framingham, Massachusetts, about 25 years ago,” he says. “So when we started this project, I remembered that glass etching cream and thought, ‘What’s in that?’”
The glass etching cream he remembered, which can be found on shelves at any craft or home improvement store, uses ammonium fluoride, a weak acid. And the MIT researchers discovered that in the right conditions, it can effectively dissolve silicate minerals without producing hydrofluoric acid in the process.
This chemistry could be useful for any silicate minerals—and there are a lot of them. But spodumene, the mineral that’s often mined for lithium, became a prime first target. (Chiang says a suggestion from Doug Wicks, one of the company’s advisors and a former ARPA-E official, pointed the team in spodumene’s direction.)
From left to right: spodumene, silica, alumina and lithium salts.
ROCK ZERO
Today, a key step in processing spodumene ore is to roast it in a kiln at super-high temperatures. This causes a phase transformation, essentially puffing up the material and making the lithium more accessible.
By avoiding the need to reach these temperatures, you could save on energy costs and potentially reduce carbon emissions as well, says Camden Hunt, one of the authors of the study and the CEO and cofounder of Rock Zero.
Avoiding the kiln could also unlock the ability to use some ores that can’t be roasted properly, Hunt adds. Ore that contains too much iron won’t go through the phase change correctly, instead melting and turning into a glassy material.
The new process relies on simple stirred plastic tanks and takes place at temperatures up to about 95 °C (200 °F). The ammonium fluoride dissolves the silicates, which in earlier experiments allowed nearly all of the lithium inside the spodumene ore to be extracted within a couple of days. The researchers have since cut this time to under 12 hours, says Benjamin Mowbray, first author of the study and the CTO and cofounder of Rock Zero.
The products (after some additional steps to clean them up) are lithium carbonate, which can be used to make batteries; alumina, which can go into a smelter to make aluminum; and cementitious silica, which can be added into concrete. And the acid can be reused in the same loop.
Chiang calls this “nose-to-tail” mining—using every part of the ore provided, like eating every part of a butchered animal.
The researchers are currently working to scale and optimize the process. The tanks in the lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts can handle three kilograms of spodumene concentrate in each batch.
They have also estimated the cost of this process once fully scaled up. Assuming that the ammonium fluoride can be recycled at a high level, they should be able to extract lithium for less than $6,000 per metric ton. (They’ve identified a potential cheap industrial source of the acid as well, as an alternative to recycling it.)
The total cost is projected to be lower than that of other processes used to extract lithium from hard-rock ore today, and it could be competitive with brine.
The team has designed a pilot plant and is looking for space to build it. The plan is to have construction done by the end of 2026 and start operating the facility in 2027. Talks are underway with potential partners in the mining industry.
One difficulty for new players in lithium extraction is the volatility of the market: Prices have seen huge swings in recent years, from a peak in 2022 to lows in late 2024 and a slow climb starting in early 2026.
Rising prices might benefit new players like Rock Zero, but there are many projects that could come online if prices continue to rise, and that could bring the market right back down, says Simon Jowitt, chair of exploration geology at the University of Nevada, Reno. “People are waiting to see what happens with the lithium price,” he says. “It’s a crowded market, and there’s some big players out there.”
And even though batteries are driving up demand for lithium, the market is still relatively small, Jowitt adds: “That means it’s going to be volatile.” New lithium extraction technologies like Rock Zero’s will have to compete with methods used by existing giants, and there’s also the potential that technological alternatives, like sodium-ion batteries that don’t need lithium, could make the market more difficult to navigate, Jowitt says. He also thinks some of the company’s economic estimates could be optimistic.
For its part, Rock Zero’s team hopes not only to scale this technology for lithium, but to use it for other minerals in the future. As Mowbray says, “The Earth’s crust is made of silicates.”
