The decrease across the country is a major breakthrough in efforts to reverse the effects of fentanyl. Researchers and health officials say there is no easy explanation for the trend.Drug overdose deaths are decreasing sharply across the country, according to recent state and federal data, a dramatic improvement in the nation’s efforts to reverse the consequences of fentanyl’s spread in the illicit drug supply.Between April 2023 and April 2024, overdose deaths declined by about 10 percent nationally to roughly 101,000, according to preliminary data published recently by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That amounted to the largest decrease on record, according to the Biden administration. Nonfatal overdoses are also down more than 10 percent.The data suggests that some of the tools used to combat opioid overdoses, such as naloxone, the overdose-reversing medication, were having a significant impact. But researchers and federal and state health officials have puzzled over the exact reasons for the decrease, including why overdoses have fallen so much in recent months.The pace of the decline “is such an anomaly in the last 20 years,” said Nabarun Dasgupta, a leading drug policy expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who published an analysis this week of the state and federal data.Some states have reported even greater decreases than the national rate. In Kentucky, overdose deaths dropped by more than a third between April 2023 and March 2024. Arizona, Maine and Vermont all recorded recent decreases of around 15 percent.North Carolina’s fentanyl overdose rate fell by more than 30 percent from May 2023 to May 2024, Dr. Dasgupta said, a figure that prompted him to call the state’s health department to confirm that the number was real.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

He was a pioneer in chronobiology, the study of how our bodies understand the passage of time.On the morning of Sept. 14, 1962, reporters and onlookers began to gather around a hole in the ground, far up in the Maritime Alps between France and Italy. A few hours later, workers rigged a rope down into the darkness; soon they pulled out a small, sturdily built man named Michel Siffre.He had been inside the cave, 375 feet down, for 63 days, with only a four-volt lamp for illumination. He wore dark goggles to limit the glare of the sun, and he had to be carried to a waiting helicopter.This was no rescue: Mr. Siffre, a geologist, was conducting an experiment on himself, to see what would happen to his sense of time if he cut himself off from the normal day-night flow of life on the surface.It turns out that a lot could happen: Time as he experienced had “telescoped,” he said. His circadian rhythm of wakefulness and sleep stretched from 24 to about 25 hours. And what felt to him like one month was in fact two on the surface.“After one or two days, you don’t remember what you have done a day or two before,” he told Cabinet, an art and culture magazine, in 2008. “The only things that change are when you wake up and when you go to bed. Besides that, it’s entirely black. It’s like one long day.”Mr. Siffre, who died on Aug. 25 in Nice, was a leading figure in the field of chronobiology, the study of how the human body understands time. Previous scientists had speculated that, contrary to the prevailing idea at the time, our internal clocks are independent of the solar cycle, even as we usually adjust to its influence. Through decades of experiments beginning with that 1962 descent, he proved it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The F.D.A. authorized AstraZeneca to prescribe the treatment online for at-home use after a study showed it was feasible.The Food and Drug Administration on Friday authorized at-home use of FluMist, opening the door for needle-shy people to have easy access to a nasal spray vaccine that is potentially lifesaving.The approval will allow, for the first time, an alternative to the annual flu shot that parents and caregivers can give to children and that adults can use on their own outside of a health-care setting. It would still require a prescription and is expected to be available from an online pharmacy next fall.AstraZeneca, which makes the treatment, said it would start a FluMist Home website, where people can fill out a questionnaire that will be reviewed by a pharmacist before the treatment is shipped to a person’s home. The mist will remain available from prescribers as an in-office treatment. The current out-of-pocket cost for a dose is about $35 to $45, but may be less depending on insurance coverage.“Today’s approval of the first influenza vaccine for self- or caregiver-administration provides a new option for receiving a safe and effective seasonal influenza vaccine potentially with greater convenience, flexibility and accessibility for individuals and families,” said Dr. Peter Marks, director of the F.D.A.’s vaccine center, which authorized the at-home option.The agency required the company to study whether its instructions were clear and whether at-home administration was feasible. The agency concluded that it was, but advised caregivers to give the spray to those who are 2 to 17 years old.The flu takes a steep toll that varies greatly from year to year, according to an F.D.A. summary of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From 2010 through 2023, hospitalizations have ranged from 100,000 to 700,000 each year, and from about 4,900 to 51,000 people have died.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Liv Schmidt has inspired debates with videos that some believe encourage disordered eating. One social media site tried to remove her.“It’s not a sin to want to be thin,” read a recent social media bio for Liv Schmidt, a polarizing content creator who amassed more than 670,000 followers on TikTok before the company disabled her account last week.The Wall Street Journal wrote a profile about Ms. Schmidt on Monday in which she outlined her philosophies on dieting, including intentionally reducing calories. That led to a wave of online discourse about when promotion of ways to lose weight becomes encouragement of disordered eating and a broader discussion of where the concept of body positivity stands in the Ozempic era.The Journal reported that their inquiries about Ms. Schmidt to TikTok led that company to ban her account before the article ran, after which The Daily Mail branded her the “skinny influencer.” Ms. Schmidt quickly returned to TikTok, posting videos under a different username.Long before these events, critics had insisted that Ms. Schmidt’s videos posed a threat to impressionable viewers and were reminiscent of a pro-anorexia trend from the early 2000s, shortened by many to “pro-ana.” At that time, people openly promoted anorexic behavior, influenced by the ultrathin bodies of many models in the 1990s.Why are people talking about Liv Schmidt?Ms. Schmidt, 22, lists her job on LinkedIn as a social event coordinator for a private family office, but she built her social media following in recent months by posting blueprints for maintaining a slim figure while working a day job, including detailing her daily food intake through “What I Eat in a Day” videos. She has also spoken frankly about receiving better treatment from society after losing weight.In the Wall Street Journal article, Ms. Schmidt, who declined a request to be interviewed by The New York Times, said that she had not struggled with disordered eating but knew what it was like to experience discomfort in her body. Ms. Schmidt also told The Journal, “We all have the option to follow and block any content we want.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The case takes aim at the major pharmacy benefit managers, agency officials said, claiming that they favored more expensive insulin products and forced patients to pay more.The Federal Trade Commission said on Friday that it had taken legal action against the three largest pharmacy benefit managers, accusing the drug middlemen of inflating insulin prices and steering patients toward higher-cost insulin products to increase their profits.The legal action targets CVS Health’s Caremark, Cigna’s Express Scripts and UnitedHealth’s Optum Rx and subsidiaries they’ve created to handle drug negotiations, agency officials said. The three collectively control 80 percent of prescriptions in the United States. Hired by employers and government health insurance programs like Medicare, pharmacy benefit managers, or P.B.M.s, are responsible for negotiating prices with drug makers, paying pharmacies and helping decide which drugs are available and at what cost to patients.Agency officials said they had filed an administrative complaint, which is not yet public, that accuses the P.B.M.s of distorting competition and harming consumers. The agency is seeking to prohibit the benefit managers from favoring medicines because those drugs make them more money.The agency’s five commissioners voted on the action, with the three Democratic appointees favoring it and the two Republicans recusing themselves.Rahul Rao, an F.T.C. official, said in a news release on Friday that the largest P.B.M.s “have extracted millions of dollars off the backs of patients who need lifesaving medications.”He said the agency’s legal action “seeks to put an end to the big three P.B.M.s’ exploitative conduct and marks an important step in fixing a broken system — a fix that could ripple beyond the insulin market and restore healthy competition to drive down drug prices for consumers.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is advising people with a peanut allergy to avoid consuming foods that may contain mustard, because they could be contaminated with peanuts.

Parents are not to blame for “fussy eating”, researchers say, as a large study suggests fussy eating tendencies are mostly down to genetics rather than parenting styles.

First Born FilmsFor the past 20 years, self-declared “cyborg artist” Neil Harbisson has provoked debate with his “eyeborg” – a surgically attached antenna.

Getty ImagesThere is an unacceptable variation in waits for treatment of different cancers in England, an exclusive analysis for BBC News by Cancer Research UK shows.

He identified the cause of a respiratory condition behind 10,000 infant deaths a year and helped design a drug to drastically reduce mortality rates.Dr. John A. Clements, a towering figure in the field of pulmonary research who in the 1950s solved one of the great mysteries of the human lung, then helped to save thousands of lives by designing a drug to treat lung failure in premature infants, died on Sept. 3 at his home in Tiburon, Calif., north of San Francisco. He was 101.The death was confirmed by his daughter Carol Clements.In 1949, Dr. Clements was fresh out of Cornell University Medical College (now Weill Cornell Medical College) and working for the Army as a physiologist, charged with investigating the effects of nerve gases, when he became intrigued by the miraculous mechanics of human breathing.How could the millions of tiny air sacs in the lungs deflate when a person breathes out, but not collapse like a balloon? Dr. Clements theorized that there must be some chemical relaxing the surface tension of the air sacs, and he went on to identify the substance as a surfactant, a class of lubricants that work like household detergents.In a 1956 paper, based on research done with a crude instrument he built himself, Dr. Clements demonstrated the presence of a surfactant in the lungs.His work led to a breakthrough three years later by two Harvard researchers whom Dr. Clements advised: pulmonary surfactant, they found, was absent in premature babies with undeveloped lungs who died of respiratory distress syndrome, or R.D.S.Dr. Clements in 1988. He began his research began shortly after he finished his education, when he was working for the Army as a physiologist.via UCSFWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.