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Permanent magnets, the kind found on refrigerators everywhere, exist because their constituent atoms behave as miniature magnets. They align and combine to form the larger magnet in a phenomenon called ferromagnetism. There are some materials where the atomic magnets instead form an alternating pattern, so the material has no net magnetization. Such antiferromagnets have attracted attention for their potential to create faster and more compact magnetic memory devices for computing.
Realizing the full potential of antiferromagnetic devices will require sensing their atom-to-atom magnetic patterns, something that has not yet been achieved. However, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign led by Pinshane Huang, a professor of materials science & engineering, have made progress toward this goal. In the journal Ultramicroscopy, they report a new electron microscopy technique that can resolve magnetic behavior on the scale of angstroms — tenths of nanometers, nearly on the scale of individual atoms. They use this technique to fully resolve the antiferromagnetic order in iron arsenide for the first time.
“We are working to develop new techniques that can resolve magnetic behavior of individual atoms, and this study is an important step,” Huang said. “The best techniques before now have achieved resolutions of a few nanometers. We have vastly exceeded that record.”
Microscopic magnetism is often measured with scanning transmission electron microscopy, or STEM, in which an electron beam is focused into a material. The electric interactions between the beam and the material’s structure have been famously used to provide images of individual atoms in the material, but the beam also interacts with the material’s magnetic structure. Although this much weaker interaction is enough to determine the longer-range magnetic order found in ferromagnets, a far more precise technique is needed to observe the atom-to-atom variation in antiferromagnets.
“In standard, low-resolution STEM experiments, the magnetic interaction can be understood as a small deflection of the electron beam,” said Kayla Nguyen, a postdoctoral research associate and co-lead author of the study. “On the scale of individual atoms, though, this picture breaks down. The magnetic interactions create complicated and subtle signals in the beam pattern which require new tools to analyze and understand.”
To achieve higher resolution, the researchers turned to a more powerful method called four-dimensional STEM. Standard STEM techniques record drops in the beam’s intensity as it interacts with the material, but 4D-STEM captures full two-dimensional scattering patterns as the electron beam scans along the two directions of the material’s surface (for four-dimensional data). These data allowed the researchers to search the full beam patterns for the more intricate signals of atomic antiferromagnetism.
A crucial step of the analysis was simulating the magnetic fields within the iron arsenide sample, for which the researchers wrote a software package called Magnstem. Graduate student and co-lead author Jeffrey Huang explained that the package allowed them to add magnetic effects specific to their material and study the effects they had on electron beam patterns.
“Magnstem simulations allowed us to compare the electron patterns with magnetic effects turned on versus turned off, something that would be quite difficult to do in a real experiment,” he said. “We saw that the effects of the magnetic and electric signals occur on different parts of the pattern and can be extracted separately.”
By combining 4D-STEM with Magnstem simulations, the researchers resolved magnetic order down to 6 angstroms. While this does not resolve magnetic effects on the scale of individual atoms, it allowed them to resolve the antiferromagnetic pattern of iron arsenide, which repeats in cells of 12 atoms.
“Our work has shown it is possible to resolve small-scale magnetic order in electron microscopy experiments and in simulations, almost at atomic resolution,” P. Huang said. “We are actively developing techniques that will build on this result.”
The researchers worked in collaboration with the research groups of Daniel Shoemaker and André Schleife, both professors of materials science & engineering. Shoemaker’s group produced samples of iron arsenide, and Schleife’s group performed simulations of the material’s magnetic structure.
This work was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Illinois Materials Research Science and Engineering Center funded through the National Science Foundation. Nguyen is supported by a L’Oreal Fellowship for Women in Science. This research made use of the electron microscopy facilities in the Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Dopamine, a brain chemical long associated with pleasure, motivation and reward-seeking, also appears to play an important role in why exercise and other physical efforts feel “easy” to some people and exhausting to others, according to results of a study of people with Parkinson’s disease led by Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers. Parkinson’s disease is marked by a loss of dopamine-producing cells in the brain over time.
The findings, published online April 1 in NPG Parkinson’s Disease, could, the researchers say, eventually lead to more effective ways to help people establish and stick with exercise regimens, new treatments for fatigue associated with depression and many other conditions, and a better understanding of Parkinson’s disease.
“Researchers have long been trying to understand why some people find physical effort easier than others,” says study leader Vikram Chib, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and research scientist at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. “This study’s results suggest that the amount of dopamine availability in the brain is a key factor.”
Chib explains that after a bout of physical activity, people’s perception and self-reports of the effort they expended varies, and also guides their decisions about undertaking future exertions. Previous studies have shown that people with increased dopamine are more willing to exert physical effort for rewards, but the current study focuses on dopamine’s role in people’s self-assessment of effort needed for a physical task, without the promise of a reward.
For the study, Chib and his colleagues from Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Kennedy Krieger Institute recruited 19 adults diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a condition in which neurons in the brain that produce dopamine gradually die off, causing unintended and uncontrollable movements such as tremors, fatigue, stiffness and trouble with balance or coordination.
In Chib’s lab, 10 male volunteers and nine female volunteers with an average age of 67 were asked to perform the same physical task — squeezing a hand grip equipped with a sensor — on two different days within four weeks of each other. On one of the days, the patients were asked to take their standard, daily synthetic dopamine medication as they normally would. On the other, they were asked not to take their medication for at least 12 hours prior to performing the squeeze test.

On both days, the patients were initially taught to squeeze a grip sensor at various levels of defined effort, and then were asked to squeeze and report how many units of effort they put forth.
When the participants had taken their regular synthetic dopamine medication, their self-assessments of units of effort expended were more accurate than when they hadn’t taken the drug. They also had less variability in their efforts, showing accurate squeezes when the researchers cued them to squeeze at different levels of effort.
In contrast, when the patients hadn’t taken the medication, they consistently over-reported their efforts — meaning they perceived the task to be physically harder — and had significantly more variability among grips after being cued.
In another experiment, the patients were given a choice between a sure option of squeezing with a relatively low amount of effort on the grip sensor or flipping a coin and taking a chance on having to perform either no effort or a very high level of effort. When these volunteers had taken their medication, they were more willing to take a chance on having to perform a higher amount of effort than when they didn’t take their medication.
A third experiment offered participants the choice between getting a small amount of guaranteed money or, with the flip of a coin, getting either nothing or a higher amount of money. Results showed no difference in the subjects on days when they took their medication and when they did not. This result, researchers say, suggests that dopamine’s influence on risk-taking preferences is specific to physical effort-based decision-making.
Together, Chib says, these findings suggest that dopamine level is a critical factor in helping people accurately assess how much effort a physical task requires, which can significantly affect how much effort they’re willing to put forth for future tasks. For example, if someone perceives that a physical task will take an extraordinary amount of effort, they may be less motivated to do it.
Understanding more about the chemistry and biology of motivation could advance ways to motivate exercise and physical therapy regimens, Chib says. In addition, inefficient dopamine signaling could help explain the pervasive fatigue present in conditions such as depression and long COVID, and during cancer treatments. Currently, he and his colleagues are studying dopamine’s role in clinical fatigue.
Other researchers who participated in this study include Purnima Padmanabhan, Agostina Casamento-Moran, and Alexander Pantelyat of Johns Hopkins; Ryan Roemmich of Johns Hopkins and the Kennedy Krieger Institute; and Anthony Gonzalez of the Kennedy Krieger Institute.
This work was funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health (R01HD097619), the National Institutes of Mental Health (R56MH113627 and R01MH119086) and the National Institute of Aging (R21AG059184).

High levels of the body’s own cannabinoid substances protect against developing addiction in individuals previously exposed to childhood maltreatment, according to a new study from Linköping University in Sweden. The brains of those who had not developed an addiction following childhood maltreatment seem to process emotion-related social signals better.
Childhood maltreatment has long been suspected to increase the risk of developing a drug or alcohol addiction later in life. Researchers at Linköping University have previously shown that this risk is three times higher if you have been exposed to childhood maltreatment compared with if you have not, even when accounting for confounds from genetics and other familial factors.
“There’s been a lot of focus on addiction as a disease driven by a search for pleasure effects and euphoria, but for many it has more to do with the drugs’ ability to suppress negative feelings, stress sensitivity, anxiety and low mood. Based on this, we and other researchers have had a theory that if affected in childhood, the function of the brain’s distress systems is altered, and that this may contribute to addiction risk in adulthood,” says Markus Heilig, professor and director of the Center for Social and Affective Neuroscience, CSAN, at Linköping University and consultant at the Psychiatric Clinic of the University Hospital in Linköping.
Endocannabinoids, i.e. the body’s own cannabis-like substances, are an interesting player in this context. The endocannabinoid system plays an important part in regulating reactions to stress and discomfort. Recent research suggests that this endogenous system may function as a stress buffer.
The researchers behind the study, published in Molecular Psychiatry, aimed to investigate possible mechanisms behind susceptibility or resilience to developing substance use disorder later in life after exposure to childhood maltreatment. One difficulty in research is that people who develop problems later in life tend to overreport negative life experiences when questioned about earlier events. The researchers therefore used psychiatric care registers of children and young people having been treated for traumatic childhood experiences to find study participants with objectively and prospectively documented exposure. The study included about 100 young adults divided into four equal sized groups: individuals that had been exposed to childhood maltreatment and had developed an addiction, individuals that had been exposed but had not, individuals that had not been exposed but had developed an addiction, and individuals who had neither been exposed nor developed an addiction. The researchers measured endocannabinoid levels in participants’ blood and carried out several experiments to test stress reactions. The participants’ brains were also scanned using magnetic resonance imaging, MRI, while their reactions to social stimuli were tested.
It turned out that one group stood out compared to the other three: the group that had experienced childhood maltreatment but had not later developed an addiction. The researchers refer to this group as ?resilient’. In comparison with the other groups, this group showed increased function of the endocannabinoid system as well as different brain activity. Surprisingly, the resilient group differed most from the control group, which had not been exposed to childhood maltreatment, nor had any addictions.
Faced with emotional social stimuli, the resilient group showed higher activity in three areas of the brain. Two of these areas are part of a brain network that focuses attention and cognitive abilities on what is important at the moment and modifies individuals’ behaviour according to the situation at hand. The third area of the brain is in the frontal lobe and is associated with regulating emotions. This area communicates extensively with other areas in the brain that process emotions. In comparison with other animals, humans have a well-developed frontal lobe that regulates impulses and emotions, for instance by suppressing fear impulses in situations where fear is not relevant.
“Increased activity in certain areas of the brain in the resilient group, which had not developed an addiction despite childhood maltreatment, may be linked to a more adaptive way of reacting to emotional social information. We can see that also in a resting state they show increased communication between the frontal lobes and other parts of the brain, which could indicate that this group has better emotional regulation,” says Irene Perini, staff scientist at CSAN at Linköping University.
A question this discovery raises is whether the resilient group had a high endocannabinoid system function from the outset, or whether they were better able to activate the system in response to stress, thereby avoiding long-term consequences of childhood maltreatment. Because of its cross-section nature, this is not possible to determine from the present study.
The study was funded by, among others, the Swedish Research Council, Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Region Östergötland, Linköping University, Systembolaget’s Alcohol Research Council and the Brain & Behaviour Research Foundation NARSAD Young Investigator Grant. It was carried out by Markus Heilig’s research group at CSAN. Irene Perini is the lead author together with Leah Mayo, previously with CSAN at LiU, and currently professor at the University of Calgary in Canada.

The case ends major litigation over claims of marketing e-cigarettes to adolescents, resolving thousands of lawsuits and amounting to billions of dollars in payouts to states, cities and people.New York, California and several other states announced a $462 million settlement with Juul Labs on Wednesday, resolving lawsuits claiming that the company aggressively marketed its e-cigarettes to young people and fueled the nation’s vaping crisis.The agreement brings much of the company’s legal woes to a conclusion, with settlements reached with 47 states and territories and 5,000 individuals and local governments. Juul is in the middle of a trial in Minnesota, an unusual case in which a settlement was not reached. But the company’s efforts to broker deals over the lawsuits have cost it nearly $3 billion so far, a massive sum for a company still seeking official regulatory approval to keep selling its products.The latest settlement resolved the claims of New York, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Massachusetts and New Mexico. It follows others that took the company to task for failing to warn young users that the high levels of nicotine in their e-cigarettes would prove addictive.California contended in its lawsuit that for months, Juul did not disclose in its advertising that its devices contained nicotine. It detailed the company’s early marketing efforts, which included handing out free samples of the e-cigarettes in 2015 at trendy events, including one called Nocturnal Wonderland in San Bernardino and a “Movies All Night Slumber Party” in Los Angeles. The New York lawsuit noted that the company embraced the use of social media hashtags like #LightsCameraVapor.Attorneys general in those states conducted investigations that they said had found that Juul executives were aware that their initial marketing lured teenage users into buying its sleek vaping pens, but did little to address the problem as the adolescent vaping rate exploded.Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, said in a statement: “Too many young New Yorkers are struggling to quit vaping and there is no doubt that Juul played a central role in the nationwide vaping epidemic.”A spokesman for Juul, Austin Finan, said that underage use of its products had declined by about 95 percent, citing federal data, since a companywide reset in the fall of 2019. The settlement, Mr. Finan said, represents a near “total resolution of the company’s historical legal challenges and securing certainty for our future.”“The terms of the agreement, like prior settlements, provide financial resources to further combat underage use and develop cessation programs and reflect our current business practices,” Mr. Finan said.Juul has repeatedly denied marketing directly to minors. In other rounds of settlements, the company has not admitted wrongdoing. In those agreements, the payments to plaintiffs are to provide financial resources to combat underage use and develop cessation programs. Juul has framed the deals as part of its effort to “resolve issues from the company’s past.”Selling products with flavors like mango and crème brûlée, Juul sales were soaring in 2019 when federal data showed that 27.5 percent of high school students reported using e-cigarettes, with more than half naming Juul as their brand of choice. As the pressure on Juul mounted, the company began to market itself less as a trend maker and more as a company helping adults make the transition away from traditional cigarettes.Although the vaping crisis among teenagers has appeared to decline from its peak in 2019, public health experts have expressed concerns that about 2.5 million adolescents continue to report using e-cigarettes at rates far higher than adults.Overall, about 4.5 percent of adults use e-cigarettes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An annual survey typically given in middle and high schools found that in 2022, 2.5 million middle and high school students, or about 9 percent, reported using e-cigarettes in the last 30 days. In that survey, about 14 percent of high school students reported vaping — about half the rate in the survey taken at the peak of the crisis in 2019.While the recent decline has been viewed as a victory, some who oppose e-cigarette use have been troubled by data showing the frequency of use among nearly half the high school students who reported vaping, who said they did so on 20 to 30 days in a month.Last year, Juul resolved thousands of lawsuits by individuals and other plaintiffs.In December, the company agreed to pay $1.7 billion over lawsuits by more than 5,000 individuals, school districts and local governments. In September, the company settled lawsuits filed by more than 30 states for $438.5 million.This month, Juul settled claims filed by West Virginia for $7.9 million.In the Minnesota trial that began a few weeks ago, Keith Ellison, the state attorney general, opened the proceedings by accusing the company of getting teenagers hooked on e-cigarettes “so they could make money.”“They baited, deceived, and addicted a whole new generation of kids after Minnesotans slashed youth smoking rates down to the lowest level in a generation,” Mr. Ellison said.Like other settlements, the latest requires Juul to refrain from marketing to youths. The agreement also requires Juul to stop offering free or “nominally priced” products to consumers, and from using the marketing technique of “product placement” in virtual reality systems.Meanwhile, Juul’s business continues to struggle to find its footing. In 2018, the company dominated the vaping space, with revenues of nearly $1 billion that year. These days, Juul has fallen behind in market share to Vuse, its competitor, which is owned by British American Tobacco. Juul does not disclose its revenues, but B.A.T. said its vapor category in the United States, which includes its popular Vuse Alto product, had about $1 billion in revenues last year, up more than 60 percent from the year earlier.Tobacco giant Altria had pinned its smokeless future on Juul. In 2018, it paid nearly $13 billion for a 35 percent stake in the vaping company only to watch as Juul became the target of blame for teenage nicotine addiction, and the defendant in myriad investigations and thousands of lawsuits. At the end of last year, Altria valued that stake at $250 million and earlier this year, it swapped its stake in exchange for Juul’s intellectual property around heated tobacco.For months last year, speculation swirled around Juul that it would be forced into bankruptcy proceedings. But in late November, the The Wall Street Journal reported two of its directors and earliest investors had provided a cash infusion and that it would lay off about a third of its employees, or 400 people.Meanwhile, Juul is still waiting for the Food and Drug Administration to decide whether it should authorize sales of the company’s products to be allowed a permanent market. The agency is in the process of reviewing many applications of e-cigarettes. (Juul’s products are on store shelves now, because the F.D.A. is not enforcing its requirement for premarket clearance.)The F.D.A. initially denied the company’s request to continue selling its products in June, saying that Juul had submitted “insufficient and conflicting” data. But the agency later decided to conduct additional reviews of the “scientific issues” in the application.

If a ruling by a federal judge in Texas is upheld, the decision has the potential to upend the nation’s abortion landscape. Here is what’s at stake and how the case may play out in the courts.The ruling by a federal judge in Texas last week revoking the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone could be the most consequential abortion decision since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.But a lot remains uncertain. Here is what is at stake and what could happen next.What’s at stake?The ruling, by Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas in a lawsuit filed by anti-abortion groups, invalidated the F.D.A.’s approval of mifepristone. That is the first pill used in the typical two-drug medication abortion regimen, which now accounts for more than half of the abortions in the United States. The plaintiffs claim that mifepristone is unsafe and that the F.D.A. did not adequately review the scientific evidence or follow proper protocols when it approved mifepristone in 2000 — claims that the F.D.A. strongly disputes, citing years of rigorous evidence that the drug is very safe.If Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling is upheld, the decision has the potential to upend the nation’s abortion landscape, making access more difficult in states where abortion is legal, not just states with abortion bans or restrictions. It could also have implications far beyond abortion, undermining the F.D.A.’s authority to approve and regulate other drugs and shaking the system that the pharmaceutical industry relies upon when it develops medicines.Reproductive health providers and experts say that medication abortion, which is typically used in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, would still be available in some form. Mifepristone might be sent from overseas, or the F.D.A. could decide not to take action against providers prescribing it. And some providers would switch to prescribing only the second abortion medication, misoprostol. But more patients would probably need to seek surgical abortions, and the ruling would create uncertainty and likely chaos throughout the country.What happens next?The first question is whether any court will grant the F.D.A. interim relief by extending Judge Kacsmaryk’s stay of his own decision, which is set to expire on Friday.Lawyers for the Biden administration have asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, to rule on their stay application by noon on Thursday. To give itself more time to consider the question, the appeals court may grant an administrative, or interim, stay.If that court ultimately grants an actual stay, the appeal will probably proceed in the usual fashion in the appeals court, with briefs and an oral argument in the coming weeks and months. The pill would continue to be available in the meantime.At what point could it reach the Supreme Court?There are several paths that could lead to Supreme Court review of the ruling.It is possible that anti-abortion groups would ask the Supreme Court to lift a stay from the appeals court, but such an application would be an uphill fight. The drug has been on the market for 23 years, and an appeals court stay would restore the status quo. The justices would also know that they would almost certainly have an opportunity to weigh in later, after the appeals court rules on the merits.The Fifth Circuit has a conservative reputation, and it may refuse to extend Judge Kacsmaryk’s stay or not rule on the government’s application, which would effectively be the same thing. The government would then ask the Supreme Court for a stay, probably on Thursday.The government’s application would initially be addressed to Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the member of the court who oversees the Fifth Circuit. He would surely refer a matter of such consequence to the full court.What might the Supreme Court do in the interim?The Supreme Court may enter an administrative stay while it considers the application. Such stays do not necessarily predict whether the court will enter an actual stay.If the court does enter a real stay, it has two basic choices about adjudication of the merits: to let the appeal proceed in the appeals court or to grant “certiorari before judgment,” leapfrogging the appeals court and proceeding to hear the case itself, which typically involves another round of briefing and oral arguments.What happens if the appeals court acts first?If the appeals court goes first, the justices would almost certainly afterward be presented with a petition from the losing party seeking review of the appeals court’s ruling. They would then have the opportunity, but not the obligation, to hear the case. Were the appeals court to rule in favor of the F.D.A., for instance, there is a fair prospect that the Supreme Court would deny review.What if the Supreme Court takes the case?If the Supreme Court takes the case right away, a procedure that has become more common in recent years, it could schedule an argument before the end of the current term, though that would be moving with unusual speed. Or it could set the case down for arguments in its next term, which starts in October.Finally, it is possible that both courts will refuse to extend Judge Kacsmaryk’s stay. The case would continue, but the F.D.A.’s approval of the pill would be suspended, effectively deciding the merits of the dispute in at least the short term.Why would a ruling in Texas affect the whole country?Nationwide rulings from a single federal judge are not unusual, though scholars and some Supreme Court justices have expressed misgivings about them. The plaintiffs in the case, groups and doctors that oppose abortion, filed their lawsuit against the F.D.A. in Amarillo, Texas, where Judge Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who has written critically of Roe v. Wade, is the only judge responsible for that division on the court. Critics said that amounted to judge shopping.Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling faces competition from a contradictory order also issued on Friday by a federal judge in Washington State in another lawsuit related to mifepristone. That lawsuit, filed against the F.D.A. by Democratic attorneys general from 17 states and the District of Columbia, challenged extra restrictions that the agency imposes on mifepristone and asked the judge to prevent it from limiting access to the drug.Judge Thomas O. Rice of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, an Obama appointee, did not lift the additional restrictions but ordered the F.D.A. to maintain the status quo. He blocked the agency from curbing the availability of mifepristone in the states that filed the lawsuit before that court, stopping short of entering a nationwide injunction. Still, those states make up the majority of states where abortion remains legal.The Justice Department filed a motion on Monday asking Judge Rice to clarify what the F.D.A. would be obligated to do if the Texas ruling took effect — essentially seeking instructions from the judge that would allow the agency to continue to keep mifepristone available, at least while the Texas case works its way through the courts.

Published29 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesBy James GallagherHealth and science correspondentAn unprecedented analysis of how cancers grow has revealed an “almost infinite” ability of tumours to evolve and survive, say scientists. 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.Cancer Research said the study showed the importance of early detection.The study – entitled TracerX – provides the most in-depth analysis of how cancers evolve and what causes them to spread.Cancers change and evolve over time – they are not fixed and immutable. They can become more aggressive: better at evading the immune system and able to spread around the body. A tumour starts as a single, corrupted cell, but becomes a mixture of millions of cells that have all mutated in slightly different ways. TracerX tracked that diversity and how it changes over time inside lung cancer patients.”That has never been done before at this scale,” said Prof Charles Swanton, from the Francis Crick Institute and University College London.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.”It has surprised me how adaptable tumours can be,” Prof Swanton told me. “I don’t want to sound too depressing about this, but I think – given the almost infinite possibilities in which a tumour can evolve, and the very large number of cells in a late-stage tumour, which could be several hundred billion cells – then achieving cures in all patients with late-stage disease is a formidable task.” Image source, Michael BowlesProf Swanton said: “I don’t think we’re going to be able to come up with universal cures.”If we want to make the biggest impact we need to focus on prevention, early detection and early detection of relapse.” Obesity, smoking, alcohol and poor diet all increase the risk of some cancers. Tackling inflammation in the body is also being seen as a way of preventing cancer. Inflammation is the likely explanation for air pollution causing lung cancers and inflammatory bowel disease increasing the risk of colon cancer. Cancer rules rewritten by air-pollution discoveryThe 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 tumour are the ones that ultimately end up spreading around the body Tumours showing higher levels of genetic “chaos” were more likely to relapse after surgery to other parts of the bodyAnalysing blood for fragments of tumour DNA meant signs of it returning could be spotted up to 200 days before appearing on a CT scanThe cellular machinery that reads the instructions in our DNA can become corrupted in cancerous cells making them more aggressive.The researchers hope the findings could, in the future, help them predict how a patient’s tumour will spread and to tailor treatment. Dr David Crosby, the head of prevention and early detection at Cancer Research UK, said: “The exciting results emerging from TracerX improve our understanding that cancer is a disease which evolves as it progresses, meaning that late-stage cancers can become very hard to treat successfully. “This underscores the crucial importance of further research to help us to detect cancers at the earliest stages of their development or even better, to prevent them from happening at all.” Follow James on Twitter.

Officials said the formal designation was a sign of the grave danger posed by xylazine, which can cause horrific wounds and, when mixed with fentanyl, increase the likelihood of overdose.The White House on Wednesday designated a common animal tranquilizer that is increasingly mixed into street fentanyl as an “emerging drug threat,” a formal move that requires the administration to create strategies to enhance law enforcement efforts, health interventions and data collection to combat it.This is the first time that the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy has ever identified a substance for that designation, a mark of the gravity of the danger that it considers to be posed by the drug, xylazine.Xylazine was approved for veterinary procedures, primarily in cattle and horses, 50 years ago but has never been sanctioned for medical use in humans. Known popularly as tranq or tranq dope, it is a powerful and addictive sedative that slows breathing and heart rate, increases the risk of fatal overdose and often produces severe skin ulcers and abscesses that have led to amputations. “Many communities are not even aware of the threat in their backyard,” Dr. Rahul Gupta, the head of the drug control office, who is often referred to as the national drug czar, said in a briefing with reporters.According to a 2018 directive from Congress that established the emerging threat designation, the administration must now lay out plans within 90 days to coordinate a national response to xylazine. That could include creating protocols for treatment, withdrawal and wound care therapies, expanding testing for the drug’s presence and scheduling it as a controlled substance, which would give federal law enforcement agents authority to pursue its illicit use.Dr. Gupta said that xylazine withdrawal could lead to symptoms so intense — such as migraines, double vision and body-rattling anxiety — “that persons may leave medical treatment, including drug treatment, against medical advice.”But it is sought out by dealers and drug users because it is relatively cheap, with its own addictive properties, whether consumed on its own or mixed with opioids or even amphetamines. Like fentanyl, xylazine first appeared as an adulterant in the illicit drug supply in the Northeast, predominantly in Philadelphia, and then rapidly spread west and south. Citing data compiled by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Justice, Dr. Gupta noted that in the two-year period from 2020 through 2021, detection of xylazine in forensic labs grew 112 percent in the West and 193 percent in the South.Currently, the supplies of xylazine are thought to come from China and possibly Mexico, India and Russia, but they could also be coming from some domestic manufacturers who sell to veterinarians.Wednesday’s announcement follows a crescendo of recent alerts from local health authorities and warnings from other federal agencies. In a xylazine alert in March, the D.E.A. said it had detected the drug in 23 percent of confiscatedfentanyl samples in 48 states in 2022. Last November, the Food and Drug Administration, which approved xylazine decades ago for veterinary procedures, issued a nationwide warning to health care providers, and in February, it announced it would monitor imported xylazine for illegal diversion.Xylazine differs from fentanyl in major ways, which contributed to administration’s decision to declare it an emerging threat. Unlike fentanyl, heroin or the prescription painkiller oxycodone, xylazine is not an opioid. That means conventional methods for reversing an opioid overdose, like naloxone injections or nasal sprays, may not succeed in fully reviving a person who has used it.Xylazine withdrawal symptoms must be managed differently from those of an opioid, and rehabilitation protocols are not yet established. And unlike opioids or, for that matter, amphetamines, xylazine is not listed as a controlled substance, which would make it subject to greater law enforcement scrutiny.Dr. Rahul Gupta, the Biden administration’s drug czar. Designating xylazine as an emerging drug threat gives the administration further powers for drug detection and deterrence and for designing strategies to manage withdrawal and rehabilitation.Sophie Park for The New York TimesWednesday’s White House announcement had long been awaited by many community outreach groups and clinics, anxious for direction on how to combat xylazine. Dr. Joseph D’Orazio, chief of medical toxicology and addiction medicine at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, which has had perhaps the country’s largest influx of patients afflicted by xylazine, said that research about how the drug works in humans would be critical.“We still don’t know what causes the wounds, just a lot of conjecture,” he said. “Once that’s understood, maybe we can work up strategies on how to avoid the wounds or treat them better. And we need to understand the withdrawal so we can figure out how to treat it better.”Dr. Gupta noted that managing xylazine’s licit and illicit uses would be challenging. It is frequently used as a sedative and an analgesic in large-animal medicine, as veterinarians suture wounds, grind down sharpened molars and treated infected hooves. Preserving the drug’s status and access for veterinarians while shutting down supplies to dealers is a topic already under deep discussion.And Dr. Gupta was candid about the fact that getting a better grip on xylazine, while urgent, would be only a step in long, painful journey. His office is also pressing this effort, he said, in part to look ahead “to what potentially comes after xylazine, as an additive to fentanyl, in order to get in front of the next additive in the drug supply.”

Time-restricted fasting diets could cause fertility problems according to new research from the University of East Anglia.
A new study published today shows that time-restricted fasting affects reproduction differently in male and female zebrafish.
Importantly, some of the negative effects on eggs and sperm quality can be seen after the fish returned to their normal levels of food consumption.
The research team say that while the study was conducted in fish, their findings highlight the importance of considering not just the effect of fasting on weight and health, but also on fertility.
Prof Alexei Maklakov, from UEA’s School of Biological Sciences, said: “Time-restricted fasting is an eating pattern where people limit their food consumption to certain hours of the day. It’s a popular health and fitness trend and people are doing it to lose weight and improve their health.
“But the way organisms respond to food shortages can affect the quality of eggs and sperm, and such effects could potentially continue after the end of the fasting period.

“We wanted to find out more about how these sorts of diets can affect fertility in a popular model organism.”
The research team studied zebrafish (Danio rerio) to find out what happens when individuals are exposed to food during and after a period of fasting. They measured how males and females allocate resources to body maintenance versus production and maintenance of sperm and eggs, and the quality of the resulting offspring.
Dr Edward Ivimey-Cook, from UEA’s School of Biological Sciences, said: “What we found is that time-restricted fasting affects reproduction differently in males and females. Once the fish returned to their normal feeding schedule, females increased the number of offspring they produced at the cost of egg quality resulting in reduced quality of offspring. The quality of male sperm also decreased.
“These findings underscore the importance of considering not just the effect of fasting on body maintenance but also on the production of eggs and sperm.
“Importantly, some of the negative effects on eggs and sperm quality can be seen after the animals returned to their normal levels of food consumption following time-restricted fasting.
“More research is needed to understand how long it takes for sperm and egg quality to return back to normal after the period of fasting.”
This study was led by the University of East Anglia in collaboration with researchers at the Centre for Environmental, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas).
It was carried out with funding from the European Research Council (ERC), the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

The preliminary ruling from Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk adopts the terminology of anti-abortion groups, such as “chemical abortion,” “abortionist” and “unborn human.”A federal judge in Texas last week invalidated the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of an abortion pill, mifepristone. The decision, should it withstand court challenges, could make it more difficult for patients to obtain abortions even in states where abortion is legal.The preliminary ruling by Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, an appointee of President Donald J. Trump who is known for his conservative views and openly opposes abortion access, could be the most consequential abortion decision since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June.Here’s a look at the ruling.PAGE 2… ultimately starves the unborn human until death. Because mifepristone alone will not always complete the abortion, F.D.A. mandates a two-step drug regimen: mifepristone to kill the unborn human, followed by misoprostol to induce cramping and contractions to expel the unborn human from the mother’s womb.Throughout the opinion, Judge Kacsmaryk uses the language of the anti-abortion movement instead of conventional medical terms. The ruling calls medication abortion “chemical abortion,” refers to abortion providers as “abortionists” and describes a fetus or embryo as an “unborn human” or “unborn child.” By contrast, a conflicting ruling by a judge in Washington State that barred the F.D.A. from limiting the availability of mifepristone used terminology like “the termination of an early pregnancy,” “fetal loss” and “patients and providers.” Before Mr. Trump gave Judge Kacsmaryk a lifetime appointment to the bench in 2019, the jurist had written critically about Roe v. Wade and worked for the First Liberty Institute, a conservative Christian legal activist group.PAGE 7Here, the associations’ members have standing because they allege adverse events from chemical abortion drugs can overwhelm the medical system and place “enormous pressure and stress” on doctors during emergencies and complications.By law, only people who can show they have suffered an actual or imminent injury from something — not one that is merely speculative — have “standing” to sue. In this case, the plaintiffs challenging the F.D.A.’s approval of mifepristone more than two decades ago are doctors who oppose abortion and do not prescribe the drug. They contended that they have standing because other doctors might prescribe the drug to women who might then experience complications and seek out the plaintiffs for care, rather than their own doctors. The plaintiff-doctors claimed that they have suffered harm because treating such patients diverts their time and resources from treating other patients and because in some cases, they said, they have had to contradict their anti-abortion values by assisting in completing a patient’s abortion process. Judge Kacsmaryk found that this rationale was sufficient; the legitimacy of that conclusion is one reason the Justice Department asked an appeals court to block Judge Kacsmaryk’s order.PAGE 11Women who have aborted a child — especially through chemical abortion drugs that necessitate the woman seeing her aborted child once it passes — often experience shame, regret, anxiety, depression, drug abuse and suicidal thoughts because of the abortion.Medication abortion is used in early pregnancies, typically before gestation at 12 weeks, and the tissue that passes out of a patient’s body is often in the form of blood clots. Patients cite varying reasons for having abortions, but several studies and surveys have suggested that patients often feel relief and experience fewer mental health symptoms like depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts after terminating pregnancies they felt unprepared or unable to handle.PAGE 13Defendants contend that plaintiffs’ theories of standing “depend upon layer after layer of speculation.” But plaintiffs allege F.D.A.’s chemical abortion regimen “caused” intense side effects and significant complications for their patients requiring medical intervention and attention.Judge Kacsmaryk’s opinion cites a handful of studies, several conducted by anti-abortion organizations, that the plaintiffs in the case submitted as evidence. The judge devotes little attention to the scores of studies that have shown medication abortion is very safe and that complications are rare, with patients needing hospitalization in fewer than 1 percent of cases.PAGE 15Considering F.D.A.’s 2021 decision to permit “mail-in” chemical abortion, many women and girls will consume mifepristone without physician supervision. And in maternity-care “deserts,” women may not have ready access to emergency care. In sum, there are fewer safety restrictions for women and girls today than ever before. Plaintiffs have good reasons to believe their alleged injuries will continue in the future, and possibly with greater frequency than in the past.In 2021, the F.D.A. permanently lifted a requirement that patients obtain mifepristone in person from a provider, citing years of studies indicating this change would be safe. The drug still needs to be prescribed by a certified health provider, but not necessarily by a physician. For years before the rule was lifted, mifepristone was the only drug that the F.D.A. required to be obtained in person from a medical provider but that did not need to be taken in the presence of a provider — it could be taken at home or anywhere the patient chose. As a result, the F.D.A. and medical experts would dispute the judge’s contention that the 2021 rule change would create greater safety risks, especially since serious complications with mifepristone are rare.PAGE 22F.D.A.’s 2016 and 2021 changes thus significantly departed from the agency’s original approval of the abortion regimen. F.D.A. repeatedly altered its original decision by removing safeguards and changing the regulatory scheme for chemical abortion drugs.Another point of contention in Judge Kacsmaryk’s order centers on the statute of limitations to file a lawsuit challenging the F.D.A.’s approval of a drug, which is six years. The F.D.A. approved mifepristone in 2000 and eased certain restrictions on the pill in 2016 before lifting the in-person requirement in 2021. The Justice Department argued that it is too late to file a lawsuit challenging the 2000 and 2016 decisions, and that only the most recent measure falls within the six-year limit. Judge Kacsmaryk interpreted each change as restarting the clock to challenge approval for the drug.PAGE 34-35The Comstock Act declares “nonmailable” every “article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use it or apply it for producing abortion.” 18 U.S.C. § 1461 (emphasis added). It is indisputable that chemical abortion drugs are both “drug[s]” and are “for producing abortion.” Therefore, federal criminal law declares they are “nonmailable.”Judge Kacsmaryk relies in part upon the Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-vice law that barred the mailing of contraceptives and “lewd” materials, along with drugs that could be used in an abortion. His strict interpretation of that statute conflicts with a December 2022 opinion by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which concluded that abortion-causing drugs could be sent by mail if the sender does not intend for the recipient to use them unlawfully.PAGE 40… to satisfy Subpart H, F.D.A. deemed pregnancy a “serious or life-threatening illness[]” and concluded that mifepristone “provide[d] [a] meaningful therapeutic benefit to patients over existing treatments.” See 21 C.F.R. §§ 314.500; 314.560. F.D.A. was wrong on both counts.One of the plaintiffs’ claims is that the F.D.A. improperly approved mifepristone because it did so using a regulation called Subpart H that was intended for drugs to treat serious illnesses. “Pregnancy is not an illness,” the plaintiffs claim, and the judge agreed, saying, “Pregnancy is a normal physiological state most women experience one or more times during their childbearing years — a natural process essential to perpetuating human life.” The F.D.A. argues that the word “illness” included “conditions” like pregnancy, which can in some cases be life-threatening. The agency also says that any semantic ambiguity was clarified in 2007, when Congress passed a law that essentially moved drugs that had been approved under Subpart H into a new regulatory framework, which explicitly used the term “disease or condition.”PAGE 46Other studies show 83 percent of women report that chemical abortion “changed” them — and 77 percent of those women reported a negative change.In requesting that an appeals court block Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling, the Justice Department noted that the court’s role is supposed to be limited to ensuring that an agency has acted within a zone of reasonableness. But the judge had overridden “F.D.A.’s. eminently reasonable scientific judgments based on the court’s own interpretation of articles and studies.” It referred to his reliance on this 2020 article as particularly egregious. The study was based on 98 comments anonymously submitted to a website called “Abortion Changes You,” and its authors acknowledged that “the population of women who write an anonymous post about their abortion experience may be different from those who do not.”PAGE 61-62Plaintiffs are likely to suffer irreparable harm if the motion is not granted. At least two women died from chemical abortion drugs just last year. See ECF No. 120 at 30 n.5;65 Deerfield Med. Ctr. v. City of Deerfield Beach, 661 F.2d 328, 338 (5th Cir. 1981) (finding irreparable harm to third-party pregnant women). “The physical and emotional trauma that chemical abortion inflicts on women and girls cannot be reversed or erased.” ECF No. 7 at 28; see also E.E.O.C. v. Chrysler Corp., 733 F.2d 1183, 1186 (6th Cir. 1984) (affirming irreparable harm for plaintiffs’ “emotional distress”). “The crucial time that doctors need to treat these injured women and girls cannot be replaced.” Id. Generally, at the preliminary stage of litigation, judges are supposed to preserve the status quo unless the plaintiffs can show they would suffer irreparable harm. Judge Kacsmaryk ruled that the plaintiffs’ claims that women who suffer complications from mifepristone might seek their care meet that standard and issued a sweeping order that would block access to a drug that has been available nationwide for more than two decades. In requesting a stay, the Justice Department said that the plaintiffs had not met that standard and contended that it was the judge’s order that would cause irreparable harm — citing, among other things, the drug’s use in managing miscarriages.Embed Only

Published11 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingJackie Pugh from Shropshire has been waiting nearly three and a half years for breast reconstruction surgery after having treatment for breast cancer. Her operation was meant to take place on Friday, but it has been cancelled due to the junior doctors’ strike. “I’m just really, really upset that it is off. I don’t know when it is going to be rescheduled,” she told the BBC. Jackie says she was preparing herself for the surgery, but the four-day strike means she must now think again.Her husband has also been recently diagnosed with cancer, and Jackie had been intending to take care of him after his chemotherapy.”I needed my operation to go ahead so that I could look after him when he is recovering, because chemotherapy is not the nicest of treatments,” says Jackie.NHS England has previously warned that this week’s industrial action by junior doctors would cause “unparalleled disruption”, with an estimated 350,000 appointments and operations having to be rescheduled. Senior doctors and other medical staff who are not on strike have been diverted to cover services such as A&E and maternity care until 07:00 BST on Saturday, when the walkout ends.There are plans to pull doctors off picket lines if lives are in immediate danger, says the British Medical Association (BMA), the union representing the junior doctors. Under trade union laws, life-and-limb cover must be provided. Sir Stephen Powis, national medical director at NHS England, said the situation in the health service would “become more challenging each day this strike progresses”. He said staff were working “incredibly hard” and that cover was likely to become “stretched” as those who worked the Easter weekend went on leave. This will “pose a huge challenge to an already depleted workforce”, he added. In Western-Super-Mare in Somerset, some junior doctors have been asked to leave picket lines and return to work. What are the strikes about?Doctors say they are striking for patient safety, as well as their own income needs, stressing that current pay levels are affecting recruitment and leading to many doctors leaving the profession – thus depleting the workforce and impacting patient welfare.The British Medical Association (BMA), the union representing the junior doctors, is asking for a 35% pay rise or “pay restoration” to put salaries back on track with rising inflation and living costs.The government says the 35% increase is “unreasonable” – and has refused to enter talks with the doctors until the demand is abandoned and junior doctors call off the strikes.A Downing Street spokesman said: “It continues to be the case that we call on the BMA junior doctors to cease their strikes and revise their starting point for negotiations, which is 35%, which we continue to believe is unreasonable and is not affordable for the British taxpayer.”The BMA says it would be happy to suspend strike action if there was a credible pay offer from Health Secretary Steve Barclay. The striking doctors say they should be compensated for 15 years of below-inflation wage increases.But the government maintains that a 35% increase is unrealistic. They have pointed to the deal that other health unions – representing nurses and other workers – have recommended to their members, which includes a 5% pay rise and one-off payment of at least £1,655.Patients at risk during doctor strike – NHS bossesWhy are doctors demanding the biggest pay rise?More than 40% of the medical workforce are classed as junior doctors, with two-thirds of them members of the BMA.The term ‘junior doctors’ covers those who are fresh out of medical school through to those who have more than a decade of experience.Image source, PA MediaThe strike is scheduled take place from 07:00 BST on Tuesday until 07:00 BST on Saturday.On the first day of the action, hundreds of medics walked past Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament after a rally in central London.’Exhausted and lumbered with responsibility’ – junior doctorImage source, BBC NewsStriking junior doctor Ben has told BBC News he is thinking about leaving the profession, after just one year.Standing on a picket line outside the Royal Leicester Infirmary, he says: “At the moment, every single time you go to work, you have people off sick.”You have staffing which is only just covering what it needs to.”And I don’t feel I am able to do my best work, and I don’t feel I’m able to manage the stresses and strains that are put upon me.”During his last rotation, he added, there would be moments when he would have panic attacks. Each day he was “completely exhausted and lumbered with responsibility”, having only just left medical school eight months previously.He says he hopes he can stay in medicine, but the job had been “made impossible by the system”.Are you a junior doctor with a view on the strike? Are you a patient affected? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also get in touch in the following ways:WhatsApp: +44 7756 165803Tweet: @BBC_HaveYourSayUpload pictures or videoPlease read our terms & conditions and privacy policy

If you are reading this page and can’t see the form you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question or comment or you can email us at HaveYourSay@bbc.co.uk. Please include your name, age and location with any submission. More on this storyTiming of doctor strike raises patient risk – Barclay19 hours agoBacklog of longest-wait patients slashed in England9 August 2022NHS waits force patients to pay for private ops22 July 2022