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Published14 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesBy Charley AdamsBBC NewsA ban on laughing gas will not stop people using it and will drive it into criminal hands, say experts.The government has defended its plans to tackle anti-social behaviour, including making the possession of nitrous oxide a criminal offence.The Drug Science scientific charity says a blanket ban “is completely disproportionate” and “would likely deliver more harm than good”.The £160m plan will also address homelessness, begging and graffiti.Laughing gas users risk spine damage, say doctorsLaughing gas should not be banned, review saysUnveiling his plans to clamp down on anti-social behaviour on Monday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said there was a need for a “zero-tolerance” approach and stressed the importance of “immediate justice”. Speaking at a boxing club in Chelmsford, Essex, Mr Sunak said he wanted to deal with a small minority of people who were being disruptive.The decision to make nitrous oxide a Class C drug goes against advice from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), which recently said nitrous oxide should not be banned under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971.Its review also found “no substantive evidence of links between nitrous oxide and anti-social behaviour” aside from littering.On Monday afternoon, Home Secretary Suella Braverman told MPs the government was expected to “take a broader view” on the ACMD’s findings, adding there was still “emerging evidence that [nitrous oxide] does cause serious harm to health and wellbeing”.She said the government would “put an end to hordes of youths loitering in and littering parks with empty canisters”.But shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper claimed the government’s crackdown was “too weak, too little and too late”.”There are 10,000 fewer neighbourhood police and PCSOs on our streets today than there were seven years ago,” she said. She said Labour supported a ban on nitrous oxide, but stressed it needed to be part of an integrated anti-social behaviour strategy.The gas, sold in metal canisters, is known as NOS and is one of the most-used drugs by UK 16 to 24-year-olds. Heavy use can lead to a vitamin deficiency that damages nerves in the spinal cord.Proposals in the government’s crackdown on anti-social behaviour also include:Powers allowing police and councils to prohibit organised begging by criminal gangs, as well as begging which causes nuisance and puts public safety at riskIncreased fines for graffiti and littering, rising to up to £500, and up to £1,000 for fly-tippingMaking offenders swiftly clear up vandalismA strategy of “hotspot” policing including more patrolsMore funding for youth centresLandlords and housing associations getting more powers to evict tenants who create persistent noise Reopening empty shops by giving councils powers to quickly sell off rental rights for empty buildings to willing tenantsSome 16 areas will get funding for either the “hotspot” policing or a new “immediate justice” scheme, where those who carry out anti-social activity will undertake repair and clean-up works within 48 hours of being handed orders. Four areas will trial both schemes. The areas include Northumbria, Cleveland, Derbyshire, Durham, Nottinghamshire, Merseyside, Sussex, Dorset, Northamptonshire, West Yorkshire, West Midlands, South Yorkshire, Essex, Lancashire, South Wales and Staffordshire. Victims of anti-social behaviour will get a say in people’s punishments “to ensure justice is visible and fits the crime”, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities said.’There’s car thefts, breaks-ins, everything’The government defended its move to clamp down on laughing gas, with Policing Minister Chris Philp saying there were concerns that nitrous oxide was being consumed on “a very large scale”. Questioned about the decision to go against ACMD advice, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme: “We have taken a broader view – considering firstly the social harms caused by nitrous oxide, the contribution it makes to anti-social behaviour, a sense sometimes of menace in local communities, the littering that goes with it and also the very early evidence of some medical harm.”In its policy paper, the government said it intends to make nitrous oxide a Class C drug with potential prison sentences and unlimited fines for unlawful supply and possession, when parliamentary time allows.Possession of laughing gas to be criminal offenceLaughing gas overdose left woman unable to walkDavid Badcock, chief executive of Drug Science, said he was “disheartened” at the proposed ban and the government was “going completely against its own advisory panel”.He went on to ask: “What’s the point in the ACMD when the very best scientists and experts have looked at the evidence and advised what to do and they completely ignore it?”Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst at the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, said criminalising nitrous oxide would “hand control of the product to criminal gangs”. Prof Adam Winstock, an addiction medicine specialist and founder of the Global Drug Survey, told the BBC that getting a criminal record “is going to be a far greater harm than the risks for the vast majority of people using nitrous oxide”.Image source, ReutersIt is already illegal to produce or supply the gas for its psychoactive effects under the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016, but this does not cover possession unless it is with the intent to supply.According to the ACDM, the number of deaths and demand for treatment for problematic use of nitrous oxide remains low compared with other drugs.However, there have been reports of an increase in neurological harms, including nerve and spinal cord damage, related to heavy and persistent use. Nitrous oxide is also regularly used as an anaesthetic in medicine and dentistry, and as a gas for making whipped cream in cooking. The Liberal Democrats said: “Making something like this illegal doesn’t work and hands profit and control to serious criminals.”More on this story’There’s car thefts, breaks-ins, everything’18 hours agoLaughing gas overdose left woman unable to walk18 hours agoLaughing gas users risk spine damage, say doctors23 FebruaryLaughing gas should not be banned, review says6 MarchMichael Gove confirms ban on nitrous oxide1 day ago

To develop treatments that may one day entirely rid the body of HIV infection, scientists have long sought to identify all of the places that the virus can hide its genetic code. Now, in a study using blood samples from men and women with HIV on long-term suppressive therapy, a team led by Johns Hopkins Medicine scientists reports new evidence that one such stable reservoir of HIV genomes can be found in circulating white blood cells called monocytes.
Monocytes are short-lived circulating immune cells that are a precursor to macrophages, immune cells able to engulf and destroy viruses, bacteria and other cells foreign to the host.
In the current research, published March 27 in Nature Microbiology, the scientists found evidence that blood samples from people with HIV undergoing long term, standard antiretroviral therapy contained monocytes that harbor stable HIV DNA capable of infecting neighboring cells.
The scientists say the findings may provide a new direction for efforts to improve therapies and eventually cure HIV, which affects more than 34 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Current antiretroviral drugs can successfully suppress HIV to nearly undetectable levels, but have not resulted in total eradication of the virus.
“We don’t know how critical these monocytes and macrophages are to eradication of HIV, but our results suggest we should continue research efforts to understand their role in this disease,” says Janice Clements, Ph.D., professor of molecular and comparative pathobiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Scientists have long known that HIV stashes its genome most often in a type of immune cell called a CD4+ T-cell. These hiding places are known as reservoirs.

“To eradicate HIV, the goal is to find biomarkers for cells that harbor the HIV genome and eliminate those cells,” says Rebecca Veenhuis, Ph.D., assistant professor of molecular and comparative pathobiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
To further study the role of monocytes and macrophages in circulating blood as HIV reservoirs, the Johns Hopkins-led team of scientists obtained blood samples between 2018 and 2022 from 10 men with HIV, all of them taking long-term, standard antiretroviral medications.
The researchers extracted blood cells from the samples and grew the cells in the laboratory. Typically, monocytes transform very quickly — within about three days — into macrophages, producing monocyte-derived macrophages.
All 10 men had detectable HIV DNA in their monocytes-turned-macrophages, but at levels 10 times lower than those found in the men’s CD4+ T cells, the well-established HIV reservoir.
For the next phase of the research, to determine if HIV genomes were present in monocytes prior to macrophage differentiation, the team used an experimental assay to detect intact HIV genomes in monocytes. The assay was based on one that fellow Johns Hopkins scientist Robert Siliciano, M.D., Ph.D., developed in 2019 to detect the HIV genome in CD4+ T cells.

The scientists, including research associate Celina Abreu, Ph.D., used the assay on blood samples taken from another group of 30 people (eight men from the first group and 22 female participants) with HIV, also treated with standard antiretroviral therapy. The researchers found HIV DNA in the CD4+ T cells and in monocytes of all 30 participants.
The scientists were also able to isolate HIV produced by infected monocytes from half of the research participants. The virus extracted from these cells was able to infect CD4+ T cells.
Three of the participants had their blood examined several times over the four-year study period, and each time, the scientists found HIV DNA and infectious virus produced by their monocyte-derived macrophages. “These results suggest that monocytes may be a stable reservoir of HIV,” says Clements.
In further research, the Johns Hopkins research team plans to pinpoint the subset of monocytes found to harbor HIV DNA and the source of these infected cells.
Funding for the study was provided by the National Institutes of Health (P01AI131306, R01AI127142, R01DA050529, R01MH127981 and R01MH113512-03S1), the Johns Hopkins University National Institute of Mental Health Center for Novel Therapeutics for HIV-associated Cognitive Disorders (P30MH075673), and the Johns Hopkins University Center for AIDS Research, an NIH-funded program (P30AI094189).
In addition to Clements, Veenhuis and Abreu, other contributors to the research include Pedro A. G. Costa, Edna Ferreira, Janaysha Ratliff, Lily Pohlenz, Erin Shirk, Leah Rubin and Joel Blankson from Johns Hopkins, and Lucio Gama from Johns Hopkins and the National Institutes of Health.

A 2022 study from Oregon Health & Science University researchers confirmed that chronic use of cannabis may greatly impact male fertility and reproductive outcomes in nonhuman primates — but it was unclear whether the effects are permanent. Now, the OHSU research team has confirmed that discontinuing use of THC can at least partly reverse these effects, according to a new study published online today in Fertility & Sterility.
This is one of the first studies demonstrating that discontinuation of chronic THC use can partially restore negative impacts to male reproductive health in nonhuman primates.
Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, is the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, which is one of the most commonly used drugs among reproductive age men in the United States and worldwide. Yet there is a significant lack of safety data around THC, and users may be unaware of its potentially harmful impacts on their reproductive health. This study aimed to gain a deeper understanding of the reversibility of these impacts, which can help providers more effectively counsel patients — especially those interested in conceiving — on risks and recommendations for THC use.
“It’s so important that we research, understand and educate about the implications of THC on reproductive health, especially as use continues to increase among individuals of reproductive age and more states legalize cannabis,”said the study’s corresponding author Jamie Lo, M.D., M.C.R., associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology (maternal-fetal medicine), OHSU School of Medicine, and Division of Reproductive & Developmental Sciences at the Oregon National Primate Research Center, or ONPRC.
“These findings are important because we can now more confidently assure patients that by abstaining from THC for at least four months, the impacts of THC on male fertility can be partly reversed,” Lo said. “This allows for more concrete, informed recommendations for patients who are in the process of family planning or actively trying to conceive.”
The research involved a multidisciplinary team including Carol Hanna, Ph.D., director of the Assisted Reproductive Technology Core at ONPRC at OHSU, and researchers from the University of Georgia and Duke University.
In a model using nonhuman primates, researchers administered THC in progressive doses over a period of about seven months, looking specifically at changes to the tissue of the male subjects’ reproductive health organs and testes, as well as the quantity and quality of their sperm. Analyses showed that THC exposure caused a significant reduction in size of the testes and impacted male productive hormones, both which negatively impact overall fertility. In addition, THC exposure impacted the sperm, altering the regulation of genes important for nervous system development, including those linked to autism spectrum disorder.
Interestingly, after discontinuing THC exposure over a period of about four months, researchers discovered these adverse effects were partially reversed, indicating that damage from chronic THC use can be partially restored.
Though further research is needed to fully understand the biological mechanism of this reversal process, the study offers a comprehensive initial understandingof the benefit of discontinuing THC use as a part of family planning, and also provides some insight to the minimum duration of abstinence from THC needed to repair damage after chronic use. These findings can also inform providers on how to more effectively counsel patients on cannabis use prior to attempting to conceive.
“We understand that for teens and young adults, family planning might not be top of mind. However, THC even in moderate doses could impact their fertility outcomes, so this is a serious concern for us as healthcare providers,” said Jason C. Hedges, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of urology in the OHSU School of Medicine, Division of Reproductive & Developmental Sciences at ONPRC, and the study’s lead author. “The more we can understand and define this issue, the better information we can provide to patients to be able to optimize their reproductive health.”
Looking forward, the team will continue to expand their understanding of the relationship between THC and reproductive health. Ongoing research efforts will focus on the effects of chronic THC use over long periods of time and through various modes, such as vaping, as well as investigating the impacts of THC on fetal and offspring development.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed a hybrid micro-robot, the size of a single biological cell (about 10 microns across), that can be controlled and navigated using two different mechanisms — electric and magnetic. The micro-robot is able to navigate between different cells in a biological sample, distinguish between different types of cells, identify whether they are healthy or dying, and then transport the desired cell for further study, such as genetic analysis. The micro-robot can also transfect a drug and/or gene into the captured targeted single cell. According to the researchers, the development may help promote research in the important field of ‘single cell analysis’, as well as find use in medical diagnosis, drug transport and screening, surgery, and environmental protection.
The innovative technology was developed by Prof. Gilad Yossifon from the School of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tel Aviv University and his team: Post-doctoral researcher Dr. Yue Wu and student Sivan Yakov, in collaboration with Dr. Afu Fu, Post-doctoral researcher, from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. The research was published in the journal Advanced Science.
Prof. Gilad Yossifon explains that micro-robots (sometimes called micro-motors or active particles) are tiny synthetic particles the size of a biological cell, which can move from place to place and perform various actions (for example: collection of synthetic or biological cargo) autonomously or through external control by an operator. According to Prof. Yossifon, “developing the micro-robot’s ability to move autonomously was inspired by biological micro-swimmers, such as bacteria and sperm cells. This is an innovative area of research that is developing rapidly, with a wide variety of uses in fields such as medicine and the environment, as well as a research tool.”
As a demonstration of the capabilities of the micro-robot the researchers used it to capture single blood and cancer cells and a single bacterium, and showed that it is able to distinguish between cells with different levels of viability, such as a healthy cell, a cell damaged by a drug, or a cell that is dying or dying in a natural ‘suicide’ process (such a distinction may be significant, for example, when developing anti-cancer drugs). After identifying the desired cell, the micro-robot captured it and moved the cell to where it could be further analyzed. Another important innovation is the ability of the micro-robot to identify target cells that are not labeled — the micro-robot identifies the type of cell and its condition (such as degree of health) using a built-in sensing mechanism based on the cell’s unique electrical properties.
Prof. Yossifon: “Our new development significantly advances the technology in two main aspects: hybrid propulsion and navigation by two different mechanisms — electric and magnetic. In addition, the micro-robot has an improved ability to identify and capture a single cell, without the need for tagging, for local testing or retrieval and transport to an external instrument. This research was carried out on biological samples in the laboratory for in-vitro assays, but the intention is to develop in the future micro-robots that will also work inside the body — for example, as effective drug carriers that can be precisely guided to the target.”
The researchers explain that the hybrid propulsion mechanism of the micro-robot is of particular importance in physiological environments, such as found in liquid biopsies. “The micro-robots that have operated until now based on an electrical guiding mechanism were not effective in certain environments characterized by relatively high electrical conductivity, such as a physiological environment, where the electric drive is less effective. This is where the complementary magnetic mechanism come into play, which is very effective regardless of the electrical conductivity of the environment.”
Prof. Yossifon concludes: “In our research we developed an innovative micro-robot with important capabilities that significantly contribute to the field: hybrid propulsion and navigation through a combination of electric and magnetic fields, as well as the ability to identify, capture, and transport a single cell from place to place in a physiological environment. These capabilities are relevant for a wide variety of applications as well as for research. Among other things, the technology will support the following areas: medical diagnosis at the single cell level, introducing drugs or genes into cells, genetic editing, carrying drugs to their destination inside the body, cleaning the environment from polluting particles, drug development, and creating a ‘laboratory on a particle’ — a microscopic laboratory designed to carry out diagnostics in places accessible only to micro-particles.”

People all around the world are drawn to creating and consuming art, and human emotions are often a central subject in visual artworks as well as in music and performance art. However, the mechanisms underlying the feelings that art evokes remain poorly characterised.
A new study reveals how viewing visual art affects our emotions. The research subjects viewed different kinds of artworks and described the feelings that the art stimulated in their bodies. The researchers recorded the subjects’ eye movement while they viewed the art. In addition, the subjects assessed what kind of emotions each piece of art evoked.
“Viewing the art evoked many different kinds of feelings and emotions in people. Even though many of the pieces handled sad or scary topics, the emotions that the people experienced were mainly positive. The bodily sensations evoked by art also contributed to the emotions: the stronger the body’s reaction was to the artwork, the stronger were the emotions experienced by the subject,” says Professor Lauri Nummenmaa from the Turku PET Centre at the University of Turku, Finland.
“In the artworks, human figures were the most interesting subject and were looked at the most. People have a tendency to empathise with each other’s emotions and this is probably also the case when we view human figures in art. The human emotions presented in art pieces can be absorbed by the viewer unnoticed, through so-called mirroring,” says Academician Riitta Hari from Aalto University.
Altogether 1,186 people from different countries participated in the study and they assessed the emotions evoked by over 300 artworks. The research was conducted with online surveys and eye movement recordings in the laboratory.
“Our results suggest that our bodies have a significant role in the aesthetic experience. Bodily sensations can draw people to art: art evokes feelings in the body, and such stimulation of the body’s pleasure centres feels pleasant to the viewer. This is why the emotions and bodily sensations evoked by art can be used, for example, in mental health rehabilitation and care,” Professor Nummenmaa recounts.

Filters fitted to vehicle exhaust systems to remove particulate matter pollution have limited impact on ultrafine particles, new research shows.
Airborne particles from vehicle emissions are a major contributor to air pollution levels. Exhaust filters designed to mitigate this pollution have been a legal requirement in new cars since 2011, and in heavy duty vehicles since 2013.
The filters are able to remove the majority of larger, solid particles, but the new study, published in Environment International, shows they are less effective at removing smaller liquid particles.
While the World Health Organisation has not yet set a guideline for safe levels of ultrafine particles, it recognises that particulate pollution overall is associated with negative impacts on cardiovascular and respiratory health. Air quality guidelines published by WHO in 2021 also outline concerns over ultrafine particles and their ability to be transported around the body.
Lead author on the study, Professor Roy Harrison, said: “Our research shows clearly that current, widely-used filters are not effective against these smaller particles and we welcome recommendations from the World Health Organisation that surveillance of these measurements increase and note with concern that current concentrations measured in London are classified as ‘high’.”
The team used data collected in from a monitoring station in Marylebone Road, in London. Air quality sampling at this site has produced the most comprehensive, long-term dataset in the world, containing data for particle mass and number dating back to 2010.
The data showed a steep decline in larger particles. Black carbon, for example, declined by 81% between 2014 and 2021. This is a clear indication that there has been a positive impact from the introduction of exhaust filters.
In contrast, however, the number of particles described as ‘ultrafine’ — smaller than 100 nanometres — reduced by only 26%. The smallest group of particles, measuring less than 30 nanometres, did not reduce at all, giving a clear indication that filters are not effective against these types of particle. WHO guidelines define concentrations of ultrafine particles above 10,000 per cubic cm as “high”and concentrations measured at the Marylebone Road site were around twice this level.
Professor Harrison added: “High concentrations of ultrafine particles are likely to be a widespread and persistent phenomenon. In order to meet WHO guidelines we are likely to need a much higher uptake of electric vehicles, as well as additional measures to reduce emissions from diesel vehicles.”

Increasing use of genetic testing means people may discover they have a gene variant associated with some types of cardiovascular disease (CVD). A new scientific statement, published today in the American Heart Association journal Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine, aims to help individuals and health care professionals understand what to do when a variant is discovered.
An American Heart Association scientific statement is an expert analysis of current research and may inform future guidelines. The new statement, “Interpreting Incidentally Identified Variants in Genes Associated with Heritable Cardiovascular Disease,” suggests next steps to determine whether a variant truly carries a health risk, provides support to health care professionals on how to communicate with people and their families, and suggests appropriate follow-up actions to care for people with variants deemed higher risk for CVD.
Variants associated with cardiovascular disease risk are often found “incidentally” when people undergo genetic testing for non-cardiac reasons, including screening or diagnosis of other diseases. These unexpected genetic variants may also be discovered with genetic testing through direct-to-consumer DNA testing kits.
Pretest genetic counseling is strongly encouraged to prepare patients for the possibility of incidental findings, how and whether findings will be communicated, and potential implications for themselves and family members.
“The scope and use of genetic testing have expanded greatly in the past decade with the increasing ease and reduced cost of DNA sequencing,” said Andrew P. Landstrom, M.D., Ph.D., FAHA, chair of the scientific statement writing committee and associate professor of pediatrics and cell biology at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina. “Where we would once look for genetic changes in a handful of genes, we can now sequence every gene and, potentially, the whole genome, allowing us to make genetic diagnoses that would have been impossible in the past. However, with increased genetic testing comes more surprises, including finding unexpected variants in genes that might be associated with cardiovascular disease.
“If we interpret these incidental variants incorrectly, it may lead to inappropriate care, either by suggesting patients have a risk of cardiac disease when they do not, or by not providing care to those with increased risk for a serious condition.”
This statement is the first to focus on inherited monogenic, or single-gene, diseases for CVD which can be passed on within families, such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy or long QT syndrome. There are currently 42 clinically treatable, secondary variant genes that increase the risk of sickness or death from sudden cardiac death, heart failure and other types of cardiovascular disease, according to the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics. Genetic variants that cause long QT syndrome cause the heart to electrically reset slower than normal after each contraction, which may cause electrical instability of the heart and may lead to fainting, arrhythmias or even sudden death.
Once an incidental genetic variant for CVD is found, the statement authors suggest a framework for interpreting the variant and determining whether it is classified as benign, uncertain or pathogenic (disease-causing): Health care professionals should only relay information to patients about incidentally identified variants if they are among the cardiovascular disease genes already known to be associated with CVD and if patients agreed during pretest genetic counseling to be informed about incidental findings. Incidentally identified variants in genes with an uncertain association with CVD should not be reported. If the discovered variant may increase the risk of CVD, a family history and medical evaluation by an expert health care professional are suggested, preferably a specialist working with or within a multidisciplinary team to address in the disease in question. The goal of this evaluation is to determine whether the individual has evidence of the disease, such as symptoms or relevant test results, or if there are any warning signs in the family history. The genetic variant itself should be re-evaluated periodically by an expert or expert team to ensure whether the CVD link remains accurate. As knowledge about a variant evolves over time, its link to disease may be reclassified. Finally, the medical evaluation and genetic re-evaluation should guide next steps, which may vary from dismissing the incidental variant as not likely to cause CVD to starting medical interventions. This may also involve periodic re-evaluation with appropriate tests (echocardiogram, blood tests, etc.) and possibly screening other family members for the variant.”The list of incidental variants related to cardiovascular disease continues to evolve. This statement provides a foundation of care that may help people with a CVD-related genetic variant and their health care professionals take the next step in determining the individual and familial risk that a variant may or may not carry,” Landstrom said. “It’s also important to consult with genetics specialists to custom-tailor an evaluation and treatment plan to both the individual and the genetic variant in order to ensure the highest level of care possible.”
This scientific statement was prepared by the volunteer writing group on behalf of the American Heart Association’s Data Science and Precision Medicine Committee of the Council on Genomic and Precision Medicine and the Council on Clinical Cardiology; the Council on Cardiovascular and Stroke Nursing; the Council on Hypertension; the Council on Lifelong Congenital Heart Disease and Heart Health in the Young: Council on Peripheral Vascular Disease; and the Stroke Council. American Heart Association scientific statements promote greater awareness about cardiovascular diseases and stroke issues and help facilitate informed health care decisions. Scientific statements outline what is currently known about a topic and what areas need additional research. While scientific statements inform the development of guidelines, they do not make treatment recommendations. American Heart Association guidelines provide the Association’s official clinical practice recommendations.

Social relationships influence physical health, but questions remain about the nature of this connection. New research in Social Psychological and Personality Science suggests that the way you feel about your close relationships may be affecting the way your body functions.
Previous smaller-scale studies have examined the connection between relationship conflict or satisfaction with stress levels and blood pressure. The new research examines the effects of positive and negative relationship experiences on the body, as well as how these experiences and health outcomes change from day to day.
“Both positive and negative experiences in our relationships contribute to our daily stress, coping, and physiology, like blood pressure and heart rate reactivity,” says lead author Brian Don of the University of Auckland. “Additionally, it’s not just how we feel about our relationships overall that matters; the up’s and downs are important too.”
Over the course of three weeks, 4,005 participants completed daily check-ins via their smartphone or smartwatch, providing assessments of their blood pressure, heart rate, stress, coping. Every three days, participants also shared reflections on their closest relationship, detailing their positive and negative experiences.
Researchers found that, on average, people with more positive experiences and fewer negative experiences reported lower stress, better coping, and lower systolic blood pressure reactivity leading to better physiological functioning in daily life. By contrast, variability — or daily ups and downs — in negative relationship experiences like conflict were especially predictive of outcomes like stress, coping, and overall systolic blood pressure.
Dr. Don notes that one broader implication of this study is that it is important to consider how outside stressors — such as the COVID-19 pandemic — can affect people’s relationships, and therefore their physical health.
“Since the COVID-19 pandemic, relationships have been facing unprecedented challenges, turbulence, and change,” says Dr. Don. “What this means is that the COVID pandemic may have health implications not just because of the virus itself, but also indirectly as a result of the impact it has on people’s relationships. That is, because the COVID-19 pandemic has created considerable strain, turbulence, and variability in people’s relationships, it may indirectly alter stress, coping, and physiology in daily life, all of which have important implications for physical well-being.”
Researchers cautioned against interpreting the study as proof that relationship experiences have physiological effects. Instead, the findings contain associations from daily life that illustrate how relationships and physical health are often intertwined. Causal conclusions, Dr. Don says, must be reserved for experimental studies.
In the future, Dr. Don suggests that researchers look beyond outcomes like blood pressure and heart rate reactivity to gain a fuller understanding of how relationships may affect health.
“It would be useful to examine other physiological states, such as neuroendocrine or sympathetic nervous system responses as outcomes of daily positive and negative relationship experiences, which may reveal different patterns of associations.”

Some researchers claim that chatbots have developed theory of mind. But is that just our own theory of mind gone wild?Mind reading is common among us humans. Not in the ways that psychics claim to do it, by gaining access to the warm streams of consciousness that fill every individual’s experience, or in the ways that mentalists claim to do it, by pulling a thought out of your head at will. Everyday mind reading is more subtle: We take in people’s faces and movements, listen to their words and then decide or intuit what might be going on in their heads.Among psychologists, such intuitive psychology — the ability to attribute to other people mental states different from our own — is called theory of mind, and its absence or impairment has been linked to autism, schizophrenia and other developmental disorders. Theory of mind helps us communicate with and understand one another; it allows us to enjoy literature and movies, play games and make sense of our social surroundings. In many ways, the capacity is an essential part of being human.What if a machine could read minds, too?Recently, Michal Kosinski, a psychologist at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, made just that argument: that large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4 — next-word prediction machines trained on vast amounts of text from the internet — have developed theory of mind. His studies have not been peer reviewed, but they prompted scrutiny and conversation among cognitive scientists, who have been trying to take the often asked question these days — Can ChatGPT do this? — and move it into the realm of more robust scientific inquiry. What capacities do these models have, and how might they change our understanding of our own minds?“Psychologists wouldn’t accept any claim about the capacities of young children just based on anecdotes about your interactions with them, which is what seems to be happening with ChatGPT,” said Alison Gopnik, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the first researchers to look into theory of mind in the 1980s. “You have to do quite careful and rigorous tests.”Dr. Kosinski’s previous research showed that neural networks trained to analyze facial features like nose shape, head angle and emotional expression could predict people’s political views and sexual orientation with a startling degree of accuracy (about 72 percent in the first case and about 80 percent in the second case). His recent work on large language models uses classic theory of mind tests that measure the ability of children to attribute false beliefs to other people.A famous example is the Sally-Anne test, in which a girl, Anne, moves a marble from a basket to a box when another girl, Sally, isn’t looking. To know where Sally will look for the marble, researchers claimed, a viewer would have to exercise theory of mind, reasoning about Sally’s perceptual evidence and belief formation: Sally didn’t see Anne move the marble to the box, so she still believes it is where she last left it, in the basket.Dr. Kosinski presented 10 large language models with 40 unique variations of these theory of mind tests — descriptions of situations like the Sally-Anne test, in which a person (Sally) forms a false belief. Then he asked the models questions about those situations, prodding them to see whether they would attribute false beliefs to the characters involved and accurately predict their behavior. He found that GPT-3.5, released in November 2022, did so 90 percent of the time, and GPT-4, released in March 2023, did so 95 percent of the time.The conclusion? Machines have theory of mind.Michal Kosinski, a psychologist at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, has argued that large language models have developed theory of mind. Many scholars disagree.Christie Hemm Klok for The New York TimesBut soon after these results were released, Tomer Ullman, a psychologist at Harvard University, responded with a set of his own experiments, showing that small adjustments in the prompts could completely change the answers generated by even the most sophisticated large language models. If a container was described as transparent, the machines would fail to infer that someone could see into it. The machines had difficulty taking into account the testimony of people in these situations, and sometimes couldn’t distinguish between an object being inside a container and being on top of it.Maarten Sap, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, fed more than 1,000 theory of mind tests into large language models and found that the most advanced transformers, like ChatGPT and GPT-4, passed only about 70 percent of the time. (In other words, they were 70 percent successful at attributing false beliefs to the people described in the test situations.) The discrepancy between his data and Dr. Kosinski’s could come down to differences in the testing, but Dr. Sap said that even passing 95 percent of the time would not be evidence of real theory of mind. Machines usually fail in a patterned way, unable to engage in abstract reasoning and often making “spurious correlations,” he said.Dr. Ullman noted that machine learning researchers have struggled over the past couple of decades to capture the flexibility of human knowledge in computer models. This difficulty has been a “shadow finding,” he said, hanging behind every exciting innovation. Researchers have shown that language models will often give wrong or irrelevant answers when primed with unnecessary information before a question is posed; some chatbots were so thrown off by hypothetical discussions about talking birds that they eventually claimed that birds could speak. Because their reasoning is sensitive to small changes in their inputs, scientists have called the knowledge of these machines “brittle.”Dr. Gopnik compared the theory of mind of large language models to her own understanding of general relativity. “I have read enough to know what the words are,” she said. “But if you asked me to make a new prediction or to say what Einstein’s theory tells us about a new phenomenon, I’d be stumped because I don’t really have the theory in my head.” By contrast, she said, human theory of mind is linked with other common-sense reasoning mechanisms; it stands strong in the face of scrutiny.In general, Dr. Kosinski’s work and the responses to it fit into the debate about whether the capacities of these machines can be compared to the capacities of humans — a debate that divides researchers who work on natural language processing. Are these machines stochastic parrots, or alien intelligences, or fraudulent tricksters? A 2022 survey of the field found that, of the 480 researchers who responded, 51 percent believed that large language models could eventually “understand natural language in some nontrivial sense,” and 49 percent believed that they could not.Dr. Ullman doesn’t discount the possibility of machine understanding or machine theory of mind, but he is wary of attributing human capacities to nonhuman things. He noted a famous 1944 study by Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel, in which participants were shown an animated movie of two triangles and a circle interacting. When the subjects were asked to write down what transpired in the movie, nearly all described the shapes as people.“Lovers in the two-dimensional world, no doubt; little triangle number-two and sweet circle,” one participant wrote. “Triangle-one (hereafter known as the villain) spies the young love. Ah!”It’s natural and often socially required to explain human behavior by talking about beliefs, desires, intentions and thoughts. This tendency is central to who we are — so central that we sometimes try to read the minds of things that don’t have minds, at least not minds like our own.

Published16 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Jamie McCarthyBy Jack GrayNewsbeat reporter”Dear younger me, you should have stayed out of tanning beds.”That’s the message WWE wrestler Alexa Bliss had for herself after undergoing treatment for skin cancer.The 31-year-old, real name Lexi Cabrera, posted an Instagram photo over the weekend showing stiches where the cancer had been removed.She told fans she’s “all clear” of the condition and urged them to “always get your skin checked… if you are in the sun or use tanning beds”. Sharing her story, five-time WWE Women’s Champion Alexa said she’d noticed a spot on her face “that had gotten worse”.”So went to get a biopsy,” she wrote.Skip twitter post by Lexi (Kaufman) CabreraAllow Twitter content?This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy,