FILE PHOTO: Psilocybin or “magic mushrooms” are seen in an undated photo provided by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in Washington, U.S. May 7, 2019. DEA | Reuters The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday announced a series of measures aimed at accelerating the development of psychedelic treatments for serious mental illness. That…
NASA follows international guidelines called the Planetary Protection protocol, aimed at making sure Earth’s biology doesn’t taint celestial bodies, and vice versa. The agency also has a dedicated team, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s biotechnology and planetary protection group, or B.P.P.G., that oversees efforts to avoid cross-contamination on missions. Several scientists behind the new research, including…
The Trump administration moved Thursday to reclassify cannabis under federal law, which could significantly expand scientific research into the drug’s medical uses. The change would not legalize the drug at the federal level, but shift cannabis from its current status as a Schedule I substance to Schedule III under the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s controlled…
A research arm of the Chinese government said it had published an atlas of deep-sea mineral deposits, highlighting Beijing’s ambitions to mine the ocean floor and underscoring its disputed claims to waters that neighboring nations consider theirs. Experts say the maps, in addition to pinpointing mineral deposits found in the deep ocean, give China’s military…
Spending on new medical research by the National Institutes of Health has fallen roughly $1 billion behind the pace of years past, delaying thousands of scientific projects and raising concerns within the agency that it may struggle to pay out the money it was allotted by Congress. Instead of canceling grants en masse, as the…
Scientists once thought it would take a century or more for animals to return to deforested land in the tropics. Now, new research has found ecosystems can recover in mere decades. “It’s been a huge surprise for all of us,” said Timo Metz, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, and first…
The sun had barely risen over the Pacific Ocean when a small motorboat carrying a team of Indigenous artisans and Mexican biologists dropped anchor in a rocky cove near Bahías de Huatulco. Mauro Habacuc Avendaño Luis, one of the craftsmen, was the first to wade to shore. With an agility belying his age, he struck…
In 2021, a disabled parrot named Bruce made headlines worldwide for creating his own prosthetic beak. He didn’t stop there: Scientists reported on Monday that Bruce has now become the alpha male of his group. And he did it by learning to joust. The new research, published in Current Biology, is an important addition to…
In 2022, Jack Brand, an environmental toxicologist, loaded a bunch of Swedish fish with cocaine. He wasn’t trying to bring a Halloween hoax to life; he wanted to see how salmon in the wild reacted to pollution from the illegal drug. In recent years, there has been an alarming rise in the number of waterways…
For more than 1,200 years, Japanese noblemen, monks and bureaucrats have carefully recorded one of the most eagerly awaited days of the year — when cherry blossoms bloom in the ancient capital, Kyoto. In recent years, a climate scientist, Yasuyuki Aono, has been the keeper of this trove of dates, one of the world’s most…
