Engineered yeast grows opiates at home.
Nature opens the door to home-brewed heroin – just add water and sugar: A paper published on 18 May in Nature Chemical Biology reports the […]
pharmacology
Acid casualties aren’t (almost ever).
Nature reviews a broad survey of research – two studies that conclude psychedelic drug use can’t be linked to psychosis: In the first study, clinical […]
One drink makes you cuter. (Not the people around you, but the person doing the drinking.)
Live Science grants us deep insight into the biochemistry of the bar pickup, revealing that prospective partners look a whole lot better after they’ve had […]
Love (hormone) against alcoholism.
L.A. Times examines the biochemical power that love – or at least the “love hormone” oxytocin – has to neutralize alcohol and beat alcoholism: …[N]ew […]
Don’t despise it. Decriminalize it. (Or, you know, don’t… but at least know the facts.)
Popular Science looks at the hard facts behind decriminalization and legalization (two different things!) of marijuana – and what science says happens when cannabis consumption […]
Why menthol makes it harder to quit.
New Scientist reveals how menthol – something originally added to cigarettes to soothe smokers’ throats – actually makes cigarettes more ‘cigarette-y’: People who smoke menthol […]
No, *this* is your brain on drugs. All interconnected….
IFL Science takes another look (courtesy of ISI Foundation researchers) at magic mushroom trips, and finds some surprises in what exactly psilocybin mushrooms do to […]
Ketamine – “special K” – can break treatment-resistant depression.
Nature has more on how the veterinary tranquilizer-slash-rave drug can reverse “anhedonia” (the inability to feel happy) for 14 days – long enough to bust […]
SONG: Could you tell me your name?
SONG: “Could You Tell Me Your Name?” ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on“Anxiety and sleeping pills ‘linked to dementia’”, BBC News, 9 September 2014, as used […]
Worried? Trouble sleeping? Congrats, you might have a higher risk of Alzheimer’s.
BBC reports the in no way worrisome news that researchers have discovered a correlation benzodiazepines (pills for anxiety and sleep) and a hugely increased risk […]
Anesthesia works by stealing electrons from your brain.
Scientific American has more on the weird quantum effects that make consciousness go bye-bye: General anaesthetics may extinguish consciousness through mysterious quantum biological effects that […]
Hemp really IS a super-material… in circuitry, that is.
Laboratory Equipment reveals recent findings (as cannabis becomes easier to research) that the marijuana plant might make better supercapacitors than the “wonder material” graphene: David […]
E-cigarettes not really that much better than the non-e variety.
Science Daily pokes a hole in the optimism around electronic cigarettes with findings that they’re really not that different from the kind you light and […]
Kids these days… so *sober*.
ABC (the Australian network) muses on the next generation… wondering why the kids are avoiding alcohol nowadays: The findings of a survey of more than […]
LSD is back in the lab… helping people face death.
The New York Times looks at the first new research into LSD therapy in four decades: “I’d never taken the drug before, so I was […]