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Today:
America's First Legal Psilocybin Program Treated 346 People. Here's What Happened.
NEWS | 22 August 2026
Just one month after the dose, 92.2 percent of participants said the experience had been beneficial, while, on average, their mental health symptoms had fallen dramatically. "This is the first large-scale study to monitor the safety and mental health symptoms of real people in the real world." In 2024, approximately 23 percent of US adults reported symptoms of mental illness in the prior year; however, only half of those people received treatment. All four were psychedelic-naive (hadn't taken a psychedelic before) and had symptoms of depression, anxiety, and/or PTSD before taking psilocybin. "Just because something isn't a medical model doesn't mean you can't have mental health benefits," Korthuis says.

Top Stories:
Hidden Pulses Within Your Brain May Hold Your Thoughts Together
NEWS | 22 August 2026
A new study suggests that distant parts of the brain briefly fall into the same rhythm when we hold and retrieve information. This gave the researchers a rare opportunity to listen to the electrical activity of individual brain cells while the participants completed a memory test. In simpler terms, a small group of brain cells suddenly becomes highly active and moves to the same fast beat. Across 43 recording sessions, the researchers followed the activity of 1,373 brain cells. "That matters because 'firing together' may be the brain's basic currency for linking information," Verzhbinsky said.

World:
All Those Nuclear Tests Decades Ago Have Revealed Something New About Our Planet's Core
NEWS | 22 August 2026
Now, using data from a surprising source – underground nuclear tests conducted more than 30 years ago – researchers have some more detail about our planet's internal systems. Because the nuclear tests occurred at nearly the same location, the seismic waves followed remarkably similar paths through the planet. The analysis used 112 pairs of nuclear tests, with the explosions in each pair occurring less than 0.05 degrees apart. These results make the case that it's likely that the outer core isn't simply a giant pool of purely liquid molten metal. Here, the nuclear tests provided a much more controlled and time-limited set of repeated seismic sources.

Current Events:
A Single Blood Sample May Reveal The Biological Age of Each of Your Organs
NEWS | 22 August 2026
Scientists have now used those marks to develop a method that may predict which organs look older than expected from a single blood sample. If the clock judged a 60-year-old person's lung tissue to resemble older tissue, for example, that lung was considered older than expected. They then developed a second model that estimated how old different organs looked using only blood data. Earlier blood-based methods have estimated organ age by measuring circulating proteins. For now, the study suggests that reducing biological age to a single number may miss an important part of the story.

News Flash:
New Evidence Challenges What Experts Said About Working From Home
NEWS | 22 August 2026
As the recent global pandemic waned – and the urgent need for widespread remote work began to fade into history – a new view started to emerge. It suggested remote work wasn't as effective as being in the office, that it hinders collaboration, and that remote workers experience increased feelings of isolation and worsened mental health. Nonetheless, the researchers say it helps to refute the idea that remote work by itself prevents people from communicating effectively. Of course, these findings certainly won't be the last word on working from home versus working in the office. "The implications of this research are especially salient as organizations navigate continued ambiguity in remote work policy," the authors explain.

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Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 22 August 2026
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Latest:
The Biggest Known Galaxy Is 1.7 Million Light-Years, And We Can't Comprehend The Scale
NEWS | 22 August 2026
But a galaxy named IC 1101 is bonkers in a way that dramatically exceeds the upper end of normal. "For comparison, the stellar disk of the Milky Way is roughly twenty times smaller in diameter," Marrero de la Rosa told ScienceAlert. Once they removed those effects, the team looked for changes in several properties of IC 1101 as they moved outward from its center. "Once the scattered light was removed, the field became much cleaner and several very faint structures around IC 1101 became visible. And, deliciously, some of those outer structures appear to line up with vast disturbances seen in the X-ray emission around IC 1101.

Breaking:
There's a Link Between Women's Reproductive Health And Heart Disease Doctors Say We're Missing
NEWS | 22 August 2026
And for decades, we've known there's a connection between heart health and gynecological issues. Women share many of the classic cardiovascular risk factors with men, including high blood pressure, diabetes, smoking, and high cholesterol. A meta-analysis involving more than a million women found an increased risk of cardiovascular disease among women with PMOS. Endometriosis also seems to be connected to heart health. Related: Ovaries Begin Aging Decades Before Menopause – And The Implications Go Far Beyond FertilityAnd then there was the Women's Heart Bus.

Trending:
Huge US Study Shows Living Near Dry Cleaners Is Linked to Major Disease Risk
NEWS | 22 August 2026
People who lived within 150 meters (500 ft, 0.1 miles) of dry cleaners faced up to 23 percent higher risk of developing Parkinson's. For example, a study published last year found that living near a golf course was associated with higher Parkinson's risk, likely owing to pesticide use on fairways and greens. Living near a golf course could also increase risk of Parkinson's disease. "Our county-level association map revealed a broadly consistent pattern across much of the US linking residential proximity to dry cleaners with Parkinson's disease risk," the researchers write in their paper. "Our findings suggest that chemicals used in dry cleaning may contaminate nearby neighborhoods and contribute to Parkinson's disease risk," the researchers write.

This Just In:
This Week in Science: Highest Radiation Occupation, a Shooting Star, And More!
NEWS | 22 August 2026
This Week in Science: Jellyfish attack, lab-grown mini-brains sense time, and much more! First up: An analysis of 500 occupations revealed the job with the highest risk of radiation-related cancer deaths, and it's probably not one you'd expect. There lurks a supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A*, tipping the scales at around 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun. Swarming Jellyfish Just Shut Down a Nuclear Reactor For The Second TimeA different nuclear power plant. frameborder="0″ allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen>Watch the video above for a recap of the top stories from this week!

Today:
Brain Scans Reveal a Striking Similarity Between Schizophrenia And Bipolar Disorder
NEWS | 22 August 2026
Bipolar disorder primarily involves episodes of extreme changes in mood and energy, including mania and depression. Some people with bipolar disorder also experience psychosis, which can make the two conditions difficult to distinguish. In brain scans, people with either condition showed less coordination among widely separated brain regions than people without either diagnosis. A recent large genetic analysis found that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder share about 70 percent of their genetic influences. Previous research has also detected sudden waves of changing brain connectivity, nicknamed 'brainquakes', in people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Top Stories:
Large Hadron Collider Reveals an Atomic Nucleus Shaped Like a Bowling Pin
NEWS | 22 August 2026
Now, in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, physicists have found evidence of one of those shapes: a nucleus structured like a bowling pin lurking inside every atom of neon. Some can have shapes that diverge from a sphere; radium-224, for example, has a distinctly lopsided pear-shaped atomic nucleus. For their experiment, the CMS Collaboration compared collisions between two different atomic nuclei – oxygen-16 and neon-20. Calculations predict (and several previous works have found evidence) that oxygen-16 has a tetrahedral nuclear structure, while the predicted structure for neon is more like a bowling pin. "They provide stringent constraints on models of small-system collectivity and offer valuable implications for nuclear structure studies."

World:
Scientists Directly Date 3.5-Billion-Year-Old Evidence of Life For The First Time
NEWS | 22 August 2026
"When this is possible, the age of the rock and the evidence of life can be linked directly, providing much robust age and isotope-based evidence for ancient life." An outcrop of ancient carbonaceous chert at Bhitardari, India, where researchers found evidence of a 3.5-billion-year-old microbial community. "At first, I did not expect to find evidence of ancient life," she said. This doesn't make the Bhitardari material the oldest evidence of life ever found. What makes this discovery so exciting is the strength of the link between the biological evidence and its age.

Current Events:
Deadly, Drug-Resistant Fungal Infections Are Spreading – Scientists Just Discovered a Potential Treatment
NEWS | 22 August 2026
"Modern medicine, from surgery and cancer treatment to organ transplantation and intensive care, depends on our ability to prevent and treat these life-threatening infections." If C. albicans reaches the bloodstream – a condition called candidemia – the infection can be life-threatening. Once C. albicans burns through its glucose, it reverts to its less invasive yeasty form – all thanks to gladiolin. When the researchers added amphotericin B, the pair had a synergistic effect, suppressing C. albicans biofilms more strongly than either treatment alone. Related: Deadly Fungal Infections Causing a 'Silent Pandemic', Scientists Warn"Fungal infections are often overlooked because they are not as common as bacterial infections," says pathologist Nathan Wiederhold, of UT Health San Antonio, who was not involved in the gladiolin research.

News Flash:
A Hidden Pattern in Your Saliva Can Predict Risk of Colorectal Cancer, Study Finds
NEWS | 22 August 2026
"These observations made us wonder whether oral microbes reach and persist in the gastrointestinal tract differently in people with cancer." Ultimately, the idea was to see whether people with gastrointestinal cancers had specific microbial signatures that could be detected through oral samples alone. That means that in cancer patients, more of the oral microbes migrate further into the gut than they normally would. (Sebastian Kaulitzki/Science Photo Library/Getty Images)Intriguingly, the team found that tests of oral samples were more accurate at detecting signs of colorectal cancer than some current standard screening tools. "It was notable that cancer-related information could be recovered from oral samples alone," says Yong Chan Lee, a gastroenterologist at Yonsei University.