Health & Science

The trip of a lifetime, via mushrooms

Back in 2006, Johns Hopkins University researchers gathered 36 volunteers—average middle-aged men and women—and blew their minds. Dosed with psilocybin, the drug found in so-called magic mushrooms, the subjects experienced eight-hour “trips” that most described as highly spiritual journeys. Indeed, many participants rated the experience as one of the most significant events of their lives. “There was this sense of relief and joy and ecstasy when my heart was opened,” one volunteer related. Researchers have now completed a follow-up study, and the volunteers reported that they have continued to derive life-affirming benefits from their psychedelic adventure. Sixty-four percent reported that life had gotten better since the psilocybin experiment. Sixty-one percent felt they had become more loving, open, and sensitive. Researchers don’t advocate use of this potent, illegal drug outside a lab setting, but they say the study suggests possible medical uses for psilocybin. For cancer patients or the terminally ill, for instance, the mind-altering experience triggered by the drug could be an excellent form of therapy, and it could help in the treatment of alcoholism and drug abuse. “I don’t think the evidence is sufficiently strong for us to consider changing the legality of these substances,” neurologist Charles Schuster of Loyola University Chicago tells Discovery News. “But the illegality should not interfere with this research.”

Global warming and gender

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Scientists studying the tuatara reptile have uncovered a surprising gender-specific effect of global warming: According to a new computer model, by 2085, no more female tuataras will be born. As with many other reptiles, the tuatara’s sex is partially determined by the temperature of the egg: If a nest gets hotter than 71 degrees Fahrenheit, all the tuatara babies that hatch are male. The climate in New Zealand, the tuataras’ habitat, is steadily heating up, and scientists have determined that within 80 years, only male tuataras will be produced. Soon after that, of course, the species would die off. Tuataras evolved around the time of the dinosaurs and have endured 200 million years of Earth’s changes. But scientists say that if warming trends continue, humans will have to step in to save the ancient reptile. “We can put shade cloth over their nesting sites to effectively change their sex ratio back to a 1-to-1,” study leader Nicola Mitchell tells Nature. Or, she says, scientists can “start translocating them to other places that would be more suitable.”

Go ahead, belt it out

If you think you sound great singing in the shower, you may be right, a new study suggests. When researchers asked 150 randomly selected people to sing some simple songs, more than 90 percent hit all the notes, while nearly 100 percent got the rhythms right. The study measured pitch and timing, not timbre or musical expression, but it does suggest that most people at least can carry a tune. Being able to sing passably may be an inborn trait that helps people bond socially, study author Simone Dalla Bella tells LiveScience.com. Dalla Bella says that people who can’t sing to save their lives divide into two groups: those who hear themselves hitting the wrong notes but can’t correct it, and the tone-deaf, who sincerely don’t know how terrible they sound. Dalla Bella could not explain why so many of the latter have tried out for American Idol.

Why lobster may get cheaper

Global warming has caused dramatic shifts in some aquatic environments, causing fish populations to recede as lobsters, crabs, and squid move in, a new study says. An analysis of 50 years’ worth of fish-trawling data collected in New England’s Narragansett Bay and the adjacent Rhode Island Sound found that resident fish communities have progressively shifted from vertebrate species (fish) to invertebrates such as lobsters, crabs, prawns, and scallops. “This is a pretty dramatic change, and it’s a pattern that is being seen in other ecosystems,” says study leader Jeremy Collie of the University of Rhode Island. Experts say it may only be a matter of time before fish that are now relatively cheap, because they are abundant, will become more expensive, while lobster and other bottom-crawlers will lose their rarefied status. People have already started “eating more calamari and less flounder,” Collie tells National Geographic.

HIV knocks, but it can’t get in

Using gene therapy, researchers have successfully treated cells in the mouse immune system to become resistant to the HIV virus, which causes AIDS. If the process works with humans, it would mark a potentially revolutionary breakthrough in the treatment of the deadly virus. The treatment, developed by Sangamo BioSciences, a biotechnology company in Duarte, Calif., increases the proportion of the immune system’s cells that can block HIV from invading them. The key protein involved in the process, the so-called zinc finger nuclease, is introduced to disease-fighting T cells via a harmless virus. Once attached to the DNA, the protein blocks a cell-surface signal that would normally help HIV recognize and enter the cell. Essentially, researchers tell New Scientist, the gene therapy removes the “door handle” that the HIV virus uses to invade cells. “We saw a tenfold suppression of the virus in the treated mice compared with controls,” says researcher Philip Gregory. “What’s really exciting is that the change in the genome is permanent.” Researchers hope to test the method on people by the end of the year.