Carl Sagan Turned This 1990 Photograph Into a Warning. It's More Relevant Now Than Ever

23 Aug. 2026, By E. Öz

https://www.sciencealert.com/voyager-1-took-a-final-look-back-at-earth-36-years-ago-today-its-more-relevant-than-ever

Carl Sagan unveils the Pale Blue Dot in 1990. 

(The Planetary Society/Vimeo)

Look closely at one of the most famous photographs ever taken of Earth and you might struggle to find Earth at all.

There are no blue oceans. No continents. No clouds. Just darkness, scattered sunlight, and a tiny pale blue point almost lost within it.

That dot is us.

The photograph was taken 36 years ago on Valentine's Day by NASA's Voyager 1.

Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn. By 1990, NASA was preparing to switch off its cameras permanently to conserve the spacecraft's limited power.

But before the cameras went dark, there was one last idea.

Astronomer Carl Sagan, a member of the Voyager imaging team, had spent years arguing that the spacecraft should turn around and photograph the Solar System it was leaving behind.

Carl Sagan unveils the Pale Blue Dot in 1990. 

(The Planetary Society/Vimeo)



So on February 14, 1990, Voyager captured 60 frames for a Solar System 'family portrait'. Earth appeared in one of them.

From around 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, our entire planet occupied just 0.12 of a pixel. The bright band crossing the image was sunlight scattered inside the camera's optics. Earth happened to fall within one of those rays.

The photograph became known as the Pale Blue Dot.

Four years later, Sagan captured the power of the image in his book of the same name:

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g

Everyone who had ever lived had lived their lives on the tiny Pale Blue Dot.

Perhaps that is precisely why the image has refused to grow old.

Scientists have a name for the shift in perspective astronauts sometimes describe after seeing Earth from space: The overview effect.

One study found that astronauts described awe, a stronger sense of connection with humanity, and heightened awareness of Earth's fragility after viewing the planet from above.

The Pale Blue Dot offers the rest of us something similar without leaving the ground.

People quite literally want to get closer to that tiny Earth.

An updated version of the Pale Blue Dot image, released in 2020.

 (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

When Voyager's Solar System portrait was displayed as a large mosaic at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the section containing Earth reportedly had to be replaced repeatedly because so many visitors touched the tiny dot.

It is a wonderfully human reaction to a photograph taken from an unimaginable distance.

We know everyone is there, so we reach out to touch it.

Thirty-six years later, the world doing the reaching has changed dramatically.

There were no smartphones, social media feeds, or constant notifications when the Pale Blue Dot photograph was taken.

Today, a message can cross the planet in seconds. Billions of other people's lives stream past us on screens. Friends and family thousands of kilometers away can appear in our homes through video calls.

We don't even need another human at the other end anymore. AI companion apps are designed to listen and respond whenever we want them.

Some research suggests they can help. A study found that AI companions could temporarily reduce loneliness, particularly when people felt the chatbot was listening to them.

But a year-long study of more than 2,000 adults found that greater social chatbot use predicted greater loneliness later on. That doesn't show the chatbots caused loneliness – people who already feel lonely may simply turn to them more often.

Together, the findings point to something more complicated.

Being able to reach someone is not the same as feeling connected to them.

The famous Earthrise image, showing Earth in part shadow.

 (NASA)



Despite all the new ways to reach one another, loneliness remains remarkably common.

A World Health Organization report published in 2025 estimated that about one in six people worldwide experiences loneliness.

But maybe the Pale Blue Dot asks us to think about 'connection' differently.

Much of modern technology asks us to zoom in: Read this message, enlarge this face, tap this notification, join this argument, look closer at somebody else's life.

The Pale Blue Dot does the opposite.

It takes us billions of kilometers away.

From that distance there are no follower counts. No countries. No status symbols. No arguments or victories.

You cannot distinguish the people you love from people you will never meet.

Everyone is inside the same point.

Voyager 1 took the Pale Blue Dot just 34 minutes before its cameras were switched off forever.

The spacecraft kept traveling, eventually entering interstellar space and becoming the most distant human-made object from Earth.

Voyager is still moving farther away from us.

But one tiny photograph it took has spent 36 years moving us in a different way.

Maybe that's why we still share it, enlarge it, and search for the tiny Earth on our screens.

The photograph doesn't just give us another way to connect.

It reminds us how deeply connected we already are.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Science Weighs in on Whether All Those Photos Are Helping or Hurting Your Memory

23 Aug. 2026, By M. Irving

https://www.sciencealert.com/science-weighs-in-on-whether-all-those-photos-are-helping-or-hurting-your-memory

(m-gucci/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Chances are, there are thousands of photos on your phone right now – and you probably never look at them.

Selfies at parties. Brunch spreads, carefully staged for Instagram. Your cat sleeping in slightly different positions. Sunsets, supermoons, and travel snaps.

One of the main reasons people take photos is to help us remember an experience or event. But it turns out that stopping to snap a selfie could actually hinder your memory of something.

It sounds counterintuitive – surely it's easier to recall something more vividly with the help of a visual cue, right? But a growing body of research keeps finding that this isn't the case.

A new study, published in the journal Memory & Cognition, adds more evidence, showing that taking screenshots consistently impaired participants' memory across seven different experiments.

"The results of the current study suggest that we are likely harming our memory for information and experiences with the press of a button, and that this impairment may even extend beyond what is captured," says Sophia Fabrizio, a psychologist at Binghamton University.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E2Ibe66j94

The idea that taking photos reduces our ability to remember is not new – the effect has shown up in research for decades. But exactly why the so-called 'photo-taking impairment effect' occurs remains unclear.

Scientists have proposed a few potential explanations. One suggests that the act of using your camera or phone could be dividing your attention or disengaging you from what's going on around you, so that your brain isn't devoting as many resources to encoding the memory of the event itself.

The leading hypothesis, though, is what's called cognitive offloading. Basically, your brain might dedicate less effort to remembering something if it knows that memory is already being stored in the form of a photograph.

Whether this is a conscious or unconscious decision doesn't seem to matter.

It's similar to what's called the 'Google effect' – why bother storing information in your brain when you can find it in seconds online? That's why many of us don't really memorize phone numbers anymore, instead consulting the contacts list saved on our phones.

To investigate these ideas, the Binghamton team tested 892 participants across seven experiments, teasing out different aspects of the phenomenon. In all experiments, however, the results were broadly the same.

Participants consistently performed worse on memory tests after snapping images.

In the first experiment, participants were shown 44 images of art on their phones, and asked to screenshot or simply view each one. After a 10-minute distraction task, participants were then given a memory test, in which they were asked to identify the original images they'd seen out of three similar variations of each.

An example of a question on the memory test portion of the experiment. 

(Fabrizio et al., Mem. Cogn., 2026)



The participants performed consistently worse on images they'd screenshotted than images they'd just viewed.

The second experiment was designed to test if there was some kind of trade-off – a benefit that countered the memory deficit. This time, the researchers added a new question to the memory test phase at the end, asking participants if they recalled whether they'd viewed or screenshotted each image.

Again, participants remembered less about images they'd screenshotted than those they'd just viewed.

The next few batches of experiments were designed to see if maybe those cognitive resources were being used elsewhere. The scientists had participants perform math problems or memory tasks unrelated to the images.

However, there were few signs that participants who screenshotted images performed any better than those just viewing images.

In later experiments, the researchers explored what happened when participants were specifically told they were going to have a memory test of the images and would have a chance to review their screenshots.

Some participants were told they would be tested within 30 minutes; others were told they'd come back a month later for the memory test. In reality, however, both groups were tested 10 minutes after the image session.

The team's hypothesis was that those who thought they'd have a bigger gap before the test would rely more on cognitive offloading than those who knew they were being tested straight away.

Intriguingly though, there was little difference between those groups. Instead, participants from both groups continued to demonstrate weaker memory for images they'd screenshotted compared to images they'd viewed.

"In sum, the present study suggests a pronounced memory impairment associated with screenshotting, with only modest benefits to subsequent learning observed under very circumscribed conditions and measures of memory performance," the study authors conclude.

It's a complicated area of research – after all, other studies have suggested that taking photos does aid your memory.

Either way, it's enough to make you hesitate next time you reach for your phone to take a picture.

While few people probably miss memorizing phone numbers, the potential loss feels much more personal if getting too snap-happy means we're harming our ability to remember life milestones like weddings, birthdays, and vacations.

The birth of modern Man

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Scientists Asked AI to Read Plant Signals—The Results Were Unexpected

Past Unsealed, 10 Aug 2026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFdmB3N-3Jc

Plants may not have brains or nervous systems like animals, but they constantly respond to their surroundings through chemical, electrical, and physiological signals.

Now, researchers are using artificial intelligence to analyze these complex patterns in ways that could reveal new insights into plant biology. In this video, we explore how scientists use sensors, imaging, electrical measurements, and machine-learning techniques to study plant responses to light, temperature, touch, water availability, and other environmental conditions. 

Could AI eventually recognize patterns in plant signals that humans struggle to detect? And does that mean plants are “communicating” in a way comparable to animals? We'll examine the science carefully and distinguish genuine biological signaling from sensational interpretations.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Chuck's picture corner to Aug. 23, 2026

It's been a time of travel and visiting for me this last few weeks. Summer has been cooler and much wetter than it often is. It's raining again today and is supposed to continue most of the week.

variety of leaf shapes in the very back of the yard

an autumn joy sedum soon to open

forget what these guys are called possibly obedience plant

perennial sunflowers

hibiscus, cup and saucer variety

these guys are well enjoyed by bees and florists alike

rain rain rain

Visited the botanical gardens in Montreal, here are some pics

nasturtiums hanging on the front porch

morning on the front porch

Enjoy the day

These Babies Grew Up With Strict Sugar Limits. Decades Later, The Results Are Dramatic.

23 Aug. 2026, By P. Dockrill

https://www.sciencealert.com/these-babies-grew-up-with-strict-sugar-limits-decades-later-the-results-are-dramatic

Wartime babies born at the evacuated quarters of the Westminster Hospital Maternity Department in Surrey, 14th August 1941. 

(George W. Hales/Fox Photos/Stringer/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

It was January 1940, and the United Kingdom had a serious problem.

German attacks on import ships were threatening to trigger extreme food shortages, effectively starving the nation into submission.

Overnight, strict food rationing went into effect, limiting the amount of certain foods people could buy, including common staples like sugar.

Decades and entire lifetimes later, the long-tail effect of that enforced sugar reduction during World War II appears to have dramatically boosted the health of an entire generation of wartime babies, research suggests.

In a new paper published in PNAS, researchers analyzed health data from 64,761 people who were born in the UK between 1951–1956, sourcing their information from the UK Biobank study.

Sugar rationing ended abruptly in September 1953, after which average consumption levels quickly doubled.

By focusing on the 1951–1956 period straddling the cut-off, the researchers were able to compare the adult health of babies who spent their first 1,000 days (from conception to the age of two) under sugar rationing with babies who were born directly after and did not experience the limits.

They also compared the relative exposure of babies who experienced more of the sugar-rationing period to those born a little later, but still before restrictions lifted.

Cancer hazard ratios, tracked against progressive months of exposure to food rationing. The vertical dashed line separates babies conceived before rationing ended and those born after food restrictions were lifted. 

(Zhu & Zhang, PNAS, 2026)

It's not the first time researchers have turned to this historical event and the unique scientific data it provides.

Previous studies have shown the sugar-rationed babies face lower chronic disease risks, along with lower chances of developing Alzheimer's, and they seem to enjoy better cardiovascular health.

But what about cancer risk?

The new study – by health economists Chen Zhu from China Agricultural University and Weilong Zhang from the University of Cambridge – answers that question, showing significant reductions in cancer incidence for babies whose sugar intake was limited in early life.

Though these babies and their parents didn't have to contend with modern-day advertising and stacked supermarket shelves enticing them with increasingly sweet foods, the findings are a window into how sugar (or lack thereof) impacts health.

Compared with the babies who didn't experience sugar rationing, the babies who were sugar-rationed for their first 1,000 days were 69 percent less likely to develop liver cancer in their adult lives. 

They also saw reduced incidence of prostate cancer (52 percent lower), lung cancer (41 percent lower), rectal cancer (40 percent lower), and breast cancer (36 percent lower).

The sugar-rationed babies also tended to show longer telomeres – the caps at the ends of chromosomes that protect our genetic material, which are linked to longevity.

According to the researchers, the telomere length of the sugar-rationed babies equated to about 2.2 years less biological aging, suggesting they aged more slowly throughout their lives, enjoying better overall health than the non-sugar-rationed participants.

Another interesting finding was that the sugar-rationed babies appeared to show persistent dietary habits that lasted into adulthood, compared to their non-rationed peers.

"Rationed cohorts consume less sugar, eat smaller food quantities, and maintain healthier, more diverse diets five decades after the policy ended," the researchers write in their paper.

While we can't be entirely sure why that is, the researchers have some ideas.

"The level of sweetness people are exposed to very early in life may shape their taste preferences for a long time," Zhang explained in The Conversation.

"There appear to be two mechanisms at work. One is biological – early nutrition may shape how the metabolism, organs and immune system develop. The other is behavioral – a taste for less sweetness, formed early, seems to stick."

While this was only an observational study, the researchers claim the experiment-like conditions of the sugar-rationing cut-off (which divided the participants into two discrete groups) produce a kind of "causal evidence" linking sugar intake to adult cancer risk.

That might be debatable, but the findings themselves are very clear.

In a time of war, a generation of children was forced to restrict themselves to the levels of sugar intake comparable to what the World Health Organization recommends for everybody today.

And what do you know? They were healthier.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

There Are Fungi in The Ocean, And They May Be Way More Important Than We Realized

23 Aug. 2026, By J. Cockerill

https://www.sciencealert.com/there-are-fungi-in-the-ocean-and-they-may-be-way-more-important-than-we-realized

Fungi in the Arctic sediments could look a bit like this. 

(David Spears FRPS ASIS FRMS/Corbis Documentary/Getty Images)

Hidden inside tree trunks, between grains of soil, deep within our bodies, and below our feet, fungi seem to wind their way into everything.

But did you know fungi actually live in the ocean, too?

New research published in PLOS Biology reveals the overlooked role of marine fungi in the carbon cycle by zooming in on the seawater and sediments that line an Arctic fjord in Norway.

We're only just starting to understand how widespread fungi are on this planet, and how much they contribute to the global carbon cycle.

Marine fungi are easily overlooked because they're microscopic, but that doesn't mean their impact is small.

For the first time, scientists quantified how much fungi in marine sediments are incorporating dissolved, free-floating amino acids into their bodies, trapping carbon and nitrogen.

"Our study shows that fungi in the Arctic Ocean can contribute significantly to carbon storage in sediments via their highly efficient metabolism," explains geomicrobiologist William Orsi of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU Munich) in Germany.

"This is important because it is a previously unknown mechanism of microbial carbon storage in Arctic fjords, key geological settings that store more than 10 percent of all the carbon buried below the seafloor."

Orsi and his colleagues collected samples from across the landscape of a coastal inlet region called Kongsfjorden: glacial environments and tundra soils adjacent to the fjord, as well as seawater and sediments from within.

Samples were collected from around Kongsfjorden. However, fungal taxon data were assessed for just one site: AWI2.

 (Trejos-Espeleta et al., PLOS Biol., 2026)

"Sampling and developing experiments in the High Arctic is still a challenging task, just like understanding fragile, dynamic ecosystems such as a glaciated fjord," says the study's lead author, Juan Carlos Trejos-Espeleta, a geomicrobiologist at LMU Munich.

"This is why studies in these parts of the planet are rare but paradoxically have a high level of urgency… Only recently we are looking at marine fungi as important participants in the marine carbon cycle, having a potential role in carbon sequestration, just as it is known for terrestrial environments."

Conceptual model of fungal contributions to the marine carbon cycle in pelagic and benthic systems, integrating findings from the new study by Trejos-Espeleta and colleagues. 

(Reich, PLOS Biol., 2026)



As with soils from above the waterline, the underwater sediments were riddled with a mix of fungi and prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea).

That balance seems to be especially important to carbon equations.

"Easily degradable dissolved organic matter was considered primarily the niche of bacteria," writes molecular mycoecologist Marlis Reich of the University of Bremen.

"The new study by Trejos-Espeleta and colleagues shatters this paradigm."

Reich was not involved in this research, but she wrote an accompanying commentary that was published alongside it.

"Fungi in microbial communities are not just competitors but can outperform bacteria in dissolved organic matter assimilation, demonstrating that carbon cycling in marine ecosystems is far more complex than previously assumed and urgently needs to be studied with a holistic angle," she adds.

Where fungi were the bigger contributors in consuming organic matter, far less carbon dioxide was emitted than in samples where prokaryotes had a stronger hold in the ratio.

That pattern applied to both fjord sediment and tundra soils, although surprisingly, the fungi-to-prokaryote biomass ratio was much higher on the seafloor than on land.

More than 80 distinct varieties of fungi were participating in this natural carbon capture phenomenon, 34 of which fall into a group known as 'aquatic hyphomycetes', which belong to the genus Alatospora.

In comparison, only seven varieties of amino-acid-hungry fungi were found in nearby soils.

In incubation experiments, these seafloor fungi continued to chew up amino acids pretty efficiently even when oxygen was scarce. Alatospora in particular seemed unfazed by a lack of oxygen, though it's probably used to it – the Arctic fjord sediments are anoxic just a few millimeters below the seafloor's surface.

"Arctic fjords are major hotspots of carbon sequestration, but the role of fungi in these systems has been largely overlooked," says James Bradley of the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography.

"Our results show that fungi in fjord sediments can efficiently retain labile organic matter as biomass, which means they may contribute directly to carbon storage at the seafloor."

Even at the bottom of a fjord, it appears fungi are hard at work converting organic matter into solid biomass – preventing it from being released into our atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

But the team is concerned they've barely scratched the surface of these long-overlooked underwater ecosystems, at a time when they are rapidly changing.

"The Arctic is changing before our eyes at unprecedented rates and the efforts to understand its ecosystems' functioning remain insufficient," says Trejos Espeleta.

"Future research should not ignore fungi anymore as key agents of carbon cycling."

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Hidden Structures in Clouds May Solve a Longstanding Mystery About Rainfall

22 Aug. 2026, ByI. Farkas

https://www.sciencealert.com/hidden-structures-in-clouds-may-solve-a-longstanding-mystery-about-rainfall

(Andreas Felske/Unsplash)

It's well known that where there's smoke there's fire, but did you know that where there's rain there's ice?

Or so the conventional thinking goes, as atmospheric ice crystals allow raindrops to grow large and heavy enough to fall from cold clouds.

There are also 'warm clouds', which generate much of Earth's rain, especially in the tropics, and influence our global energy balance.

Yet how raindrops form inside these sky-borne marshmallows made of water is one of the biggest puzzles in atmospheric science – and a barrier to precise climate forecasts.

Fortunately, scientists have just taken a significant step toward solving this mystery, revealing the previously invisible structures that breed raindrops in warm clouds.

As reported in a recent study in PNAS, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) used their unique, in-house CloudKite – a helium-filled balloon-kite – to probe low-flying cumulus clouds near Barbados.

A CloudKite test flight. This unique device is designed to explore the relationships between cloud microphysics and turbulence.

  (MPI-DS)



"We assessed the structure of a warm cloud at high spatial resolution," says Mohsen Bagheri, a cloud microphysics and atmospheric turbulence researcher and the study's senior author.

Unlike using planes, which zoom by and gather fewer measurements that may be separated by miles, or drones, which have limited flight times and may cause turbulence, CloudKite is "like a 3D-microscope in the clouds investigating particle size and distribution", Bagheri explains.

It sports two bespoke optical imaging systems that combine the cloud-scanning benefits of lasers and high-speed cameras.

As a result, CloudKite can create 3D representations of the position and size of droplets in clouds, capturing data at a rate of 75 times per second to map cloud dynamics on scales from micrometers to kilometers.

Yet our understanding of cloud microphysics is still incomplete, "exemplified by our inability to fully explain how rain initiates in warm clouds" the researchers say, "which is an unsolved mystery that has puzzled scientists for many decades".

An illustration of cloud types by height.

(Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.)



So the researchers sought to demystify its major mystery: the bottleneck that would-be raindrops must overcome.

For a tiny droplet, at the limit of human vision, to become a full-fledged falling raindrop, it must collide and combine with its fellows, growing heavy enough to fall from the sky (and, annoyingly, onto our freshly cleaned cars).

Now, researchers have uncovered this invisible process, demonstrating that cloud droplet clustering occurs in highly intermittent, ultra-localized hotspots, rather than uniformly or randomly throughout clouds.

In reality, most of a sampled cloud may not harbor significant clustering. Instead, it appears to occur in small patches spanning a meter (3.3 feet) or less, in which individual droplets are packed shoulder-to-shoulder at separations of only around one millimeter (0.04 of an inch).

"Because droplets cluster there, collisions become much more likely," says Birte Thiede, a cloud microphysics researcher and the study's first author.

"These localized hotspots may therefore represent the places where rain starts in shallow cumulus clouds."

In contrast, previous research suggested that clustering is weaker and more spread out in shallow (low) stratocumulus clouds. This may be because other observatories could not match CloudKite's ability to resolve localized clusters, and instead averaged out their signals across much larger areas.

CloudKite emerging to explore shallow cumulus clouds.

(MPI-DS)



Though this may seem a neat resolution to the clustering mystery, the researchers note that the hotspots may not clearly correlate with droplet concentrations or average sizes.

Instead, they may be facilitated by dynamical factors like turbulence, which the team is currently studying.

Such factors affect how cloud components evolve and coalesce into raindrops, dictating both Earth's water budget and its energy balance, as clouds are vital for reflecting, absorbing, and emitting solar radiation.

Accordingly, future CloudKite expeditions are in the works, including flights over the Amazon, the Baltic Sea, and Finland.

Constraining hotspot formation, the droplets' collision rates, and how they join together will be essential to ironing out some sizable wrinkles in climate simulations, promising that you'll never get caught in a hairdo-ruining downpour without an umbrella again.

As Bagheri concludes, revealing the "hidden structure of warm clouds will lead to better descriptions of rain formation and more accurate weather forecasts".

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Scientists Warn of a Nearly 400% Increase in Toxic Liver Injuries – One Common Drug Leads the List

By U. of Virginia Health System, Aug. 21, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-warn-of-a-nearly-400-increase-in-toxic-liver-injuries-one-common-drug-leads-the-list/

Xenobiotics such as medications, alcohol, supplements, and environmental chemicals can damage liver cells as the organ works to break down and remove them from the body. When exposure is too high or toxic byproducts accumulate, the resulting inflammation and cell death can impair liver function and, in severe cases, lead to acute liver failure.

 Credit: Shutterstock

U.S. poison centers have recorded a sharp long-term rise in liver injuries linked to medications and other foreign substances, with most severe enough to require inpatient care.

Reports to U.S. poison centers involving liver damage from medications, supplements, alcohol, and other substances rose nearly 400% between 2000 and 2024, according to research from UVA Health.

Christopher P. Holstege, MD, of UVA Health and his colleagues examined liver injuries caused by “xenobiotics,” substances that are foreign to the body. These include medications, food additives, alcohol, and environmental pollutants.

More than 80% of the reported liver injuries led to inpatient care, and medications accounted for most cases. Acetaminophen was the substance implicated most often.

“Xenobiotic-induced liver injuries reported to U.S. poison centers have steadily increased,” said Holstege, director of UVA Health’s Blue Ridge Poison Center. “The public should be aware of potential liver injury with various substances that are readily available to consumers.”

Across the 24 years examined, Holstege and his colleagues identified 220,160 cases of xenobiotic-related liver injury. After adjusting for population size, exposure rates climbed from 10.9 cases per million people to 52.9 per million.

Christopher P. Holstege. 

Credit: UVA Health



Regulation reduced combination drug exposures

One notable shift followed action by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. After the agency limited how much acetaminophen could be included in combination prescription medicines, exposures involving these products fell significantly, by 60% to 85%. Potentially harmful exposures involving acetaminophen alone, however, continued to rise throughout the 24 years.

The pattern suggests that regulation successfully reduced liver injuries associated with combination products while acetaminophen by itself remains a major contributor to cases reported to poison centers.

Women had higher rates of acetaminophen-associated liver injury than men, and suspected suicide was the most common reason for exposure in both sexes.

“Liver injuries reported to poison centers has increased substantially over the past 25 years, with acetaminophen emerging as a growing contributor,” Holstege said. “Our study findings highlight the important role poison centers play in toxico-surveillance.”

Christopher Holstege, MD, led a UVA Health study that found calls to poison centers involving liver injuries caused by medications, supplements, alcohol and other substances jumped nearly 400% between 2000 and 2024. 

Credit: UVA Health



Alcohol and other exposures also increased

Alcohol ranked a distant second among the leading causes of reported liver injury. Cases involving alcohol occurred more often in men than women, although injuries increased among both sexes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The researchers also recorded rising numbers of liver injuries involving stimulants and street drugs, herbal and dietary supplements, and environmental toxins. These cases remained far less common than those linked to acetaminophen and alcohol.

“Medications should always be taken as directed by clinicians and per pharmaceutical label instructions,” Holstege said. “Care must also be taken in consuming emerging substances that are unregulated. More studies are warranted to determine if specific populations are more at risk of liver injury.”

The birth of modern Man

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Hidden Pulses Within Your Brain May Hold Your Thoughts Together

22 Aug. 2026, By E. Öz

https://www.sciencealert.com/hidden-pulses-within-your-brain-may-hold-your-thoughts-together

(True Creatives/Canva)

When you recognize a familiar face, your brain must connect that face with a name, a place, and perhaps a memory.

Those pieces of information are not necessarily handled in the same part of the brain. Yet they come together so smoothly that you experience them as a single thought.

Scientists may now have found one way the brain pulls off this trick.

A new study suggests that distant parts of the brain briefly fall into the same rhythm when we hold and retrieve information. During these fleeting moments, their cells become more likely to send signals together, potentially allowing separate pieces of a thought to be joined.

Published in Nature Neuroscience and led by medical scientist Ilya Verzhbinsky and neuroscientist Eric Halgren of the University of California San Diego, the new research examined brain recordings from 35 people being monitored for treatment-resistant epilepsy.

"'Firing together' may be the brain's basic currency for linking information."

– Medical scientist Ilya Verzhbinsky

These patients already had electrodes placed inside their brains for medical reasons. This gave the researchers a rare opportunity to listen to the electrical activity of individual brain cells while the participants completed a memory test.

They were shown either one or three images and asked to remember them for a few seconds. They then had to decide whether another image had been part of the original group.

Synchronized ripple oscillations may support communication between distant brain regions during working memory. 

(Ilya Verzhbinsky, created with assistance from Google Gemini)

The researchers were especially interested in extremely brief bursts of electrical activity called ripples.

"A ripple is a very brief burst of rhythmic oscillations in neuron excitability – roughly 90 cycles per second, lasting only about a tenth of a second," Verzhbinsky told ScienceAlert.

In simpler terms, a small group of brain cells suddenly becomes highly active and moves to the same fast beat. The entire event is over almost as soon as it begins.

Across 43 recording sessions, the researchers followed the activity of 1,373 brain cells. They discovered that ripples often appeared at the same time in two distant brain regions.

When that happened, cells in those regions were about 30 percent more likely to send signals together. In some parts of the task, the increase reached 49 percent.

This may help explain how information stored across the brain can be combined into one experience.

A face may be processed in one area, a name in another, and the place where you met that person somewhere else. The shared rhythm could briefly open a line of communication between those areas, allowing them to work as one team.

"That matters because 'firing together' may be the brain's basic currency for linking information," Verzhbinsky said.

The most surprising result was how far this coordination reached. The shared ripples linked areas separated by as much as 220 millimeters and even appeared across the brain's two halves.

Ordinarily, direct connections between brain regions become less common as the distance between them increases. If the ripples depended only on direct wiring, their coordination should have weakened over longer distances. It did not.

The results suggest this coordination may not require a single brain region acting as a conductor. Instead, the effect may resemble a crowd gradually beginning to clap to the same beat without anyone directing it.

The rhythm also became more prominent when the memory task grew harder. When participants remembered three images rather than one, coordinated signaling rose by about 13 percent while they held the images in mind and by 19 percent when they tried to recognize one.

Cells that sent signals together when an image was first seen were also more likely to repeat that pattern when the same image appeared again. Participants tended to recognize the image faster when this happened.

Previous research has connected similar ripples with the replay and storage of memories. One recent study covered by ScienceAlert found that even one exercise session could change memory-related ripples in the human brain.

The new findings suggest these brief rhythms may also help the brain keep a thought together while we are actively using it.

But the study does not prove that the ripples caused faster recognition. The researchers observed the signals but did not turn them on or off to see how memory changed.

All participants also had severe epilepsy, and the electrodes were positioned according to their medical needs. That meant only selected parts of their brains could be studied. The experiment tested just one type of memory task.

Verzhbinsky said it would be premature to consider these signals a target for treating conditions that affect memory or thinking. Researchers first need to find out whether the same activity occurs in healthy brains and whether disrupting it changes memory.

For now, the results offer a compelling possibility: A thought may feel whole because distant parts of the brain briefly find the same beat.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

This Natural Gut Compound Could Point to Better Treatments for IBD

By U. of Louisville, Aug. 20, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/this-natural-gut-compound-could-point-to-better-treatments-for-ibd/

Researchers have identified a diet–microbe signaling pathway that may protect damaged intestinal tissue. The discovery could help inspire more targeted approaches to inflammatory bowel disease. 

Credit: Shutterstock



What if your next meal could help your gut defend itself?

Your gut bacteria may be doing more than digesting dinner. They may also be making compounds that help repair the intestine when it is under attack.

Researchers at the University of Louisville have uncovered how urolithin A (UroA), a compound produced when certain gut microbes break down foods such as pomegranates, walnuts, and berries, helps protect the intestinal lining. The finding could point toward more precise treatments for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

IBD damages the gut’s protective barrier, allowing bacteria and other irritants to move into places they do not belong. That can fuel chronic inflammation, pain, and long-term complications. Many current treatments work by calming the immune system, but that broad approach can also weaken normal defenses. The new study suggests another possibility: activating the body’s own repair programs in the right cells.

The research, published in Nature Communications, focused on the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR), a protein that responds to signals from food, microbes, and the environment. AHR has a complicated reputation. Certain pollutants can activate it in harmful ways, but some dietary and microbial compounds appear to use the same receptor to support gut health.

Why the Same Pathway Can Help or Harm

The key, researchers found, is context. UroA activated AHR specifically in intestinal epithelial cells, the cells that form the gut’s protective surface. That targeted signal switched on the NLRP6 inflammasome, a cellular system often associated with inflammation.

But in this case, the inflammasome did not behave like a blunt inflammatory weapon. Instead, it helped release controlled levels of molecules involved in gut repair, mucus production, antimicrobial defense, and barrier strength.

A naturally occurring microbial metabolite from pomegranates, walnuts, and berries helps protect the gut barrier. 

Credit: University of Louisville



The result is a more nuanced view of inflammation. Some immune pathways can damage tissue when overactive or triggered in the wrong place. Under the right conditions, however, those same systems can help the intestine heal.

“This study shows, for the first time, how a natural microbial product works together with the body’s response to control complex molecular and cellular processes during intestinal injury,” the researchers reported.

Human Tissue Findings Point to New IBD Treatments

UroA is not simply found ready-made in pomegranates or walnuts. It is produced only after gut microbes transform plant compounds known as ellagitannins and ellagic acid. That means two people can eat similar foods but produce different amounts of UroA, depending on the microbes living in their intestines.

That detail makes the discovery especially interesting. It suggests future therapies may not be as simple as telling patients to eat more berries. Instead, researchers may need to understand which microbes, foods, or treatments help the body make or use UroA most effectively.

“The findings show that not all inflammatory pathways are harmful,” said Sweta Ghosh, previously a postdoctoral researcher in Jala’s laboratory and lead investigator on the study. “Under the right conditions and in the right cells, these pathways can play an essential role in maintaining gut health and supporting tissue repair.”

Toward More Targeted IBD Treatments

The team tested the mechanism in several systems, including cell studies, organoids, and intestinal tissue samples from patients with IBD. UroA activated the same protective pathway in human tissue, strengthening the case that the finding could be relevant beyond laboratory models.

The study was led by Venkatakrishna Rao Jala, associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and UofL’s Brown Cancer Center. Jala previously studied UroA’s beneficial effects in the gut, and the new work helps explain how the compound communicates with the immune system.

“This study helps us better understand how natural compounds produced through interactions between diet, gut microbes, and the body can influence disease processes,” Jala said. “By identifying this specific protective pathway, we may be able to develop more targeted therapeutic approaches that restore intestinal balance instead of broadly suppressing immune responses.”

The finding does not mean foods such as pomegranates, walnuts, and berries can treat IBD on their own. But it does show how diet, microbes, and immune signaling may intersect in ways that could be harnessed for future therapies. For a disease driven by a broken barrier, the most promising strategy may be helping the gut rebuild its own defenses.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/