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/

https://www.sciencealert.com/acupuncture-seems-to-rewire-the-brain-in-depression-scans-reveal

18 Aug. 2026, By D. Nield

https://www.sciencealert.com/acupuncture-seems-to-rewire-the-brain-in-depression-scans-reveal

The researchers found that acupuncture affected different parts of the brain to antidepressants. 

(Zhang et al., Medicine, 2026)

Acupuncture is a traditional and significant part of Chinese medicine that's been around for thousands of years, and continues to be used to ease the pain and discomfort that come with a wide variety of conditions, including fibromyalgia and osteoarthritis.

The practice has also shown potential for easing the symptoms of depression. What hasn't been clear, however, is why.

In a new study published in Medicine, researchers led by a team from the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine analyzed brain imaging data from seven previous clinical trials, involving a total of 357 participants with major depressive disorder.

When comparing the brain scans of people who had been given acupuncture treatments against those on antidepressants or those receiving a placebo version of acupuncture, the researchers found something interesting: acupuncture seemed to be rewiring specific brain regions.

(Catherine Falls Commercial/Moment/Getty Images)



"Acupuncture shows promise as an adjunctive therapy for depression, but its neurobiological mechanisms remain incompletely understood," write the researchers in their published paper.

"Our findings indicate that acupuncture-based interventions elicit a distinct pattern of neuroplastic remodeling, targeting key regions involved in emotion regulation and reward processing, which contrasts with the hippocampal–occipital effects of conventional treatments."

Patients who had been given acupuncture as a treatment showed increased activity in the right cingulum region (linked to emotional control) and the right caudate nucleus (part of the brain's reward system).

A related analysis linked more acupuncture sessions to greater change in the left amygdala region of the brain. This region is important in emotional processing, and the suggestion is that the needle treatment might be acting as an emotional brake of some kind.

The researchers found that acupuncture affected different parts of the brain to antidepressants. 

(Zhang et al., Medicine, 2026)



It was a different story for the patients on antidepressants. In these participants, the brain activity boosts were seen in the left hippocampus (involved with memory and stress regulation) and the right middle occipital gyrus (a visual processing area).

Compared to antidepressants alone, acupuncture was more effective at reducing depression and anxiety scores in the study volunteers – though it's worth pointing out that most acupuncture participants were taking antidepressant medication too.

"The correlation between neuroplastic changes in affective circuits and clinical improvement supports a potential mechanism for acupuncture's efficacy in alleviating core depressive symptoms such as anhedonia and emotional dysregulation," write the researchers.

We're still at the early stages in terms of understanding the mechanisms, but the results show that acupuncture can be effective at reducing the symptoms of depression – and it works through different neural pathways than conventional medications do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb0miieP2Bo

That's particularly significant for the sizable chunk of people with depression that don't respond to standard treatments. Acupuncture could be an alternative route.

"This pattern suggests that acupuncture may offer complementary mechanisms for patients who exhibit hippocampal nonresponsiveness or reward-circuit dysfunction – a common phenotype in treatment-resistant depression," write the researchers.

According to the World Health Organization, almost 6 in every 100 adults worldwide suffer from depression, and it seems to be brought on by a complex combination of factors, including genetics, environmental pressures, and physical health.

While we're making progress at finding ways to combat it, not everyone who has depression is able to get relief from it – and it's also thought to raise the risk of further health problems, including dementia.

The next steps here are to test the effects of acupuncture in larger, more diverse groups of people than this analysis was able to, and over a longer period of time. The different methods of acupuncture varied over the seven trials that were analyzed, which is something that could be standardized in future work.

It's also going to be important to study in more detail the chemical processes that are driving the neural rewiring. That will require more biological data than just brain scans, and should give researchers an idea of how the benefits of acupuncture could be boosted even further.

"Future work should integrate molecular biomarkers with longitudinal neuroimaging to unravel acupuncture's systems-level mechanisms and to advance personalized neuromodulation strategies for depression," write the researchers.

The Life of Earth

https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/

Scientists Revisited a Forest Experiment That Was Forgotten for 30 Years. What They Found Was Astounding

By K. Hammond, U. of Northern B C. & C. Nitschke, P. Baker, R. Trouve, U. of Melbourne, August 21, 2026

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-revisited-a-forest-experiment-that-was-forgotten-for-30-years-what-they-found-was-astounding/

An almost forgotten forestry experiment has revealed surprising clues about how mountain ash forests respond to different kinds of disturbance. 

Credit: Center for Forest Tree Technology

A decades-old experiment in Victoria’s mountain ash forests is challenging assumptions about the trade-offs between timber production and conservation.

Should a forest remain untouched, or should some trees be harvested to sustain nearby communities and economies? Australians have debated these competing approaches for decades, often treating conservation and timber production as mutually exclusive choices.

Research into a largely forgotten experiment in Victoria’s mountain ash forests suggests the answer is more complicated.

Clearfell logging, which removes every tree from a section of forest, has faced sustained criticism since the 1970s. Conservationists argued that the practice destroys habitat for rare wildlife and diminishes ecological value. Foresters countered that mountain ash forests naturally regenerate after catastrophic bushfires, making clearfelling a comparable disturbance.

The dispute became deeply polarized, but the central scientific questions persisted. Researchers still lacked clear evidence showing how clearfelling affected these forests over time and whether less intensive harvesting methods produced better outcomes.

Aerial views of the Tanjil Bren Silvicultural Systems Project. 

L: Small cleared patches varying in size (50-140 metres wide) and shape (square vs. rectangular) 

R: Heavy thinning. 

Credit: Center for Forest Tree Technology

A landmark experiment

During a major restructuring of Victoria’s timber industry in the mid 1980s, the state government invested the equivalent of A$26 million today to investigate alternatives to clearfelling. The project focused on silviculture, the science of establishing, growing, and managing forests.

Between 1987 and 1989, researchers established the Silvicultural Systems Project at Tanjil Bren in Victoria’s Central Highlands and Cabbage Tree Creek in East Gippsland.

The landmark experiment compared forest regeneration under a broad range of management approaches. Researchers tested conventional clearfells (250–350 meters wide), smaller patch clearfells (50–140 m wide), and heavy thinning that removed 50–70% of the trees. Large areas of unharvested forest remained untouched to provide benchmarks for comparison.

L: The Silvicultural Systems Project (SSP) sign at Tanjil Bren in the late 1980s. 

R: the sign rescued from the forest floor in 2025. 

Credit: Center for Forest Tree Technology/Tom Fairman



The forest at Tanjil Bren was dense mountain ash regrowth from the 1939 fires. Hundreds of survey plots were established and thousands of seedlings were monitored. By the early 2000s, the results were clear: mountain ash regenerated best on clearfell sites. Where tall canopy trees were retained or the cleared patches were small, common understory species such as acacia dominated.

The findings were published. The access road grew over. The project sign collapsed. The experiment was forgotten. The debates continued.

But the trees kept growing.

Thinning produced an unexpected outcome

In 2014, we visited the Tanjil Bren site as part of a University of Melbourne subject on silviculture in native forests. A colleague, Simon Murphy, had been involved in its establishment and suggested our students see the long-term outcomes of different silvicultural systems side-by-side. What we found was astounding.

The original results still held: 30 years later, the mountain ash in the large cleared patches and clearfelled areas was vigorous and abundant. But it was the heavily thinned parts of the forest that really caught our attention.

The trees left behind after thinning were enormous. While they were only 80 years old, the largest averaged well over a meter in diameter at chest height, and some were more than 1.5 m. Thinning had given these trees more space and resources to grow, and they had responded dramatically. The largest trees in the thinned stands were 20% bigger in diameter than those in the unharvested control areas.

A Leadbeater’s possum in one of the heavily thinned sites 33 years after the silvicultural treatment. 

Credit: Jeremy Johnson



More remarkable still: the thinned stands of trees had stored as much or more carbon in their wood than the unharvested control areas. In just 30 years, the heavily thinned forest had not only recovered all the carbon removed during harvesting, but had also gained enough additional carbon to equal the increase seen in the unharvested controls.

These findings have profound implications. Bigger trees are more resistant to fires, so when the next fire occurs, they are more likely to survive. Bigger trees are also more likely to form hollows – a critical and declining habitat for rare species such as the greater glider and Leadbeater’s possum.

The acacia trees that grew in most of the silvicultural treatments are also vital for Leadbeater’s possums, which use it to forage and move around the forest. Camera traps across the sites confirmed this: Leadbeater’s possums were found in every silvicultural treatment plot we surveyed – but none of the unharvested areas.

Forest management needs more than one answer

The Tanjil Bren SSP offers three important lessons.

First, long-term silvicultural experiments are irreplaceable. Australia’s forests contain many forgotten experiments that could transform our understanding of how forests respond to human intervention. But all too often, they end up neglected, unfunded, and forgotten. We should find them before it is too late.

Second, forest thinning is not a trade-off. Our findings show this for mountain ash, and other studies in North America have shown this for conifer forests. It can deliver wood for local industry, absorb carbon and improve habitat for wildlife. It is a win-win-win outcome that challenges the false dichotomy of conservation versus production that has dominated public debate for decades.

While thinning cannot (and should not) be done everywhere, it may be a useful tool to create more variety in tree ages and sizes, particularly in forests impacted by clearfelling or high-severity fire.

Third, and perhaps most importantly: there is no silvicultural silver bullet for managing forests. The long-forgotten experiment at Tanjil Bren has taught us that there are options available for managing our forests beyond clearfelling that can contribute to the societal demand for wood, maintain carbon stocks, and conserve biodiversity.

The Life of Earth

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