October 3, 2024: A better way to search online, rethinking psychedelic therapy, and a beautiful fly brain. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | The 50 largest neurons of the fly brain connectome. Tyler Sloan and Amy Sterling for FlyWire, Princeton University, (Dorkenwald et al., Nature, 2024) | | | • Researchers have constructed a complete map of a single fruit fly brain. It's the most complete brain map of any organism. | 4 min read | | | • Many health care facilities along the path of Hurricane Helene had to be evacuated, and some remain closed even today, leaving a lack of care in the most vulnerable communities. | 7 min read | | | • This is the forgotten story of FDA medical examiner Frances Oldham Kelsey, who refused to approve thalidomide in the U.S. because of its danger to fetuses during pregnancy. | 34 min listen | | | If you, like me, look for things on the Internet dozens of times a day, there's a very good chance you use Google Search. It's ubiquitous, plays well with other Google products, and is often the default option on devices. (This is true for Apple phones because Google spent billions to make it so, as noted in the trial that concluded Google has a search monopoly.) But some information scientists, tech bloggers and users have noticed that the experience has gotten worse (complaints include the intrusion of AI-generated answers and spam results). So, for a story published this week, I wanted to see how well alternatives stack up against Google.
What the experts say: Other major search engines—Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.—provide results similar to Google's, at least for common searches with clear answers. In one 2022 study, Google's top 10 results for trending searches in the U.S. overlapped with its competitors by about 25 percent. "For the majority of queries, it really doesn't matter which search engines you use," study author Dirk Lewandowski, an information scientist at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany, told me.
Keep looking: The above study only examined popular searches. Lewandowski points out that if a question is obscure, there's a greater chance that different search engines will return different results. In those cases, he recommends that those with the time to dig a bit more should consider submitting the same question to multiple engines. It doesn't hurt to ask, and ask, and ask. --Ben Guarino, technology editor | | | Psychedelics, Without the Trip | Psychedelic trips have three components: the biochemical reactions that occur in the brain, the conscious awareness of the person taking the drug of any perceptual responses (hallucinations), and the setting and circumstances of the trip (the place, for example). Researchers are discovering that a psychedelic trip might still be therapeutic even without the hallucinations.
The evidence: Researchers administered a standard antidepressant dose of ketamine to people with diagnosed depression who were under general anesthesia for an unrelated surgery (e.g. knee replacement). Participants who signed up for the study knew they had a 50-50 chance of receiving the psychedelic while they were out. Remarkably, 60 percent of the participants experienced improvement in their mental health after the procedure even if they did NOT receive the ketamine.
What the experts say: "This was a very clear demonstration to me that nondrug factors, such as expectations and feelings of hope, contribute a substantial portion to the effects we've seen," says Boris D. Heifets, an associate professor of anesthesiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, who co-ran the study. "And you would be foolish to disregard those components in designing a therapy." | | | Just a Couple Ordinary Guys In the VP debate this week, both candidates played up their Midwestern roots to appeal to a broad audience, says Nicole Holliday, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. They both employed a classic Midwestern congeniality, often called "Minnesota nice," and repeatedly referred to their humble middle-American upbringing. Click here for more of Holliday's analysis on political speech patterns. | | | • Persistent stereotypes of autistic people portray them as solitary or non-social. Now a growing body of research concludes that many autistic people yearn for human connection and community at least as much as their neurotypical peers. An autistic researcher at the University of Kent says that intimacy is a two-way street and uses the term "double empathy problem" to refer to the impaired ability of many neurotypicals to accurately gauge the emotional states of people with autism. Dismantling these false notions matters urgently, writes the late Steve Silberman. | 4 min read | | | It's a wonderful time of year, when people all over the world can vote in the annual "Fat Bear Week" showdown, a single elimination tournament to elect the fattest and cutest of the brown bears in Katmai National Park in Alaska. Bears fatten up to survive their winter hibernations, during which time they lose hundreds of pounds and neither drink nor eat. It's a metabolic feat that scientists are still studying. | How are you liking this newsletter? Let me know by emailing: newsletters@sciam.com. Until tomorrow, fellow science lovers. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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