October 16, 2025—Which anti-inflammatory supplements are worth your time? Plus, a concerning cancer trend among women, and the government shutdown is hurting science.

—Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor

TODAY'S NEWS

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A mathematical principle called Parrondo's paradox explains how combining losses can lead to a win. It may aid scientific discovery in biology and cancer research. | 5 min read
The U.S. government shutdown is starting to pinch science: projects at several federal museums and laboratories have been suspended, public health workers have been fired, and funding cancelled to clean energy research. | 5 min read
OpenAI's recently-released Sora app may be the start of a new digital economy for deepfakes. | 3 min read
Wood burial, also called wood vaulting or biomass burial, could potentially store more than 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. | 5 min read

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Anti-Inflammatory Supplements

Supplements to fight inflammation are a booming business. These pills, capsules and powders are projected to become a $33-billion industry by 2027. Although thousands of products claim to "support immunity" or "reduce inflammation," most lack solid evidence. Scientific American reviewed dozens of studies and spoke with researchers to find out whether any supplements demonstrate anti-inflammatory activity not just in laboratory animals and cultured cells but in human trials. Just three compounds, it turns out, have good evidence of effectiveness: omega-3 fatty acids, curcumin and—in certain ailments—vitamin D.

What we looked at: Scientific studies vary in how they're designed and carried out. We looked for consistent results across several studies that scientists described as large and well designed. Ones that passed muster tended to focus on biomarkers that researchers use to track inflammation in the body. These include C-reactive protein (CRP), a molecule produced by the liver when inflammation is active, and cytokines, which are chemical messengers. For example, omega-3 fatty acids, which have the most compelling evidence behind them, come in two forms, and they signal the production of molecules in the body that block certain cytokines associated with inflammation.

What the experts say: Inflammation involves hundreds of different types of cells and many signaling pathways, says Prakash Nagarkatti, director of the National Institutes of Health Center of Research Excellence in Inflammatory and Autoimmune Diseases at the University of South Carolina. This complexity makes it difficult to prove that any supplement works consistently.

WATCH THIS

Jeffery DelViscio/Scientific American; Getty Images

A Concerning Trend

Lung cancer is the deadliest cancer among women in the United States, surpassing the mortality numbers of breast and ovarian cancer combined. And surprisingly, younger women who have never smoked are increasingly being diagnosed with the disease. What's going on? Science, Quickly host Rachel Feltman sat down with Jonathan Villena, a thoracic surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell, to try to get to the bottom of it. Watch the whole interview here.

EXPERT PERSPECTIVES

No federal agency in the U.S. fully oversees the clinical testing and chemical verification of supplements or nutraceuticals (pills and powders derived from foods that make various health claims), and these products are often plagued by quality and safety problems (and are associated with tens of thousands of ER visits a year). Congress should empower the Food and Drug Administration to start treating these products more like drugs, which undergo stringent testing and regulation, the editors of Scientific American wrote in 2023: "The FDA should be empowered to verify nutraceutical products by chemically confirming their ingredients, enforcing recalls and product bans, and maintaining a publicly searchable database of all supplement and nutraceutical health products with their associated ingredients and efficacy studies." | 3 min read

SCIENTISTS AT WORK

Andrea Varela

Conservation biologist Amy MacLeod runs a program called Iguanas from Above, which uses drones to study the population of marine iguanas (Amblyrhynchus cristatus) on the Galápagos Islands. Bolstered by 17,000 online volunteers, the project has now surveyed the whole archipelago, some parts of which were previously inaccessible. "I'm proud that the use of drones for wildlife survey is now a tool that other scientists can test in remote places around the world," she says. Nature | 3 min read

Content courtesy of Nature Briefing

You may be asking yourself why store shelves are filled with so many supplements in the form of pills, powders or tonics claiming to be anti-inflammatory or "detoxing" if they're not all effective at what they claim. Here in the U.S., supplements are largely self-regulated under loose post-market oversight, whereas in other places, like the European Union, dietary supplements face the same kind of scrutiny as food—ingredients and health claims must be proven safe and authorized before they hit the market. This means the responsibility for judging what's safe or effective often falls to the consumer—and, ideally, an informed doctor.

Thanks for reading. Send comments or feedback on this newsletter to: newsletters@sciam.com. See you tomorrow!

—Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor

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Friday, October 17, 2025

Today in Science: Which anti-inflammatory supplements actually work?