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literally me the rest of the night, just clicking every link like
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asteroid 4 vesta, photographed by dawn, 28th november 2011.
each gif flickers between two frames taken from slightly different perspectives, creating the illusion of depth. vesta turns fast enough that lighting changes visibly from one frame to the next.
image credit: nasa/jpl-caltech/ucla/mps/dlr/ida. animation: ageofdestruction.
first known picture of a surfer. Hawaii, 1890
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No link found between psychedelics and psychosis
Data from population surveys in the United States challenge public fears that psychedelic drugs such as LSD can lead to psychosis and other mental-health conditions and to increased risk of suicide, two studies have found.
In the first study, clinical psychologists Pål-Ørjan Johansen and Teri Suzanne Krebs, both at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, scoured data from the US National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), an annual random sample of the general population, and analysed answers from more than 135,000 people who took part in surveys from 2008 to 2011.
Of those, 14% described themselves as having used at any point in their lives any of the three ‘classic’ psychedelics: LSD, psilocybin (the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms) and mescaline (found in the peyote and San Pedro cacti). The researchers found that individuals in this group were not at increased risk of developing 11 indicators of mental-health problems such as schizophrenia, psychosis, depression, anxiety disorders and suicide attempts. Their paper appears in the March issue of the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
The findings are likely to raise eyebrows. Fears that psychedelics can lead to psychosis date to the 1960s, with widespread reports of “acid casualties” in the mainstream news. But Krebs says that because psychotic disorders are relatively prevalent, affecting about one in 50 people, correlations can often be mistaken for causations. “Psychedelics are psychologically intense, and many people will blame anything that happens for the rest of their lives on a psychedelic experience.”
The three substances Johansen and Krebs looked at all act through the brain’s serotonin 2A receptor. The authors did not include ketamine, PCP, MDMA, fly agaric mushrooms, DMT or other drugs that fall broadly into the category of hallucinogens, because they act on other receptors and have different modes of biochemical action. Ketamine and PCP, for example, act on the NMDA receptor and are both known to be addictive and to cause severe physical harms, such as damage to the bladder.
“Absolutely, people can become addicted to drugs like ketamine or PCP, and the effects can be very destructive. We restricted our study to the ‘classic psychedelics’ to clarify the findings,” says Johansen.
The ‘acid casualty’ myth
“This study assures us that there were not widespread ‘acid casualties’ in the 1960s,” says Charles Grob, a paediatric psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has long has advocated the therapeutic use of psychedelics, such as administering psilocybin to treat anxiety in terminal-stage cancer. But he has concerns about Krebs and Johansen’s overall conclusions, he says, because individual cases of adverse effects use can and do occur.
For example, people may develop hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD), a ‘trip’ that never seems to end, involving incessant distortions in the visual field, shimmering lights and coloured dots. “I’ve seen a number of people with these symptoms following a psychedelic experience, and it can be a very serious condition,” says Grob.
Krebs and Johansen, however, point to studies that have found symptoms of HPPD in people who have never used psychedelics.
The second of the new two studies, also published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, looked at 190,000 NSDUH respondents from 2008 to 2012. It also found that the classic psychedelics were not associated with adverse mental-health outcomes. In addition, it found that people who had used LSD and psilocybin had lower lifetime rates of suicidal thoughts and attempts.
“We are not claiming that no individuals have ever been harmed by psychedelics,” says author Matthew Johnson, an associate professor in the Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “Anecdotes about acid casualties can be very powerful — but these instances are rare,” he says. At the population level, he says, the data suggest that the harms of psychedelics “have been overstated”.
Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2015.16968
NYC Health in History: Smallpox Outbreak in 1947
On March 1st, 1947, Eugene Le Bar and his wife visited NYC after a 6-year stay in Mexico City. On March 5th, he was admitted to Bellevue Hospital but because of his rash was soon transferred to Willard Parker Hospital, a communicable disease hospital also in Manhattan. Diagnosed with a drug reaction, he died at the hospital a few days later. After two patients on the same floor as him were diagnosed with smallpox, an autopsy confirmed he died of smallpox. Le Bar’s hospital stay soon led to additional smallpox cases in Willard patients, and cases soon emerged at Bellevue hospital.
On April 4, 1947, these events led NYC Mayor William O’Dwyer to announce plans to vaccinate everybody in the city. Vaccination clinics were set up around the city at hospitals, health department clinics, police and fire stations, and schools. The city also set up 179 additional locations to be used for vaccinations that were open every day. Within days, long lines formed outside the clinics. In less than a month, more than 6,350,000 people were vaccinated against smallpox in NYC. Over 5,000,000 of those vaccinations took place in the first two weeks. By the end of the outbreak, a total of 12 patients were confirmed to have had smallpox.
Thanks the efforts of NYC, U.S. Public Health Service, community organizations, and local health providers, the outbreak was declared ended on April 24, 1947.
Find out more about the outbreak in an article written by then NYC Health Commissioner Israel Weinstein.
Learn more about NYC’s immunization requirements for children in daycare or schools and services offered at our walk-in immunization clinics.
On this day in 1981 the legendary anchor of CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite, signed off for the last time. Cronkite had been presenting the news for nineteen years and became known as ‘the most trusted man in America’. He is known for his departing catchphrase “And that’s the way it is”, followed by that day’s date. Cronkite reported on some pivotal moments of the twentieth century, including the Nuremberg trials, the moon landing, and the Watergate scandal. He also got involved in the politics of the day, and is known for his denunciation of the Vietnam War which led President Johnson to bitterly remark “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America”. Cronkite is also remembered as the anchor who broke the story of the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22nd 1963. After his retirement, Cronkite continued to be an active figure in the American media and as a political activist. He died in 2009 in New York City, aged 92.
"This is my last broadcast as the anchorman of The CBS Evening News; for me, it’s a moment for which I long have planned, but which, nevertheless, comes with some sadness. For almost two decades, after all, we’ve been meeting like this in the evenings, and I’ll miss that…And that’s the way it is: Friday, March 6, 1981. I’ll be away on assignment, and Dan Rather will be sitting in here for the next few years. Good night”
The first president of Zimbabwe was President Banana. Full name, Canaan Banana.
