What the scientists are saying...
Statin side effects are “nocebos”
Around one in five people prescribed statins come off the potentially life-saving drugs after experiencing unpleasant side effects including fatigue, nausea and joint pain. But a new study has found that in many cases, these symptoms may be psychological. Researchers at Imperial College London recruited 60 people who’d stopped taking statins and persuaded them to start doing so again. They were given what they were told was a year’s supply – divided into eight bottles – and were asked to work through them, recording any side effects. However, only four of the bottles contained the real drugs; the pills in the others were placebos. It emerged that 90% of the symptoms the patients experienced occurred even when they were taking the placebo pills; and the patients who stopped taking the pills, citing intolerable side effects, were only slightly more likely to have done so when taking the statins than the placebos. The researchers attribute this to a “nocebo” effect – in which people experience negative effects because they have negative expectations – and said that if doctors warned patients about this phenomenon, it might occur less often.
A machine to sober you up
When you realise you have had too much to drink, it’s usually too late to do anything about it: sobering up again can take hours. But now, scientists have invented a machine that can greatly speed up that process. Users of the briefcase-sized device don a face mask that pumps out carbon dioxide while breathing deeply and rapidly, to expel more alcohol via their lungs. Usually, to hyperventilate in this way would risk them fainting, owing to the fall in CO in 2 their blood – but by replenishing it, the device prevents this. When researchers at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute tested it on a small group of intoxicated volunteers, they found their levels of blood alcohol fell three times faster than normal when they breathed through the mask. Dr Joseph Fisher, who led the research, said the machine could be used to treat life-threatening cases of alcohol poisoning. But he conceded that it could, in theory, have non-medical uses. “If you’re sitting in the bar and you’ve got a little pocket breathalyser and you’re over the limit, could you use this device to get under the limit? Yes, sure, of course.”
How sauropods got their necks
Sauropod dinosaurs – such as diplodocus and brontosaurus – are the biggest creatures ever to have roamed the Earth: they grew up to 60ft tall. Now the discovery of a previously unknown species has cast light on how the sauropod became such a colossus. The fossil fragments, discovered in the Cañadón Asfalto Basin in Patagonia, are from an animal that lived 179 million years ago, making it the earliest eusauropod, or “true sauropod”, yet found. It lived shortly after a period of violent volcanic activity known as the Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event. This led to runaway global warming, and dramatically depleted wildlife – but in the wake of it, forests of tall conifer trees grew up. The smaller sauropod groups that lived before this event would have been killed off. But analysis of the fossils indicate the eusauropod, which was taller and blessed with unusually robust teeth, was able to chew on the spiny leaves of these trees – and so these relative giants flourished and then grew bigger, possibly because they needed larger digestive systems to cope with their tough diet.
Don’t underestimate hash
Resin, or hash, is often thought of as the safer form of cannabis – and certainly less harmful than the powerful “skunk” strains of grass that have emerged in the past 20 years or so. But a new analysis suggests this perception is false, and that resin is generally the more potent of the two. Scientists at the University of Bath analysed data from more than 80,000 samples of street cannabis tested over the last 50 years, and found that during that period, the potency of resin has grown more than that of grass; and that now, in most cases, it is stronger than grass. The concentrations of THC [the main psychoactive ingredient] in herbal cannabis went up by 14% between 1970 and 2017, whereas those in resin rose by 24%. The cannabis people smoke today “differs enormously from the type of drug used by people 50 years ago”, warned Dr Tom Freeman, the study’s lead author.