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Psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms, has been cleared for regulated use in therapeutic settings in Australia.Credit: Moha El-Jaw/Getty
First country to prescribe psilocybin, MDMA
From tomorrow, Australia will become the first country to allow approved psychiatrists to prescribe MDMA (also known as ecstasy) and psilocybin (the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms) as medications. Australia’s drug regulator approved the change in February, following a nearly three-year review process. Some researchers in the field fear there is still insufficient evidence that the drugs are safe and effective. “It’s not for everybody. We need to work out who these people are that are going to have bad experiences, and not recommend it,” says psychiatrist Susan Rossell.
Affirmative action axed in the United States
The US supreme court has struck down race-conscious admissions to academic institutions. The decision was in response to two cases brought against universities by an organization that argued that race-based admissions discriminate against certain applicants, including Asian Americans. The ruling will mostly affect elite institutions with high tuition fees, and could alter not just the make-up of student bodies, but also that of academic staff — elite institutions supply most of the faculty members in the country. Institutions might seek alternative measures to promote diversity, such as ending legacy admissions and standardized testing, both of which favour white, wealthy applicants. But universities in states that have already banned race-based admissions have mostly failed at attempts to replace the benefits of affirmative action.
Who will get updated COVID vaccines
Now that COVID-19 is no longer defined as a global emergency, health officials have been rethinking who should receive a vaccine. A World Health Organization subgroup has recommended that high-risk groups, such as older adults and health-care workers, should continue to receive boosters, but not healthy younger adults and children. Some countries in Europe are restricting access to jabs to high-risk individuals. Others, including the United States and Japan, might offer jabs to just about everyone. Some scientists argue that broad vaccination campaigns can help to protect vulnerable people. Others say that it wastes resources and risks undermining influenza vaccinations, which are more beneficial to all age groups.
What you need to know about El Niño
The world is bracing for an El Niño weather event that could be particularly powerful, with worldwide consequences. In El Niño years, trade winds slacken above the tropical Pacific Ocean, leading to droughts in some places and increased rainfall in others. This can feed into complex public-health outcomes, such as food shortages and outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases. And, if severe enough, El Niño could help push global temperatures to record highs.
Dark-matter telescope poised for launch
Euclid, a European Space Agency telescope expected to launch tomorrow, is poised to start a new era in cosmology. By mapping ordinary, visible matter — as revealed by the 3D positions of 1.5 billion galaxies — Euclid will explore the distribution of dark matter, the scaffolding that constitutes the Universe’s structure on the largest scale. Its goal is also to decode the mystery of dark energy, the force that’s pushing cosmic expansion to accelerate.
Reader poll
Last week, we learnt that things don’t look great for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a collection of 17 interlinked objectives that aim to end poverty and achieve equality while protecting the environment. It’s likely that none of the goals and just 12% of the targets will be met by the 2030 deadline. In September, world leaders will gather in New York City to come up with a rescue plan.
When we asked readers how the SDGs meshed with their work, 62% — across scientists and non-scientists — said they considered the goals in their work. A significantly smaller proportion (36% across scientists and non-scientists) said they didn’t tend to think of them in the context of their work.
Considering the SDGs can come in many flavours: from measuring political discourse around the SDGs, helping companies to reduce their carbon footprints and taking direct action in local environmental initiatives, to researching soil erosion and improving microbial fuel cells.
Several people told us that, even if they are unable to support the SDGs with their professional activities, they find other ways to keep them in mind. “I try to contribute to them with my behaviour and choices in my everyday life,” says retired cell biologist Maria Grazia Lampugnani.
Some readers suggested that the goals’ focus on economic growth is at odds with sustainable resource use and people’s well-being. “The need for profit is simply too toxic for sustainability,” says environmental scientist José Milton Andriguetto-Filho. “The SDGs are what we have for the moment, but they serve only as a palliative measure.”
Features & opinion
A search tool for protein folds
The open-source search tool Foldseek helps scientists to uncover the function of unfamiliar proteins by finding known proteins with similar 3D shapes. Researchers usually look for proteins with similar amino-acid sequences — but proteins with similar shapes can have vastly different sequences. Foldseek searches databases such as AlphaFold 2 and RoseTTAFold for proteins that have similar shapes — and, presumably, similar functions. Because the software represents a protein’s shape as a string of letters, it has the sensitivity of slow, shape-based searches at the speed of sequence-based ones.
Futures: Memory Day report
A grandfather’s remembrances offer a glimpse of a possible past in the latest short story for Nature’s Futures series.
Podcast: Do octopuses dream?
Sleeping octopuses’ skin sometimes flashes with incredible patterns — the same patterns that are associated with camouflage, hunting or communication in awake animals. Octopuses are the first invertebrates to show signs of going through a similar two-stage sleep cycle as mammals, birds and reptiles. In humans, the active stage (called rapid eye movement sleep) is associated with vivid dreams. Sleeping octopuses’ skin patterns could be “the reactivation of the waking experience for something like memory consolidation or even something like dream”, neuroethologist Sam Reiter tells the Nature Podcast. It’s still not clear what two-stage sleep is for, but it seems to be important: Reiter suggests that it evolved independently in invertebrates and vertebrates.
Nature Podcast | 30 min listen
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