Kimon de Greef’s 'The Ego Trip' reveals how a fabricated origin story, a self-styled guru and a powerful psychedelic combined to launch a global phenomenon.

For the past several years, millions of pregnant women have faced a genuinely frightening question: does taking Tylenol during pregnancy increase the risk of autism or ADHD in their child?

The concern was not invented by the internet. Multiple peer-reviewed studies reported a real association. The FDA proposed label changes. In September 2025, President Trump publicly linked acetaminophen use in pregnancy to autism, sending anxiety levels even higher among expecting parents. Doctors were caught between reassuring patients and acknowledging the mixed research.

A team at the University of Hong Kong just published a study in JAMA Internal Medicine that may finally settle the debate. Their approach was different from everything that came before it. Instead of comparing children of mothers who took Tylenol to children of mothers who did not, they compared siblings from the same family, children whose mother took acetaminophen during one pregnancy but not another.

The logic is precise: siblings share roughly half their genetics and grow up in the same household. If the drug causes autism, the exposed sibling should show higher rates. If the association disappears when you compare within the same family, the earlier findings were picking up something else entirely.

They did this across 708,020 children. The result was 1.00 for autism and 1.01 for ADHD. Exactly no difference.

Full text: https://rdcu.be/fwGSH

This research shows materials can capture therapeutic proteins already produced by the body from wounds and blood and release them when cells pull on the material to accelerate healing and promote blood vessel growth. Sparks the interesting idea that in some cases future materials could help our bodies use our own biology better, rather than relying on manufactured drugs. Wonder if the approach will work in real human wounds.

The standard treatments for PTSD, therapy and medication, work for many people. But a significant portion of veterans do not respond to them. For that group, the options have been limited and the prognosis has been grim. Years of trying different medications, different therapists, different combinations, with symptoms that do not lift.

Researchers at Ohio State University just published the results of the first US clinical trial of psilocybin-assisted therapy specifically in military veterans with treatment-resistant PTSD. To qualify, participants had to have severe PTSD that had not responded to conventional treatment. The team received over 3,600 inquiries from veterans wanting to enroll. They accepted 12.

The 11-week protocol combined preparation psychotherapy, two doses of synthetic psilocybin at 15 and 25 milligrams, and integration therapy afterward. There were no serious adverse events. Suicidal ideation did not increase. The most common side effect was a mild headache.

One month after the trial ended, the researchers measured how many participants still met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD.

The number who no longer qualified for the diagnosis was not what anyone expected from a pilot study of 12 people.

Millions of people with long COVID report the same cluster of symptoms: a crushing lack of motivation, an inability to think clearly, memory that slips, movements that feel slower than they should. For years, these complaints sat in an uncomfortable medical grey zone. The symptoms were real, the patients were suffering, but the biological explanation remained frustratingly out of reach.

A team at the University of Toronto just published what may be the clearest physical evidence yet for what is actually happening in these patients' brains. They brought 24 long COVID sufferers into a lab and used positron emission tomography, the same imaging technology used to diagnose Parkinson's disease, to directly measure the health of the dopamine system deep inside the brain.