May 22, 20253 min readHow Much Ultraprocessed Food Do You Eat? Blood and Urine Record ItA new study suggests blood and urine samples could provide an objective measure of diets and help unravel their connections to diseaseBy Smriti Mallapaty & Nature magazine Diets rich in industrially manufactured food have been associated with several health conditions. monticelllo/Getty ImagesMolecules in urine and blood can reveal how much of a person’s diet comes from ultra-processed foods, according to a study published in PLOS Medicine today. The paper suggests that these measurements provide an objective way to track consumption of ultra-processed food — and would be useful for investigating links to diseases such as diabetes and cancer.Ultra-processed foods are industrially manufactured and often contain ingredients, such as additives and emulsifiers, that are not typically found in home-cooked food. From sweetened yogurts to factory-made bread and packaged snacks, “it’s a really wide range of foods”, says study co-author Erikka Loftfield, an epidemiologist at the US National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Maryland.Studies have linked high consumption of ultra-processed food to an increased risk of obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and some types of cancer. But these investigations have typically relied on asking individuals to remember what they have eaten, which can be unreliable.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Studies have also shown the potential of studying the products of metabolism excreted in the blood and urine, but only for a small number of such metabolites. Loftfield and her colleagues have now expanded that analysis to include more than 1,000 metabolites, which are produced when the body converts food into energy.“This work is important,” says Oliver Robinson, a molecular epidemiologist at Imperial College London. “There’s a lot of measurement error in traditional assessment methods for diet.”Diet scoringLoftfield and her colleagues studied samples collected from 718 healthy individuals aged 50–74 in 2012–13. The participants’ urine and blood samples had been collected twice, six months apart. The participants had also been asked — up to six times during the one-year study period — to record everything they had consumed the day before. Loftfield’s team labelled each food item, from the bun in a burger to the cheese slice, meat patty and ketchup, either ultra-processed or not.The researchers then used a machine-learning technique to give each participant a score for how much of their daily energy intake came from ultra-processed foods, says Loftfield. They found that, on average, ultra-processed food accounted for 50% of the participants’ energy intake, but the range varied between individuals — from 12% to 82%. Individuals who consumed the most ultra-processed foods generally got more of their energy from carbohydrates, added sugars and saturated fats — and less from proteins and fibre — than did those who consumed lower levels of ultra-processed foods.The researchers then analysed the participants’ blood and urine samples, looking for metabolites that were more common in the people whose diets contained lots of ultra-processed food.Samples from people with diets rich in ultra-processed foods were more likely to contain a metabolite linked to an increased risk of type-2 diabetes — and some of these people’s urine samples contained a molecule produced by certain food packaging. They also contained fewer metabolites derived from fresh fruits and vegetables.Randomized studyTo test whether the metabolite scoring could be used to predict the presence of a lot of ultra-processed food in a person’s diet, the researchers used data from a randomized controlled diet study of 20 individuals aged 18–50 conducted between 2018 and 2020. Half of the participants were asked to eat a diet rich in ultra-processed food for two weeks, then a diet containing no ultra-processed food for two weeks; the rest ate the same diets in the opposite order. Loftfield and her colleagues found they were able to distinguish between the two diets by looking at the metabolites in the participants’ urine and blood samples.Loftfield wants to test the method on populations with more varied diets, and on younger people, who tend to eat more ultra-processed foods. She hopes to use the tool to improve studies of the link between ultra-processed food and cancer.Robinson wonders whether the tool could be used to address big unanswered questions, including what it is about ultra-processed food that is bad for you. It is difficult to distinguish between the metabolic signatures of a diet rich in ultra-processed food and of one that is unhealthy because it is high in salt, sugar and saturated fats, he says.Understanding this difference could help companies to improve their products. “We’re sort of trapped in this industrial food-production system where we all eat ultra-processed food, and it’s quite hard for most people to go back to fresh food, because our food systems are now set up like this,” adds Robinson.This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on May 20, 2025.

Not providing enough practical experience in science classes will have a direct impact on whether children work in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) roles in the future, research suggests. EngineeringUK and The Royal Society’s Science education tracker asked hundreds of science teachers about delivering hands-on lessons and found there has been a decline in practical classes, with teachers highlighting many of the barriers standing in the way of being able to deliver this style of teaching. “We know the frequency of hands-on practical science has dropped,” said Becca Gooch, head of research at EngineeringUK. “Our Science Education Tracker research in partnership with the Royal Society highlighted this, as well as how critically vital practical science is as a motivating factor for learning science for years seven to nine. “Hands-on practicals help bring science to life for young people and boost interest in science, as well as developing important skills,” she added. “We need more young people, especially girls, choosing to continue with science and progress into engineering and technology careers. So, we need school students to have many more opportunities to get hands-on in their science lessons.” More than half of children in years seven to nine highlighted how important practical science lessons are for motivating them to learn more about the subject, especially for students who are less interested in the topic – if there are fewer practical science lessons, it actually serves to put people off of studying the subject later on in their education. With EngineeringUK and The Royal Society reporting that a diverse engineering and tech workforce in the future is directly linked to young people engaging in science and other STEM subjects, more needs to be done to maintain an interest in these subjects into further education and beyond. One of the reasons young people, and especially girls, don’t choose tech or other STEM careers is because they don’t fully understand what they involve or what the kinds of people working in those careers look like, so hands-on lessons can help in informing young people about what skills they may use in a future career. Female students are slightly more likely to engage with a subject when there is practical work involved than their male counterparts – practical elements of learning were a motivator for 54% of female students versus half of males – and having a good teacher is also more important to girls than boys. But hands-on science lessons have been on the decline over the past 10 years, with 44% of students across the UK taking part in practical work at least once every two weeks in 2016, dropping to 37% in 2019, and falling further to just over a quarter in 2023 – and now in many cases, practical demonstrations have been replaced with videos. Teachers pointed to a number of barriers in the way of delivering hands-on lessons, the biggest of which are what is required in the curriculum, and the time they have – with the amount of time it takes for teachers to develop practical sessions that relate directly to the learning goals laid out in the curriculum, teachers said in many cases they can’t feasibly work them into their teaching. Unfortunately, a child’s socio-economic background can stand between them and certain educational pathways, and the area a school is in can prevent access to certain funding and resources. What schools are able to provide can be varied depending on funding and area, and 26% of teachers said a lack of equipment stood in the way of offering more practical lessons. Some 27% said they don’t have the money to buy the equipment. Read more about STEM in schools Computer science has a persistent gender divide, but research by BCS has found more women are now being accepted on computing university courses. Speaking at the Bett Show this year, the UK’s education secretary outlined the ways in which teachers will be using technologies such as AI in the future, including planning lessons and marking work. Almost a quarter said they don’t have enough technicians with the skills available to facilitate hands-on science lessons, and almost 40% of teachers said vacancies in science departments have stopped students from receiving practical teaching. A small number of science teachers also expressed concerns about their ability to deliver practical sessions, with 3% saying they lack the training and 2% saying they lack the confidence to do so, a trend that has existed for some time. EngineeringUK and The Royal Society pointed out that practical science lessons are important for increasing student interest in STEM, fuelling the talent pipeline in the future, and gave a number of recommendations to help enable teachers to offer more hands-on lessons. The first was a call to government to take advantage of the current curriculum review to streamline it and allow science lessons to offer more practical lessons, as well as to make practical learning part of the curriculum to ensure all students are able to experience these kinds of lessons as part of their learning. Resources for schools was the third suggestion from EngineeringUK and The Royal Society. Going forward, schools need more investment to make sure they have the equipment, training and technical assistance needed to give students the opportunity for practical lessons.

22 May, 2025 The Type Tasting founder's new podcast shows how visuals intersect with our other senses. She tells Rob Alderson why she thinks this could help save graphic design. Sarah Hyndman has an experiment she has been running at events for several years. She asks people to sniff two bottles of perfume and then say what they smell in each. Both perfumes are identical – only the typography on the bottles is different. And yet 72% of participants, nearly three quarters, describe the perfumes differently. It’s a perfect example of the sorts of insights Hyndman has been sharing through her books, talks, and other projects for the past 12 years. Having worked as a graphic designer – “one of the original Mac monkeys” – and run her own agency, Hyndman started Type Tasting in 2013, inspired by Stefan Sagmeister’s regular client-free sabbaticals. She wanted to research type’s ability to influence our other senses, find evidence to back up her intuition, and bring this knowledge to a broad audience (which she does through Type Safaris, and wine-tasting events among others). Now in her new podcast, Seeing Senses, she is interviewing chefs, psychologists and perfumiers, “to discover how they connect what we see to what we sense and feel.” We sat down with her to find out why she thinks multi-sensory design might help save the industry. Sarah Hyndman’s podcast Seeing Senses How does your podcast build on Type Tasting’s work? From the outset, Type Tasting was always multi-sensory, but I was looking at typography because it was a niche area. Type was just the gateway into the other senses. So we start with what you see, vision. Vision is about what gets your attention – that’s what branding and packaging does. But in my opinion, what we’ve forgotten in design is the follow-through – that senses like smell and sound boost the mood more than vision. So you need to back up the experiences you are designing with all the other senses if you’re going to create an emotional connection, make something feel personal, and create memories. What does that mean for graphic designers and their work? I think graphic design, as a term, is too one-dimensional. The visuals are the flag for your brand, so you can recognise it really quickly. But what does it sound like? What does it smell like? What does it feel like? How does your experience of this product change from location, to moment, to experience? I think we need to rewrite our job descriptions, so that we start thinking in a multi-sensory way from the outset. Who cares if it wasn’t in the brief? We need to be the challengers, the rebels that are saying “No, I think you need to think about this differently.” If we keep doing what’s already been done, that’s what AI could do. Our job is to find the gaps, to be the mavericks, and to do the lateral and creative thinking which, at the moment, AI can’t do. That infamous Future of Jobs report, that said graphic design was at risk of becoming extinct, was a wake-up call. That report is based on what business leaders think will be important over the next five years. Why is graphic design not seen as a useful skill? And do we need to talk about what it does in a different way? Yes, absolutely. Leaders need to see designers doing something, or being something, different. It always used to be that clients loved visiting their agencies. Why aren’t businesses excited by designers any more? I think we need to show people something that makes them say, “Oh, we need that.” Rather than showing them something which will win them awards. Type Tasting activations at Adobe Max. Photo by Grant Terzakis. As someone now studying neuroscience, how do you see the relationship between science and creativity? I did science all the way through school. I’ve never studied graphic design, so nobody ever told me I wasn’t allowed to experiment. As designers, we’re given permission to come up with solutions that fit the brief, but we’re not somehow given permission to go out and experiment. And there is a big misconception that science is very rigid, and will take all of your creativity away. Whereas real research is about constantly interrogating every statement. Always asking why, like an annoying five-year-old. And that same curiosity is key to good design as well, right? Exactly. But as designers, I think we’ve lost a bit of bravery to do that. So my thing is – think more like a scientist. Science is about proving yourself wrong, and finding what’s right. The interesting stuff, when it comes to my experiments, are the really weird answers, the outliers. That’s where the magic is – when someone tells you something different, and you discover it’s because they grew up somewhere where that means something else, or they’ve had an experience where that means something else. A lot of your experiments seem to be very fun – is that an important part of designing them? If I want people to take part, I have to make them really understandable. I have to make them fun. And if I’m going to gather your data, I need to give you something – some insight or learning. I did a talk for 1,000 people in Germany not so long ago, where we gave them all pairs of jelly beans, and I played a load of different stimuli, to show how it changed what they tasted. I talked them through the science of what happens, so that everybody could feel for themselves how it worked. A Type Tasting event at London Design Festival. Photo by David Owens. Is there any tension between that sense of fun, that showmanship, and the scientific rigour you are clearly interested in? I like that I sit in the middle. I think as designers, we are basically showmen. Packaging, branding, everything that we do is about showmanship. It’s about catching attention, selling imagination, sensation transference. But then in spaces like FMCG, they have consumer neuroscientists, and everything is measured to an infinite degree. What’s your hope for the podcast, and the new books, you are working on? Hopefully they will help graphic design to keep changing, so this amazing profession can stay alive, but also evolve as it needs to. Type Tasting does wine tasting in London. Photo by David Owens. Design disciplines in this article What to read next

Humpback Whales Can’t See as Well as Scientists Thought, and It Might Explain Why They Keep Getting Tangled in Fishing Gear Despite having big eyes, the whales can’t make out details of objects more than a few body lengths away, according to a new study Humpback whales have poorer eyesight than previously thought, according to a new study. by wildestanimal via Getty Images With large, grapefruit-sized eyes, it would make sense if humpback whales had decently strong eyesight. So, why do these intelligent cetaceans continue to become entangled in fishing gear? Scientists have dissected the left eye of a juvenile humpback and revealed the species’ eyesight is weaker than biologists previously suspected. Their results, published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, carry implications for how humans can help humpback whales steer clear of fishing nets. When lead author Jacob Bolin, at the time studying marine biology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, cut open the specimen with his colleagues, they found that the white of the whale’s eye was particularly thick at the back. This made the humpback’s focal length—the distance between the eye’s lens and retina—shorter than expected, as Bolin tells bioGraphic’s Marina Wang. Longer focal length usually indicates sharper eyesight, so this was one sign that humpbacks may have poor vision. Another limitation they discovered involved the number of retinal ganglion cells, which are like “the pixels of the eye,” as Bolin says to the New York Times’ Elizabeth Anne Brown. These neurons are responsible for converting the image on the retina at the back of the eye into electrical signals for the brain. The dissection revealed that humpback whales have a surprisingly low density of these cells, especially compared to humans. The whale had, at most, 180 retinal ganglion cells per square millimeter; humans, meanwhile, have up to about 40,000 in the same area. The researchers also found that the humpback whale could see at 3.95 cycles per degree (CPD), a measure of vision determined by how many pairs of black and white lines an animal can make out in one degree of visual space. Humans have much higher visual acuity, between 60 to 100 CPD, per the paper. Researchers investigate a preserved humpback whale eyeball. Michael Spencer / UNCW The team processed these observations with computer models to simulate how humpback whales see their environment. Their visualizations demonstrated that while the animals can see large, faraway shapes, like schools of fish, they can only detect smaller details within about three to four body lengths of the whale, according to a University of North Carolina Wilmington statement. (That’s about 150 to 200 feet.) Overall, humpback whale eyesight is surprisingly less sharp than what scientists had suggested it might be, given the size of their eyeballs, per a Nature research highlight. That means humpback whales might not see fishing nets until it’s too late. Researchers measuring the dissected humpback whale eye.  Michael Spencer/UNCW “[A low CPD] is bad for a human, but not bad for a whale at all,” says Thomas Cronin, a visual ecologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who did not participate in the study, to bioGraphic. Whales don’t typically need sharp vision to catch their prey, he adds. In other words, if humans’ boats and nets didn’t get in their way, the whales could get along perfectly well. “This work helps fill a major gap in our understanding of the sensory ecology of large whales, how humpbacks experience their world,” Lori Schweikert, a co-author of the study and neurophysiologist at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, explains in the statement. Elena Vecino Cordero, a biologist at the University of the Basque Country in Spain who has previously analyzed whale eyes but didn’t participate in the study, tells the New York Times that the research might even be overestimating humpback whale eyesight because of how the dissected eye may have changed after spending more than a decade in a jar. Ultimately, the researchers suggest their work could help inspire fishing net designs that are more visible to humpback whales and potentially result in fewer entanglement incidents. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

In the peaceful countryside of Zayas de Báscones, Spain, a new winery by Fran Silvestre Arquitectos is quietly emerging. The Bodegas Dominio d’Echauz winery is designed to be more than just a site for making wine. Once finished, it will function as an archive, a research lab, and a sanctuary focused on preserving and studying rare grape varieties. This thoughtful approach blends modern architecture with a mission to protect local wine heritage, making the winery an important space for both production and conservation in the region. Designer: Fran Silvestre Arquitectos Unlike many wineries built for scale, this project takes a more modest, thoughtful approach. The planned curved white structure will follow the natural lines of the surrounding vineyards, making it feel like a seamless part of the landscape. Despite its understated appearance, the building stands out for its innovative use of materials and focus on sustainability. The winery will be built mainly from hempcrete blocks—a mix of hemp fibers, lime, and water—known for being both strong and environmentally friendly. These blocks will form two curved walls, adding both stability and a gentle visual appeal. A single-pitch metal roof will top the structure, while Diathonite, a cork-based insulating mortar, will coat the walls, floors, and ceilings to improve insulation throughout. These materials work together to create a unified, seamless look while delivering strong thermal performance. This helps keep the interior temperature stable, which is essential for wine aging and can reduce or even remove the need for mechanical cooling or heating. The winery’s minimalist white color scheme and natural finishes align with Fran Silvestre’s broader design philosophy. Here, these choices are both practical and beautiful. The white cork render reflects sunlight, helping the building stay cool during Castile’s hot summers. Its low profile keeps the structure discreet, blending it into the landscape. Despite its simplicity, the design leaves a lasting impression. Inside, the space is organized for efficiency. Grapes enter at one end, move through fermentation, and age in oak barrels before bottling. The layout also provides space for tasting, gatherings, research, and storage. These thoughtful design choices highlight the winery’s true mission. Rather than focusing on mass production, the space is dedicated to micro-vinification—small batches that explore the preservation and potential of rare grape varieties. Developed with Vitis Navarra, the project aims to protect grapes at risk of extinction, creating a living genetic archive rather than chasing high output. In the context of shifting climates and changing tastes, these lesser-known varietals could shape the future of winemaking. The first collection, called Basajaun after a Basque forest spirit, symbolizes the winery’s role as a quiet guardian of natural and cultural heritage. When finished, the winery will be more than just a place for wine; it will stand as a living archive of sustainability and stewardship. The post Spanish Winery Made From Hempcrete Blocks Is Setting A New Standard For Sustainability & Wine Heritage first appeared on Yanko Design.

May 21, 20256 min readSleep Plays an Important Role in Sustainable Weight LossA sleep medicine specialist explains how restless nights lead to consuming more calories and how you can use sleep as a tool for weight lossBy Tammy Worth solidcolours/Getty ImagesThis Nature Outlook is editorially independent, produced with financial support from Avadel.A healthy diet and regular exercise have long been staples of weight management. But research shows that the role of sleep, which helps to regulate appetite hormones and calorie intake, is just as important. Esra Tasali, a sleep specialist at University of Chicago Medicine in Illinois and director of the UChicago Sleep Center, spoke to Nature about why getting sufficient sleep could be crucial to weight loss and maintenance.How did you end up studying sleep and weight loss?On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.My sleep journey started about 25 years ago. I had completed my pulmonary training and decided to specialize in sleep medicine. I also trained in endocrinology, so it was natural for me to study the relationship between sleep and metabolic diseases, including obesity and diabetes.Would you say that sleep is as important for the body as it is for the brain?Absolutely! Sleep is inextricably linked to our biology and important for every cell in the body. Work at the University of Chicago has challenged the brain-centred view of sleep. As far back as 1999, we published a paper that showed that healthy young men who did not have obesity or diabetes, when sleep-deprived in a laboratory setting, show signs of prediabetes. And now we have the research to show that sleep is essential to regulating metabolism, appetite and hormones.Why does not getting enough sleep make us more susceptible to weight gain?Lack of sleep increases our drive to eat. There are two main reasons that this could happen. The first is that when we are sleep-deprived, our brain’s reward centres are more active and drive us to seek rewards. These include food, particularly high-calorie, unhealthy food. Our ability to inhibit the impulse to eat is diminished.The second mechanism driving increased calorie intake is elevations in appetite hormones. The most well-known is ghrelin, the ‘hunger hormone’, which is mainly secreted by the stomach. If you don’t sleep enough, levels of that hormone will be higher, and you will feel hungrier and consume more calories. Over the long term, this leads to weight gain. In 2022, we showed, in a real-world setting while people continued their daily activities in their home environment, that if you extend sleep by an average of 1.2 hours per night and monitor the energy intake among adults who are overweight, they decreased their intake by an average of 270 calories per day.How many hours of sleep should people aim for if they are trying to lose weight?In our study, we aimed for 8.5 hours of time in bed. So, a target of at least 8 hours in bed — and no less than 7 hours of sleep — would be a good start for an adult. But any increase in sleep time seems to help. Interestingly, we found an association between an increase in sleep duration and a decrease in calorie intake. Even an extra 30 minutes of sleep reduced the number of calories consumed.Many people would like to get more sleep, but have difficulty doing so. What kind of sleep intervention did you use in the study?We personalized the sleep-hygiene instructions — that is, we tailored them to each person’s schedule and specific needs. One strategy that worked for almost all participants was to insist that they put their electronic devices away at a certain time so that they wouldn’t hear those beeps and dings that draw them into social media, texting or e-mail.Does weight loss help sleep apnoea, in which a person’s breathing during sleep is interrupted?Yes — for people with sleep apnoea, a 10% reduction in body mass index reduces the apnoea’s severity by about one-third. And if you lose weight and improve your sleep apnoea, that might reduce your risk of type 2 diabetes, or make it less severe if you already have it. The fragmented, low-quality sleep associated with sleep apnoea, however, can compound the risk of obesity. So there’s a kind of a bidirectional interaction between excess weight and sleep apnoea.So, it’s not just the duration of sleep, but also sleep quality that plays a part in metabolism and diabetes risk?Yes, slow-wave sleep, often called deep sleep, is a key marker of sleep quality. This stage of sleep helps with memory consolidation, restoration at the cellular level and tissue repair, and the clearing out of metabolic waste products. It also has an important role in metabolism and hormonal release. For example, a major pulse of growth-hormone secretion occurs during slow-wave sleep.Our experimental work has shown that if you deprive healthy young adults of slow-wave sleep — to the levels seen in older adults, or in people with sleep apnoea — they show signs of prediabetes after just three days. This finding opened up an area of research that focused on the role of sleep quality in diabetes risk. And data emerging from large population studies suggest that adults who get sufficient slow-wave sleep have a lower future risk of developing diabetes. So finding ways to get enough slow-wave sleep seems to be important, particularly for younger people.Can wearable technology help people to get better sleep?Wearables have allowed people to become more aware of their sleep needs and patterns by helping them to monitor their sleep passively. But they don’t necessarily know what to do with this information they’re getting about their own sleep. What is missing are guided, personalized solutions to improve sleep for each individual. That is what we are working on in our new study. I think that, increasingly with wearables, people will start to see how their sleep is connected with other health parameters, such as heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen saturation. They might notice that improvement on those metrics correlate with better sleep, which can, in turn, lead to a change towards healthier sleep behaviours.How important do you think sleep is in the larger realm of weight-loss strategies?Getting enough sleep could really help to tackle the obesity epidemic. Its impact could be particularly great for younger people. We know that the obesity epidemic is even more pronounced than it used to be in children and young people. Teenagers are sleep-deprived for various reasons, including heavy use of electronics, social media, video gaming and, in some places, early school start times that work against teenagers’ natural circadian rhythms. To compensate for that sleep loss, they increase their food intake because they tend to be hungrier and reach for unhealthy foods, putting them on a high-risk trajectory for weight gain. So stopping that weight-gain spiral before it starts, at an early age, through healthier sleep habits, has enormous public-health implications for prevention or reversal of obesity.New weight-loss drugs, known as GLP-1 agonists, are effective against obesity. Is it still important to emphasize the importance of sleep in maintaining a healthy weight?Despite the increasing interest in the positive effects of GLP-1 agonists, there is still a lot of uncertainty about their long-term biological effects and how they will ultimately change people’s eating habits and lifestyle behaviours. They make you feel less hungry, but they also come with side effects and they’re quite expensive. Plus, when you stop these drugs, you rapidly regain weight. Sufficient sleep can also make you feel less hungry and help you to eat healthier foods; and the good news is that sleep is free, has no side effects, and has many other benefits to overall health and well-being.More than one-third of US adults are not getting enough sleep on a regular basis, which strongly increases their risk of chronic conditions, including obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Lack of sleep is estimated to cost the US economy close to half a trillion dollars per year. So I strongly believe that educating the public about the importance of adequate sleep in maintaining a healthy weight is crucial to preventing obesity and curbing the epidemic of chronic disease.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

May 21, 202510 min readSleep Better with New Drugs, Select Cannabinoids and Wearable DevicesDrugs that target wakefulness, molecules in cannabis and wearable devices that modulate brain activity could help people with insomniaBy Rachel Nuwer carlofranco/Getty ImagesThis Nature Outlook is editorially independent, produced with financial support from Avadel.Miranda cannot remember a time in her life when she did not have insomnia. The 23 year old, who asked for her last name to be withheld, started struggling with sleep when she was a child. As she’s grown older, it’s only become worse. She takes “a myriad of medications” each night, she says, but usually still cannot fall asleep until the early hours of the morning. “I can’t get up and be functional until halfway through the day,” she says. She had to drop out of university because she couldn’t attend classes, and she can’t hold down a job. Her insomnia exacerbates other medical conditions as well, including migraines and the pain condition fibromyalgia. “It’s hugely debilitating,” she says. “It affects everything.”In the United States, about 12% of adults have been diagnosed with chronic insomnia — when a person struggles to sleep for more than three nights each week for at least three months, and experiences daytime distress as a result. Research suggests that the worldwide figure is 10–30%. It also often co-occurs with and creates a vicious cycle with other conditions, including chronic pain, depression and anxiety.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Fortunately for Miranda and millions of others with chronic insomnia, new treatments are arriving. The emergence of a class of pharmaceuticals that induces sleep through a different brain pathway from existing drugs is a welcome development, and molecules in cannabis and specialized medical devices to promote sleep are also showing potential as sleep aids. Soon, those struggling with sleep could have a range of new options available to help.Imperfect solutionsCognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) is usually the recommended first treatment. This specialized talking therapy focuses on establishing healthy sleep behaviours and addressing thoughts that can interfere with sleep. But CBT-I is not covered by all health-care insurance plans in the United States. In the United Kingdom and parts of Europe, public health-care systems usually provide it, but waiting times can be long. This is because, around the world, there is a limited availability of therapists, says Andrew Krystal, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco. “We keep hiring new people, but almost immediately their schedules are completely filled and the wait list is a year.”CBT-I also doesn’t work for everyone. Miranda has tried it and has received conventional talking therapy for over a decade, with limited success. “It only helps so much,” she says.Pharmacological interventions are the next line of defence, Krystal says. Benzodiazepines and a class of medicines called Z-drugs, which include zolpidem (Ambien), are among the most prescribed insomnia medications. These sedative hypnotics enhance the effects of the neurotransmitter GABA, thereby dampening brain activity. They also reduce anxiety. But they can create a hangover effect and increase the risk of falls in older people. These drugs also have the potential for misuse and can cause dependence. Some studies have even found an association between long-term use of Z-drugs and benzodiazepines and an increased risk of death.Miranda tried Ambien, but says that she quickly became chemically dependent. She eventually weaned herself off it and switched to benzodiazepines, but she began developing a tolerance to them, too — she once wound up in hospital with withdrawal symptoms after she tried to cut back on her dosage. “They’re horrible drugs to be on,” she says. But she cannot fall asleep without them. Each night, she now takes two benzodiazepines, as well as gabapentin, an anticonvulsant medication that is sometimes given off-label for insomnia.Physicians frequently provide other off-label prescriptions for insomnia, including trazodone, which is approved for depression. Over-the-counter products such as antihistamines are also used for sleeplessness. None are ideal, however, because they have not been evaluated as sleep aids, says Emmanuel Mignot, a sleep-medicine researcher at Stanford University in California.Miranda has experience with many of these products. When she first developed chronic insomnia as a child, her paediatrician recommended melatonin, which is available without a prescription in the United States. It helped her fall asleep, but it did not keep her asleep. During her teenage years, different neurologists prescribed off-label antidepressants and other mood medications, including trazodone and mirtazapine. But they came with what she calls “torturous” side effects: she felt constantly anxious and exhausted during the day, and her memory became “incredibly foggy”.Blocking wakefulnessMignot was studying narcolepsy, a chronic disorder that affects sleep–wake cycles and causes people to fall asleep suddenly, when he inadvertently helped to pave the way towards the latest means of treating insomnia. He discovered that dogs with narcolepsy have a genetic mutation that affects one of two receptors used by the neurotransmitter orexin, the primary role of which was initially thought to be the regulation of appetite. Mignot then found that people with narcolepsy lack orexin, confirming the chemical’s main job: promoting wakefulness. If drugs could be developed to prevent orexin from binding to its receptors, Mignot thought, then people with insomnia would become “narcoleptic for one night”.In 2007, researchers at the pharmaceutical firm Actelion (part of which is now Idorsia Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland) showed that blocking orexin’s two receptors induced sleep in rats, dogs and people. In 2014, the biopharmaceutical company Merck, received US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for the first dual orexin receptor antagonist (DORA) drug, suvorexant (Belsomra). In 2019, another DORA drug — lemborexant (Dayvigo) — was approved, followed, in 2022, by daridorexant (Quviviq).Compared with benzodiazepines and Z-drugs, which inhibit activity all over the brain, DORA drugs affect only the neurons activated by orexins (see ‘Blocking wakefulness’). “The beauty of it is it does nothing but block the stimulation of wakefulness,” says neurologist Joe Herring, who heads neuroscience clinical research at Merck in Rahway, New Jersey. “It’s a physiologically better way to promote sleep.”Alisdair Macdonald/NatureDaridorexant is the only DORA drug for which data are available about daytime functioning, says Antonio Olivieri, chief medical officer at Idorsia, which produces daridorexant. In clinical trials, Idorsia showed that, compared with those given a placebo, people who received daridorexant experienced significant improvements in daytime insomnia symptoms the following day. Data reported in the approvals database of the FDA also indicate that daridorexant has the lowest fatigue and drowsiness scores of the three DORA drugs, possibly because it leaves the body the quickest.So far, there have been no one-to-one comparisons of DORA drugs. “Ideally, you’d have direct evidence of how those drugs compare to each other,” says Daniel Buysse, a sleep scientist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pennsylvania. “But we rarely have such evidence, so instead, we have to rely on statistical techniques that allow you to make indirect comparisons.” It’s also difficult to say definitively how DORA drugs compare with older treatments for insomnia, but Buysse says that drug registration trials suggest that DORA drugs have fewer adverse cognitive or hangover effects compared with benzodiazepines and Z-drugs, as well as less potential for dependence and misuse. The European Insomnia Guideline 2023 placed daridorexant as the next recommended insomnia treatment after CBT-I.The main drawback to DORA drugs, Buysse says, is not medical but financial: their high cost keeps them out of reach of many people who could benefit from them. “There are many patients I would like to prescribe these drugs for, but I know in order for them to get one of these medications we’ll have to go through trials of several other drugs before the request will be considered,” Buysse says. DORA drugs are also available only in a few countries, so far.Given her long history of insomnia, Miranda was given a prescription for suvorexant. Her psychiatrist recommended the drug to her about a year ago. “I was really sceptical that an anti-wakefulness drug would be any different to a pro-sleep drug,” she says. But she quickly felt the difference, and has now come to see the drug as “a saviour”. Without the drug, she says, “I’d probably be on a much higher benzodiazepine dose than I am.” She hopes her suvorexant dose can continue to increase, so that some of her other medications can be reduced.Expanding availabilityOther drugs that target the orexin system are in the clinical pipeline. Seltorexant, for example, is being developed by the US pharmaceutical firm Johnson & Johnson for people with both major depressive disorder and insomnia. Around 70% of people with depression have insomnia, so having a medication that treats both of those disorders “has the potential to fill an important gap”, says Krystal, who has consulted for Johnson & Johnson on the drug. In a phase III trial, participants who took the drug experienced meaningful improvement in both sleep and depressive symptoms, with an antidepressant effect that seemed to be independent of the participants getting better sleep. Seltorexant might have an antidepressant effect because it is designed to block only one of the two types of orexin receptor, Krystal adds, whereas other DORA drugs block both receptor types.Investigations of already-approved DORA drugs are also expanding into other populations. Merck has sponsored investigator-led studies of suvorexant in people with insomnia as well as depression or substance-use disorders, and Idorsia is sponsoring studies of daridorexant’s safety and efficacy in sub-groups of people who have insomnia and other conditions.In 2020, suvorexant became the first medication to be approved for treating sleep disorders in people with Alzheimer’s disease. Insomnia is often a precursor to and co-morbid with Alzheimer’s, and the disease seems to manifest differently in people with the condition. In one study comparing older people with insomnia with those with both insomnia and Alzheimer’s, people with both conditions had a number of extra changes to their sleep patterns, including less time spent in deep sleep — sometimes called slow-wave sleep because that describes the pattern of the brain’s electrical activity during these intervals. Sleep problems in people with Alzheimer’s also seem to have a causal role in increasing levels of toxic substances in the brains of those individuals. Preliminary data suggest that suvorexant could also help to reduce toxic brain proteins. The results of a follow-up study testing that finding are expected in 2026.In the weedsSleeplessness is already among the most common conditions for the medicinal use of the drug cannabis. Miranda, for example, supplements her nightly pharmaceutical regimen with a cannabis tincture that contains a few of the plant’s 100-plus cannabinoids (she lives in a state where cannabis use is legal). “It’s definitely a key player in my sleep-medication arsenal,” she says.Yet, scientifically, little is known about which cannabinoids — if any — promote sleep, and what a safe and effective dose is. “Tens of millions of people around the world are probably using cannabinoids for insomnia, but we have very little good-quality evidence to support that,” says Iain McGregor, director of the Lambert Initiative for Cannabinoid Therapeutics at the University of Sydney in Australia.McGregor is investigating cannabinol (CBN), a molecule that develops in cannabis as the psychoactive component tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) oxidizes. His group reported that CBN increased sleep in rats to a similar degree as zolpidem, but without the drug’s known negative side effect of suppressing rapid-eye-movement sleep. Unpublished data of a single-night trial with 20 people with insomnia disorder show that people fell asleep 7 minutes faster after taking 300 milligrams of CBN compared with those taking a placebo; participants also reported subjective improvements in sleep and mood. Although 7 minutes “doesn’t sound like a lot”, it is on a par with what benzodiazepines and Z-drugs typically accomplish, says Camilla Hoyos, a sleep researcher at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, who led the work. McGregor, Hoyos and their colleagues are aiming to follow up the work with a large, community-based trial in which people with insomnia take either CBN or a placebo for six weeks at home.As for cannabidiol (CBD) and THC — the most well-known cannabinoids — the prospects for efficacy against insomnia are doubtful, at least for the doses used in trials so far. Several small studies have failed to find a sleep benefit from taking CBD. In one experiment, researchers observed that participants in a study who received 10 milligrams of THC and 200 milligrams of CBD actually slept for 25 minutes less compared with when they received a placebo. Several other company-sponsored trials of low-dose CBD for insomnia were not published, McGregor adds, because they found no significant improvement. “It’s been one failure after the next,” he says.Insomnia’s new frontiersThe search for more effective insomnia treatments continues in other realms, as well. Some research groups are experimenting with different receptors that they hope could lead to new classes of drugs. Gabriella Gobbi, a clinical psychiatrist and research neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, for example, has homed in on one of the brain’s two melatonin receptors, MT2. “We want to find an alternative mechanism without any addiction liability and with fewer side effects, especially for use in children and elderly people,” she says. A molecule that the team developed that binds to MT2 increased the time that rats spent in deep sleep by 30%. Gobbi aims to launch clinical trials in the next two to three years.A few companies and health systems, including the US Department of Veterans Affairs and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, have also created or are developing digital platforms for delivering CBT-I. These apps take users through regimens that are tailored to their symptoms. SleepioRx, for example, is a 90-day digital programme that has been evaluated in more than two dozen clinical trials and has showed efficacy as high as 76%. This includes helping people to fall asleep faster, sleep better throughout the night and feel better the next day. In August 2024, the programme, developed by Big Health in San Francisco, California, received FDA clearance. A 2024 meta-analysis of 15 studies that compare in-person and electronically delivered CBT-I concluded that the two approaches were equally effective.Uptake among physicians has been slow so far, Krystal says. But once practitioners catch on, he adds, “I can imagine a world where you have digital care as your first stop, and if that’s not successful, you see a therapist.”Some studies suggest that insomnia can stem from a high level of underlying brain activity during sleep. This raises the question of whether reducing this activity could treat insomnia, says Ruth Benca, a psychiatrist at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina. Companies and academic research groups are beginning to test this proposition with wearable devices that use auditory tones or mild electrical stimulation to increase slow-wave activity in the brain. Some devices are already on the market, and evidence suggests that they can increase the duration of deep sleep. Last June, for example, researchers at Elemind Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, confirmed that auditory stimuli delivered in sync with specific brain-wave rhythms generated in a headband allowed people who usually struggle for more than 30 minutes to fall asleep to shave an average of 10.5 minutes off that time.In the coming years, according to Benca, researchers hope to learn enough about insomnia’s causes and treatments to be able to recommend personalized therapies based on an individual’s specific demographics, genetics and co-morbidities. These are the frontiers people are working at, she says.Even after a lifetime of struggling to find safe and effective help, Miranda says that she still holds out hope that better treatments for insomnia are on the horizon. “I can’t be on these medications forever,” she says. “They’re going to take years off my life.”

not enough Paris Agreement target won’t protect polar ice sheets, scientists warn Calls for a more ambitious climate goal are rising as Earth hits several tipping points. Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News – May 21, 2025 11:35 am | 21 A slurry mix of sand and seawater is pumped via barge onto the main public beach during a sand replenishment project along eroding shoreline on November 21, 2024, in San Clemente, California. Credit: Mario Tama / Getty Images A slurry mix of sand and seawater is pumped via barge onto the main public beach during a sand replenishment project along eroding shoreline on November 21, 2024, in San Clemente, California. Credit: Mario Tama / Getty Images Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here. Sea levels in some parts of the world could be rising by as much as 8 to 12 inches per decade within the lifetime of today’s youngest generations, outpacing the ability of many coastal communities to adapt, scientists warned in a new study published this week. The research by an international team of sea level and polar ice experts suggests that limiting warming to 2.7° Fahrenheit (1.5° Celsius) above the pre-industrial temperature—the Paris Climate Agreement’s target—isn’t low enough to prevent a worst-case meltdown of Earth’s polar ice sheets. A better target for maintaining a safe climate, at least for the long term, might be closer to 1.8° Fahrenheit, said Durham University geographer and glacier expert Chris Stokes, a co-author of the new paper. “There have been a couple of quite high-profile papers recently, including a synthesis in Nature looking at safe planetary boundaries,” he said. “They made the argument that 1° Celsius is a better goal. And a couple of other papers have come out suggesting that we need a stricter temperature limit or a long-term goal. And I think the evidence is building towards that.” It’s not a new argument, he said, noting that climate research predating the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 1990 already highlighted the high risks of more than 1° C of warming. “Those studies were saying, ‘We’re warming. We really don’t want to go past 1°. We really don’t want to exceed 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide,’” he said. “Because we know what could happen looking at past warm periods and at simple calculations of ice sheet mass balance. And, you know, 30 years later, 40 years later, here we are seeing the problem.” Scientific calls for a more ambitious long-term climate goal are rising just as Earth’s average global temperature has breached the Paris Agreement target of 1.5° C of warming over the pre-industrial level nearly every consecutive month for the past two years. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has reached a concentration of 430 ppm, a 50 percent increase over pre-industrial levels. But missing those goals doesn’t diminish the importance of potentially revising the target, for which the Paris Agreement includes a review mechanism, Stokes said. Even if the global temperature overshoots the 1.5° mark, it’s important to know for the long term how much it would have to be lowered to return to a safe climate range. The new study focused on how melting polar ice masses drives sea level rise by combining evidence from past warm periods that were similar to the present, measurements of how much ice is being lost under the present level of warming, and projections of how much ice would be lost at different warming levels over the next few centuries. Sea level rise of several inches per decade would likely overwhelm adaptation efforts by many coastal communities in the US, said co-author Andrea Dutton, a geoscientist and sea level expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Coastal communities that are adapting to and preparing for future sea level rise are largely adapting to the amount of sea level rise that has already occurred,” she said. In a best-case scenario, she added, they are preparing for sea level rise at the current rate of a few millimeters per year, while the research suggests that rate will double within decades. The last time atmospheric carbon dioxide was at a concentration similar to now was in the mid-Pliocene warm period, just over 3 million years ago, when average global sea level rose 35 to 70 feet higher than today over the course of thousands of years. But the current rate of warming is far faster than any other time identified in the geological record. How the ice sheets will respond to warming at that speed is not clear, but nearly every new study in the past few decades has shown changes in the Arctic happening faster than expected. The United States’ ability to prepare for sea level rise is also profoundly threatened by the cuts to federal science agencies and staffing, Dutton said. The current cuts to science research, the retraction of funds already promised to communities through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the abandonment of the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, and changes to federal rules on air pollution “collectively threaten our ability to project future sea level rise, to prepare our communities, and to mitigate climate change and stem the rate at which sea-level is rising,” she said via email. Many researchers are working closely with coastal communities, but as federal grants continue to get cut, these collaborations will founder, she added. “The ice sheets won’t care what different political parties ‘believe’ about climate change,” she said. “Like it or not, they are simply at the mercy of rising temperatures.” The mass of ice lost from the polar ice sheets has quadrupled since the 1990s, and they are currently losing around 370 billion metric tons of ice per year, said co-author Jonathan Bamber, a physicist at the University of Bristol who focuses on studying how Earth’s frozen regions interact with the rest of the climate system. “We switched on some new technology 30 years ago, and we discovered that the ice sheets are responding with a large amplitude and rather rapidly,” he said. The extent of the changes to the ice sheet are much greater than models had ever suggested they would be, he noted. “That was a bit of a shock for the whole community.” Most of the climate models of the past three decades projected only about half as much melting as has actually been observed during that time, he said. That suggests the “safe operating zone for humanity is about 350 ppm” of atmospheric carbon dioxide, corresponding to about 1° C of warming. “I think we’ve known for a long time that we’re interfering with the climate system in a very dangerous way,” he said. “And one of the points of our paper is to demonstrate that one part of the climate system, the ice sheets, are showing some very disturbing signals right now.” Some of the most vulnerable places are far from any melting ice sheets, including Belize City, home to about 65,000 people, where just 3 feet of sea level rise would swamp 500 square miles of land. In some low-lying tropical regions around the equator, sea level is rising three times as fast as the global average. That’s because the water is expanding as it warms, and as the ice sheets melt, their gravitational pull is reduced, allowing more water to flow away from the poles toward the equator. “At low latitudes, it goes up more than the average,” Bamber said. “It’s bad news for places like Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, and the Nile Delta.” Global policymakers need to be more aware of the effects of a 1.5° C temperature increase, Ambassador Carlos Fuller, long-time climate negotiator for Belize, said of the new study. Belize already moved its capital inland, but its largest city will be inundated at just 1 meter of sea-level rise, he said. “Findings such as these only sharpen the need to remain within the 1.5° Paris Agreement limit, or as close as possible, so we can return to lower temperatures and protect our coastal cities,” Fuller said. While the new study is focused on ice sheets, Durham University’s Stokes notes that recent research shows other parts of the Earth system are already at, or very near, tipping points that are irreversible on a timescale relevant to human civilizations. That includes changes to freshwater systems and ocean acidification. “I think somebody used the analogy that it’s like you’re wandering around in a dark room,” he said. “You know there’s a monster there, but you don’t know when you’re going to encounter it. It’s a little bit like that with these tipping points. We don’t know exactly where they are. We may have even crossed them, and we do know that we will hit them if we keep warming.” Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News 21 Comments

“Woodrush, Viola, Golden Saxifrage, Field Horsetail, Marsh Marigold, Lesser Celandine, Sedge (Frylet, Violen, Gullpudran, Åkerfräknet, Kabelöken, Svalörten, Starrgräset)” from the portfolio ‘Dornach Nature Studies’ (1919), watercolor, pencil, and ink on paper from a portfolio of 46 drawings, sheet: 19 5/8 × 10 9/16 inches. All images courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, shared with permission A Unique Portfolio of Hilma af Klint’s Botanical Drawings Communes with Nature’s Spiritual Side May 21, 2025 Kate Mothes With the Industrial Revolution in full swing at the turn of the 20th century, jobs and opportunities attracted people to burgeoning cities. New technologies were being developed at breakneck speed and discoveries within the natural sciences introduced people to invisible yet potent concepts like radio waves and X-rays. During this period of social transformation, philosophical or occult religious movements like Spiritualism and Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy offered ways to not only connect within a like-minded community but to explore the afterlife—the so-called spirit world—and the very fabric of the universe. “Sunflower (Solrosen)” from the portfolio ‘Dornach Nature Studies’ (1919), watercolor, pencil, ink, and metallic paint on paper from a portfolio of 46 drawings, sheet: 19 3/4 × 10 9/16 inches For Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), like many who sought refuge and inspiration in these belief systems, a spiritual link to her surroundings united her with the natural world during “a period of massive change…as people from all levels of society were searching for something new to hold on to,” Johan af Klint and Hedvig Ersman wrote about the Swedish artist’s spiritual journey. Now on view at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers highlights the institution’s recent acquisition of a phenomenal, 46-leaf portfolio called Nature Studies. During the spring and summer of 1919 and 1920, af Klint recorded Sweden’s seasonal flora, from lilies of the valley and sunflowers to violets and cherry blossoms. Beyond traditional botanical studies, the artist incorporates her characteristic abstractions and diagrams, surrounding each rendering with esoteric annotations and geometries. “One has to think of the realm of the nature spirits as the realm of thought; these entities hover around us, some like driving winds, others like soft summer breezes,” af Klint once said. “Lily of The Valley, Water Avens, Common Milkwort (Liljekonvaljen, Fårkummern, Jungfrulinet)” from the portfolio ‘Dornach Nature Studies’ (1919), watercolor, pencil, ink, and metallic paint on paper from a portfolio of 46 drawings, sheet: 19 5/8 × 10 5/8 inches Grids with unique color relationships or energetic spirals accompany renderings of field woodrush or marsh marigold, and tree specimens are paired with dotted checkerboards. “Through these forms, af Klint seeks to reveal, in her words, ‘what stands behind the flowers,'” the museum says, “reflecting her belief that studying nature uncovers truths about the human condition.” What Stands Behind the Flowers continues through September 27 and is accompanied by a catalogue that is slated for release on Tuesday. Find your copy on Bookshop, and plan your visit to MoMA on the museum’s website. “Yellow Star-of-Bethlehem, Lungwort, Coltsfoot, Nailwort, Pasqueflower (Vårlöken, Lungörten, Hästhoförten, Nagelörten, Backsippan)” from the portfolio ‘Dornach Nature Studies’ (1919), watercolor, pencil, and ink on paper from a portfolio of 46 drawings, sheet: 19 5/8 × 10 9/16 inches “Common Lime (Linden)” from the portfolio ‘Dornach Nature Studies’ (1919), watercolor, pencil, ink, and metallic paint on paper from a portfolio of 46 drawings, sheet: 19 5/8 × 10 5/8 inches “Tulip (Tulpanen)” from the portfolio ‘Dornach Nature Studies’ (1920), watercolor, pencil, ink, and metallic paint on paper from a portfolio of 46 drawings, sheet: 19 5/8 × 10 5/8 inches Next article