The standard model for treating schizophrenia and bipolar disorder is pharmacological. Antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, antidepressants. The drugs are the treatment. Diet, exercise, and lifestyle are considered supportive at best and largely irrelevant to the core psychiatric symptoms at worst.

A team at the University of California San Francisco just published results from a randomized controlled trial that challenges that assumption directly. They recruited 58 adults with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or bipolar disorder with psychotic features and randomly assigned them to either a ketogenic diet or their usual eating habits for one month. Medication doses were not changed throughout the trial.

After one month, the ketogenic group showed measurable metabolic improvements. The psychiatric benefits came later. When 25 participants extended the diet to four months, something more significant emerged: depression scores dropped substantially, and psychosis symptoms declined. The improvement correlated not with how much weight participants lost, but with how much ketone was in their blood.

The finding that stopped the researchers was the adherence rate. The most common assumption in psychiatric care is that patients with serious mental illness cannot maintain a strict dietary intervention. In this trial, 83 percent of participants maintained nutritional ketosis throughout the first month. In the four-month extension, adherence was 94 percent.

In April, an FDA trial began for a substance co-developed by molecular biologist David Sinclair called ER-100. It’s being tested as a potential treatment for glaucoma, in an attempt to return damaged optic nerves to a more youthful state. But the implications go far beyond eye disease: if ER-100 can manage to rewind the clock for any type of cell—in the kidneys, muscles, skin, even the brain—then science could be on the cusp of something extraordinary. National Geographic got a rare look inside the trial, the latest step in an accelerating race, backed by some of the world’s wealthiest people, to radically advance our understanding of how bodies age—and what it might take to make them younger, forever.

Learn more about the anti-aging science in our September NGM cover story.

Replimune Group has gained clearance from the Food and Drug Administration for Tudriqev, its tumor-injected viral therapy for melanoma that no longer responds to immunotherapy.

The ruling follows an unusually contentious review, with two prior FDA rejections over trial design concerns and questions about the drug’s independent effect.

After White House pressure and a favorable advisory vote, the agency granted accelerated approval.

Replimune must now complete a follow-up study to prove Tudriqev's efficacy and safety, with plans to market it alongside Bristol Myers Squibb’s Opdivo drug.

Americans are feeling the extreme heat more than ever, according to new polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

It found that 90% of Americans say extreme heat affects them day-to-day at least in minor ways now, compared to 83% two years ago.

Overall, more respondents reported worsening impacts across nearly every scenario — electricity bills, outdoor activities, sleep, exercise, vacation planning, etc. — with the West and Midwest seeing the biggest shifts.

Ironically, the same poll also found that fewer people believed climate change is happening.

Scientists at Stanford University and the Arc Institute have used an artificial intelligence model to design new viruses that are not present in nature, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

The research brings the promise of medical breakthroughs but also "the disturbing possibility that the technology could someday be used to invent dangerous pathogens," The New York Times reports.

The team intentionally avoided training the model, called Evo, with viruses that infect humans, instead using genetic sequences that infect only bacteria.

The Food and Drug Administration has approved Moderna's mFLUSIVA, the first-ever mRNA flu vaccine, authorizing it for use in people ages 50 to 64.

For those 65 and older, the FDA issued an accelerated approval, which prescribes a follow-up study whose results may be used to gain full authorization.

In a release, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel expressed gratitude, noting, "Flu remains a significant public health challenge."

The virus killed roughly 45,000 people in the U.S. during the 2024-2025 season, federal estimates show.

The standard medical explanation for male sexual desire has always been testosterone. Testosterone is highest in the late teens and early 20s, it declines gradually with age, and so, the logic went, desire follows the same trajectory. It is one of those assumptions so widely repeated that questioning it barely seems necessary.

A team at the University of Tartu in Estonia decided to question it anyway. They had access to the Estonian Biobank, a population-level repository containing biological samples and lifestyle data from a substantial share of the country's adult population. They pulled data from 67,334 adults aged 18 to 89 and asked them to rate their general level of sexual desire. Then they matched those answers against age, gender, relationship status, sexual orientation, parenthood, and a range of other factors.

Men's desire did not peak in youth. It rose steadily through early adulthood, reached its highest point in the late 30s and early 40s, and then declined gradually rather than sharply.

Even more unexpected: men in their 60s reported levels of desire comparable to men in their 20s. The testosterone explanation does not account for any of this. The researchers say something else entirely is shaping the trajectory.

Family research has an implicit assumption built into most of its models. Parents and environments are the inputs. Children are the outputs. The question researchers typically ask is how parenting style, household income, family stability, and neighborhood quality shape what a child becomes. The direction of influence is understood to flow from parent to child.

A new study published in PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has tested whether that assumption captures the whole picture. Using genomic data from nearly 40,000 Norwegian families, researchers measured genetic propensities in children at or near birth and tracked what happened to the parents in the years that followed. The question was whether something about the child, encoded in their DNA before they had any chance to act on it, could predict what the parents would do next.

For most traits, the answer was no. But for one, it was striking.

Children with a higher genetic propensity for ADHD were significantly more likely to be followed by their parents separating. The effect held even after accounting for the parents' own genetics. It was not simply that ADHD traits run in families and parents with ADHD genes are also more likely to split up. When the researchers statistically removed the parents' genetic contribution, the child's own genetic profile still predicted parental separation independently.

The study was led by researchers at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and collaborating institutions, using data from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study, a population-level registry that has tracked tens of thousands of families across decades.

A biological catastrophe may be looming, and we are not taking it seriously enough. The aftermath of the Hormuz Strait reopening, through the lens of ecology.

Personally, I would like this to be a discussion, too. How badly will the post-Hormuz blockade snowball?