(October 29, 2025 at 8:42 am)Angrboda Wrote:

Quote:A new clinical trial has found that adding repeated intravenous ketamine infusions to standard care for hospitalized patients with serious depression did not provide a significant additional benefit. The study, which compared ketamine to a psychoactive placebo, suggests that previous estimates of the drug’s effectiveness might have been influenced by patient and clinician expectations. These findings were published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

Ketamine, originally developed as an anesthetic, has gained attention over the past two decades for its ability to produce rapid antidepressant effects in individuals who have not responded to conventional treatments. Unlike standard antidepressants that can take weeks to work, a single infusion of ketamine can sometimes lift mood within hours. A significant drawback, however, is that these benefits are often short-lived, typically fading within a week.

This has led to the widespread practice of administering a series of infusions to sustain the positive effects. A central challenge in studying ketamine is its distinct psychological effects, such as feelings of dissociation or detachment from reality. When compared to an inactive placebo like a saline solution, it is very easy for participants and researchers to know who received the active drug, potentially creating strong expectancy effects that can inflate the perceived benefits.

To address this, the researchers designed their study to use an “active” placebo, a drug called midazolam, which is a sedative that produces noticeable effects of its own, making it a more rigorous comparison.

(October 31, 2025 at 12:18 am)Paraselene Wrote: Coffee, serious business.

A Florida man has reportedly been arrested after violently ripping down a Pride flag in a local Starbucks, demanding the staff display the American flag instead.

https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/10/30/f...cks-pride/

Quote:In other words, as far as Trump is concerned, his legislative agenda, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. Most modern presidents from both parties have a laundry list of bills they’d love to see congressional lawmakers take up, but the current president is apparently under the impression that he signed one large bill into law, and he can now coast until January 2029.

Part of this reflects Trump’s ongoing indifference toward governing and policymaking, but it also reflects something equally nefarious: Part of the reason the president is indifferent toward Congress is that he’s already seized many of the responsibilities that are supposed to rest with lawmakers, including the power of the purse.

Trump’s impression of Congress as an irrelevant institution is an extension of his authoritarian worldview: He’s already acquiring power as GOP leaders on the Hill render themselves irrelevant, voluntarily ceding ground to the executive.

Quote:Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a staunch right-wing conservative, is as close an ally as President Donald Trump has in Europe. But that hasn’t stopped the U.S. Commerce Department from threatening to hit Italian pasta with a punitive antidumping tariff.

If the case isn’t resolved in the coming weeks — a potentially challenging timeline given the government shutdown in the United States — 13 of Italy’s largest pasta exporters would face punishing duties of 91.74 percent on everything from short tubes of rigatoni to chunky threads of pappardelle. That’s on top of the 15 percent imposed by the Trump administration on goods exported from the European Union.

Together, they push the total tariff amount on the most emblematic Italian export to nearly 107 percent.

In the United States, such probes into alleged “dumping” — whether foreign companies selling their goods in the U.S. at a cheaper rate then at home — are routine. But outraged Italian companies and industry groups say they have never seen such stratospherically high duties applied across the board. They call the duties — prompted by a complaint by two U.S. manufacturers — a trade barrier aimed at shutting them out of the lucrative American market so that U.S. pasta makers can seize additional market share.

The new duties would hit roughly 50 percent of Italy’s $780 million pasta exports to the United States, including 90 percent of its more expensive premium pastas, said Luigi Scordamaglia, CEO of the Italian food industry group Filiera Italia.