It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
Some nicotine pouch flavors much more addictive than others
A new paper in Nicotine & Tobacco Research, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that different nicotine pouches, which have become very popular in recent years, particularly among young people, may influence user preferences very differently. An investigation using rats finds some flavors lead to much more nicotine consumption than others.
According to the World Health Organization, tobacco use remains a major global health threat, with 1.3 billion tobacco users, and 8 million tobacco-related deaths annually. While cigarette smoking is the most prevalent form of tobacco use worldwide, people also use other tobacco products including e-cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, and oral nicotine products.
The rise of oral nicotine products, including gums, pouches, and other novel formats, represents a significant shift in nicotine consumption pattern. For example, there is noted interest in and use of nicotine pouches among adult smokers planning to quit. Young people may perceive nicotine pouches as less addictive, due to their noncombustible form and due to the influence of youth-oriented advertising. US sales of nicotine pouches increased more than 600% between 2019 and 2022.
As the market for oral nicotine products expands, with an increasing diversity in flavors, nicotine concentration, and sources, many observers believe it’s important to investigate the implications of these products on consumer behavior and public health. A recent American national online survey revealed that flavored nicotine use is preferred among youth. Although flavors do not significantly impact nicotine absorption, they significantly influence user satisfaction and increase the likelihood that people will continue using nicotine products.
Researchers from the Yale School of Medicine here investigated the effects of the sweeteners sucrose and saccharin, as well as the commonly used flavor additive cinnamaldehyde (cinnamaldehyde is the principal chemical of cinnamon) on nicotine preference and oral choice behavior in female and male adult Sprague Dawley rats supplied with various nicotine and flavor-enhanced water solutions.
The investigation found that both male and female rats significantly preferred sucrose and saccharin, but not the cinnamon flavor. Moreover, when rats were given a choice of different solutions, rats differentiated between sweet and bitter solutions, with the highest preference for saccharin.
Between different solutions, females showed the highest nicotine preference when combined with sucrose, while males preferred nicotine combined with cinnamon. When rats were given multiple options with saccharin and cinnamaldehyde, saccharin increased nicotine preference in females, but not in males. These findings suggest that sweeteners may play a greater role in nicotine preference for females, while flavors are more influential for males. Consistent with this potential differential extent of flavor effects in females and males, menthol flavoring increases oral nicotine intake and preference in male rats but not in female rats.
“The study examined the choice behaviors between sweetened and flavored solutions, said the paper’s lead author,” Deniz Bagdas. “Females rats showed the highest preference for nicotine when combined with sweeteners, while males showed highest nicotine preference when combined with cinnamon. Understanding the role of sweeteners and flavorants in oral nicotine product appeal can inform regulatory policies and harm reduction strategies.”
The paper, “Effects of Sweeteners and Cinnamon Flavor on Oral Nicotine Choice Behaviors,” is available (at midnight on March 18th) at https://doi.org/10.1093/ntr/ntaf037.
Effects of Sweeteners and Cinnamon Flavor on Oral Nicotine Choice Behaviors
Article Publication Date
18-Mar-2025
Social media pressures could make friendship a full-time job
Perception of social media features and norms, especially highly visual content and availability expectations, could lead to teens experiencing digital stress that might give rise to fights with friends
Friendships are critical parts of our lives. Staying in touch with friends online is crucially important, especially for teenagers. Fostering friendships online, however, takes time and might require near constant availability, which can cause digital stress that can arise when expectations on social media are not met. This in turn, can lead to conflicts among friends.
New research published in Frontiers in Digital Health by scientists in Italy highlights how social media expectations within friend groups and digital stress shape adolescent friendships and conflicts over time.
“We show that adolescents’ perceptions of social media norms and perceptions of unique features of social media contribute to digital stress, which in turn increases friendship conflicts,” said Federica Angelini, a researcher at the University of Padua and first author of the study. “Disappointment from unmet expectations on social media—such as when friends do not respond or engage as expected—is a stronger predictor of friendship conflict than the pressure to be constantly available.”
Left on read
More than 1,100 young people aged between 13 and 18 participated in the study collecting friendship and social media use data at two time points six months apart. In particular, the researchers focused on how teens’ perceived need to be constantly available (entrapment) and feelings of sadness, anger, or frustration that may arise when teens find friends aren’t available to them on social media (disappointment) might lead to digital stress and friendship conflict.
Disappointment emerged as the behavior that is most likely to lead to squabbles six months after the initial data collection. “Individuals feel let down by their friends’ availability or responsiveness online. This disappointment arises from unmet expectations and leads to negative emotions which can spill over into friendship conflicts,” Angelini said. Entrapment, on the other hand, had less impact on how often conflicts arise, which might be due to constant availability being a normalized aspect of peer relationships.
Images and videos posted to social platforms may play a particularly important role in how social media use can cause friendship conflicts, the researchers found further. “Visual content makes it easier for teens to see what their friends are doing at any given time. If teens notice that their friends are active online or spend time with others while ignoring their messages, they may feel excluded, jealous, or rejected,” Angelini explained. “This heightened awareness can intensify negative emotions and contribute to friendship tension.”
Add friend: Building healthy friendships
The research highlights how social media expectations and digital stress shape adolescent friendships. “Identifying key stressors, for example visual content and availability expectations, and understanding dynamics of online interactions among friends can help educators, parents, and teens develop healthier online habits,” Angelini said. One such habit for teenagers could be setting boundaries, for example scheduling ‘offline’ times or managing notifications. When done in discussion with friends this can also help reduce misunderstandings. “Learning to accept that not every message requires an immediate reply can ease digital stress while maintaining healthy friendships.”
The study provides valuable insights into the inner workings of teenage friendships but has some limitations, the researchers noted. For example, it relies on self-reported assessment of teens’ social media use, which may not fully reflect the reality of social media behaviors. In addition, the six-month time span doesn’t allow for the examination of even longer-term effects. “Future research could use objective measures of social media activity and extend the timeline to better understand how digital stress and friendship conflicts evolve over time,” Angelini recommended.
Digital Stress and Friendship Conflict in Adolescence: The role of Perceived Norms and Features of Social Media
Article Publication Date
18-Mar-2025
inait announces collaboration with Microsoft to deploy novel AI based on digital brains across industries
AI with digital brains: inait & Microsoft collaborate to deploy unique neuroscience-inspired technology across industries, with an initial focus on finance and robotics applications.
At the 2025 World Economic Forum, Henry Markram presented a five-step recipe for building digital brains: populate them with neurons, grow dendrites, grow axons, form synapses, and model the electrochemical behavior of each neuronal and synaptic type—then “switch on” these networks to iteratively refine their biological fidelity. He further explained how teaching these digital brains can revolutionize AI by mirroring the brain’s own adaptive capabilities, opening the door to a future where generalizable AI arises from genuine causal understanding rather than mere correlation-based methods.
Zürich/Lausanne, Switzerland – 18 March 2025 – inait today announced a collaboration with Microsoft to accelerate the development and commercialization of inait’s innovative AI technology, using its unique digital brain AI platform. The collaboration will focus on joint product development, go-to-market strategies, and co-selling initiatives, initially targeting the finance and robotics sectors.
inait's AI technology, born from decades of neuroscience research offers a paradigm shift in artificial intelligence. Its “brain programming language” and ability to learn from experience and understand cause and effect delivers cognitive abilities for real-world interactions towards adaptive general intelligence, overcoming the limitations of current AI systems.
“This collaboration with Microsoft marks a pivotal moment for inait,” said Henry Markram, Founder and Chairman of inait. “After two decades of R&D we now have digital brain replicas and the know-how to teach them to perform AI. Microsoft’s global ecosystem is ideal to globally scale our disruptive digital brain-based AI.”
“Together with Microsoft, we aim to deploy our existing AI solutions and co-develop transformative industry solutions going forward,” stated Richard Frey, CEO of inait.
“inait is pioneering a new AI paradigm—moving beyond traditional data-based models to digital brains capable of true cognition. Their AI models mirror biological intelligence in a highly efficient manner, becoming a leading contender in the new reasoning-driven AI era.” said Adir Ron, EMEA Cloud & AI Director for Startups and Digital Natives Microsoft.
“We believe that inait’s approach to AI has the potential to bring significant value to the industry,” said Catrin Hinkel, CEO Microsoft Switzerland. “Their neuroscience-inspired technology is truly innovative, and we are pleased to collaborate with them to bring these advancements to market, starting with the fintech and robotics sectors where we see opportunities for immediate transformation.”
The collaboration will use the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and its global reach to accelerate the deployment of inait’s AI solutions. In the financial sector, the collaboration will focus on delivering advanced trading algorithms, risk management tools, and personalized financial advice. In robotics, the focus will be on developing more intelligent and adaptable robots for industrial manufacturing capable of performing in complex and dynamic environments.
About inait
inait (www.inait.ai) is a Swiss-based AI innovator developing the next generation of artificial intelligence based on digital brain technology. Founded by neuroscientist Henry Markram and with the Open Brain Institute (www.openbraininstitute.org) as its strategic partner for access to digital brains, inait is pioneering a paradigm shift in AI, delivering adaptive generalizable intelligence for applications across industries.
The Open Brain Institute announces the dawn of a new frontier in neuroscience
The Open Brain Institute launches as a not-for-profit organization to make the 18-million-line software recipe to build and simulate mammalian digital brains developed in the Blue Brain Project openly available through AI-powered Virtual Laboratories
Detailed image of the reconstructed neocortical circuit with a selection of neurons highlighted in different colors according to their morphological types.
LAUSANNE, March 18, 2025 – The Open Brain Institute (OBI) launches today as a groundbreaking non-profit organization, transforming neuroscience from the physical to the virtual world. Building on the pioneering achievements of the EPFL’s Blue Brain Project, OBI opens the era of simulation neuroscience—empowering researchers to build and simulate digital brains with unprecedented detail, scale, and speed.
AI has been given access to the software recipe to build digital brains, providing natural language support to researchers to explore, build and simulate digital brains, petabytes of brain data collected from global databases, and the world’s cumulative knowledge of the brain and its diseases.
Establishing Simulation Neuroscience
The Blue Brain Project, founded and directed by Professor Henry Markram, was on a 20-year mission to work out how to forward engineer mammalian brain tissue on supercomputers from limited experimental data and discovered a revolutionary approach to reverse engineer the brain and a recipe to build digital brains. With around 300 peer-reviewed scientific papers, the project demonstrated that these digital brain models closely mirror real brain structure and function—enabling experiments that would otherwise be technically or ethically impossible.
OBI takes this legacy further, hosting virtual neuroscience laboratories where researchers can access:
Open Data, data made available on AWS Open Data Registry under the Blue Brain Open Data.
Open Software with 18 million lines of code to explore, build and simulate digital brains.
Global brain databases curated by the project and the neuroscience community.
An AI companion to guide exploration, modeling, and simulation.
Simulation neuroscience now joins experimental, theoretical, and clinical neuroscience as the fourth pillar to tackle the brain’s complexity. “The Blue Brain Project gave us the proof that the brain can be reconstructed in a computer from limited experimental data,” says Professor Henry Markram, Founder of OBI, who presented this breakthrough at this year’s World Economic Forum. “Today, the OBI brings the recipe to build and simulate the brain to empower researchers to explore the brain in unprecedented detail, and at a scale and speed never before imagined.”
Sparking a Global Collaboration
OBI’s Virtual Labs allow researchers from any discipline, anywhere in the world, to construct digital brain models at multiple scales—from molecular pathways and individual neurons to entire brain regions and whole-brain simulations, in principle of any species, at any age, and in any disease state.
Disease modeling: Study neurological and psychiatric disorders in digital brains.
AI and cognition research: Use digital brains to inspire new forms of artificial intelligence.
Brain-computer interface and neuroprosthetics: Prototype and test neural implants virtually.
Researchers can invite unlimited collaborators into their Virtual Labs, fostering global, interdisciplinary teamwork in ways never before possible.
Visionary Funding
The Blue Brain Project was established at EPFL in 2005, when Professor Patrick Aebischer, then President of EPFL, outbid several prestigious institutions to host and fund the project. His visionary leadership led to 300 million Swiss francs in Swiss Federal Government funding over 20 years. “We recognized that if scientists can replicate the brain in computers, we can explore its functions and diseases in completely new ways” says Professor Patrick Aebischer. “The Open Brain Institute takes our work at EPFL and extends it into an open, global resource. It is exactly what the community needs to accelerate progress and spark new discoveries.”
An EPFL Legacy
As one of the world’s leading research institutions, EPFL continues to drive science into innovation and impact. “EPFL is delighted to support this transition from a long-term audacious internal project to a non-profit platform serving the international neuroscience community,” says EPFL President, Professor Anna Fontcuberta i Morral. “The extensive work accomplished within the EPFL Blue Brain Project will continue to have impact under the Open Brain Institute, providing researchers worldwide with access to cutting-edge virtual laboratories.”
Over 22’000 students have already taken Blue Brain’s on-line courses on simulation neuroscience, preparing for the age of digital brains.
A Catalyst for Neuroscience Breakthroughs
The OBI enables rapid brain research, therapeutic development, and next-generation AI, helping to tackle some of humanity’s greatest challenges:
The brain’s complexity: Understanding perception, learning and action to adapt and thrive, as well as developmental changes, species-specific adaptations, and the origins of disease.
The economic burden: Exploring treatments for brain disorders that cost the global economy trillions annually, yet drug development remains slow, expensive, and inefficient.
Neurotechnology innovation: Rapid virtual prototyping on digital brains to accelerate brain-computer interface, neuromodulation, and neuroprosthetic research and development.
AI beyond machine learning: Studying biological intelligence could unlock new AI architectures and strategies to interact with the world in real time.
“The brain is the only known system that exhibits true generalized intelligence,” says Markram. “OBI’s virtual labs can be used to study how the brain’s natural architecture—evolved over millions of years—creates intelligence, offering radical new directions for AI.”
Join the Digital Brain Revolution
The OBI opens its doors to the Virtual Labs on March 28, 2025.
Researchers, clinicians, industry R&D teams, and AI innovators are all invited.
Virtual Labs accommodate principal investigators, small research teams, and global consortia.
Although fungi of the genus Piloderma are common, scientists have now discovered five previously unknown species. One of these is one of the most widely distributed species in Northern Europe, while another is found only in old-growth forests. The discoveries, published in Fungal Biology, show that diversity in this genus is much greater than previously thought and that some of its species are at risk of disappearing as old-growth forest is logged.
Many of the fungi of the genus Piloderma are among the most common fungal species in Sweden. They are associated with trees in a form of symbiosis called mycorrhiza, where they help their hosts acquire water and nutrients in return for sugar. This makes them very important to the functioning and growth of forest ecosystems.
Researchers have now discovered five new species in the genus, which are described in a study published in Fungal Biology. With an additional seven new species that they published last year, Piloderma has now tripled in size, and grown from being a small to a medium-sized genus.
“We have seen for a long time how important Piloderma species appear to be in mycorrhizal symbiosis, and that the diversity of species in this genus far exceeds the number of named species. It’s satisfying that we can now, through delimitation and naming, make these species visible and communicate about them” says Martin Ryberg, professor at the Department of Organismal Biology.
Rare species found in old-growth forest
One of the new species described isPiloderma fugax. It appears to be rare and was found close to Gällivare in Sweden and in Trøndelag in Norway.Its ecology deviates from other species in the genus, as it only grows in old-growth forests. Since it is also small and difficult to detect, the researchers have given it the name fugax, which means shy, hidden or fleeting in Latin.
“It’s interesting but also a little frightening to see that in a genus like Piloderma, where we previously thought all species were common, there are such hidden old-growth forest species. They risk disappearing as the forest landscape is transformed from natural forests to plantations. Because of their insignificant size, no one have discovered them. I hope that our research can assist in making more people aware of and marvel at this kind of species and forests” says Sten Svantesson, lead author of the study.
Compared DNA to identity new species
In the study, the researchers looked for new species in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Lithuania. They collected fruiting bodies and went through collections already made in other research projects. Then potentially new species were compared with existing species to establish that they were in fact new.
“Species are deemed to be new if we, based on DNA sequencing, consider that we can establish that they are biologically distinct from existing species, that is, if no reproduction occurs between them. We then use data from soil and root tip samples uploaded into international gene databases from previous studies to obtain more information about their geographical distribution and ecology,” says Sten Svantesson.
Among the five new species found, was also Piloderma luminosum. This very common species was found to be easily recognisable by its almost luminous yellow to orange fruiting bodies. It has been distinguished from a species complex that includes the equally common species Piloderma byssinum. The difference between the two species is small but consistent.
“These two species often grow right next to each other and are commonly occurring in soil and root tip samples. By distinguishing them as different species, their differentiation can now be investigated – whether they have developed different niches or whether other factors have led to one original species becoming two,” says Sten Svantesson.
Piloderma fugax under the microscope. Images of the fresh fruiting body are unavailable as it was collected during a previous research project where no photos were taken.
Piloderma luminosum is a very common species, found throughout Northern Europe. The photo shows the holotype – the specimen that defines the species.
Piloderma byssinum is another widespread fungal species, and the species from which P. luminosum was distinguished.
Oct 20, 2009 ... The idiot Chaos blew Earth's dust away. ... Out in the mindless void the daemon bore me, Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space, Till ...
