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)
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
Scientific insights into how humans access deep spiritual states
Study finds practices in Buddhism and Christianity share a similar cognitive pathway to profound focus
Two seemingly opposite spiritual practices – Buddhist jhāna meditation and the Christian practice of speaking in tongues – have more in common than previously thought, a new study suggests.
While one is quiet and deeply focused, and the other emotionally charged and expressive, both appear to harness the same cognitive feedback loop to create profound states of joy and surrender.
The research, co-led by Michael Lifshitz, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University and Investigator at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research, with collaborators from Monash University and the University of Toronto, identified a phenomenon they call the Attention, Arousal and Release Spiral – a mental cycle that deepens both meditative and energized states.
“If we can understand this process better, we may be able to help more people access deep states of tranquility and bliss for themselves,” said Lifshitz. “In another sense, our findings may help to promote a sense of commonality and mutual respect between spiritual traditions. Despite differences in beliefs, we are all sharing a human experience.”
A common pathway to bliss
The researchers found that both jhāna meditators and those speaking in tongues enter a reinforcing cycle: they focus their attention on an object, such as the breath in meditation or God in prayer, which triggers a sense of joy. This joy makes attention feel effortless, leading to a feeling of surrender, which deepens the experience.
“As far as we know, this spiralling dynamic leading to increasingly deep and effortless bliss is a novel idea in the psychological sciences,” said Lifshitz. “It's fascinating that these radically different spiritual traditions seem to have discovered it and made use of it in different ways.”
To uncover this link, researchers collected firsthand accounts from Buddhist meditation retreats and evangelical Christian worship services in the U.S. They asked participants to describe the subtle micro-moments of their attention and emotional state during their practice. They also recorded the practitioners’ brain activity. While full neurobiological results are still being analyzed, early findings suggest that both practices involve a cognitive shift that allows for a uniquely immersive experience.
The next step involves using brain imaging techniques to map the physiological changes that occur as attention, arousal and release unfold in real time.
New Haven, Conn. — Yale scientists have taken a critical next step in creating a scalable process to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air and “recirculate” it as a renewable fuel.
In a new study published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, Yale chemist Hailiang Wang and his colleagues describe their latest breakthrough in creating methanol — a widely used liquid fuel for internal combustion and other engines — from industrial emissions of CO2, a primary greenhouse gas contributing to climate change.
The process could have far-reaching applications throughout industry.
“This is a new strategy that brings CO2 reduction into methanol to a new level,” said Wang, a professor of chemistry in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and lead author of the new study. Wang is also a member of the Yale Energy Sciences Institute and the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture.
Transforming CO2 into methanol is a two-step chemical reaction. First, CO2 reacts with a catalyst to become carbon monoxide (CO). The CO then undergoes a catalytic reaction to become methanol.
The most effective previous process — also developed in Wang’s lab — featured a single catalyst made of cobalt tetraaminophthalocyanine molecules supported on carbon nanotubes.
But the two reaction steps have a mismatch on this single-site catalyst: the conversion of CO2 to CO is not as efficient or selective, which presents a challenge for scientists trying to devise a robust process that can be scaled up for industrial use.
“Having just one type of catalytic site was not optimal for both steps in the reaction,” said Jing Li, a postdoctoral associate in Wang’s lab and first author of the new study. “To avoid this trade-off, we’ve now designed a ‘two-in-one’ catalyst.”
The new process starts with a nickel tetramethoxyphthalocyanine site for the conversion of CO2 into CO. The newly formed CO then migrates onto a cobalt site — catalysis scientists refer to this as “spillover” — to complete the reduction into methanol.
“Our work offers a potentially scalable solution to reduce carbon footprints and accelerate the transition to cleaner energy,” said Conor Rooney, a former Ph.D. student in Wang’s lab and co-author of the new study.
Rooney is a founder of Oxylus Energy, a company that works with industry partners to convert carbon waste into methanol liquid fuel, based on research from the Wang lab.
Additional co-authors from Yale include Seonjeong Cheon, Yuanzuo Gao, Bo Shang, Huan Li, Longtao Ren, and Shize Yang. Yang is director of Yale’s aberration-corrected electron microscopy core facility, a comprehensive electron microscopy and spectroscopy lab focusing on materials science research.
The study is a collaboration with Quansong Zhu and Robert Baker of Ohio State University, who provided experimental evidence for CO spillover from the nickel site to the cobalt site. Other collaborators on the study include Alvin Chang and Zhenxing Feng of Oregon State University and Huan Li, Zhan Jiang, and Yongye Liang of Southern University of Science and Technology.
The research was funded, in part, by the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture and the National Science Foundation.
# # #
Journal
Nature Nanotechnology
ASPARTAME KILLS
Artificial sweetener triggers insulin spike leading to blood vessel inflammation in mice
From diet soda to zero-sugar ice cream, artificial sweeteners have been touted as a guilt-free way to indulge our sweet tooth. However, new research publishing in the Cell Press journal Cell Metabolism on February 19 shows that aspartame, one of the most common sugar substitutes, may impact vascular health. The team of cardiovascular health experts and clinicians found that aspartame triggers increased insulin levels in animals, which in turn contributes to atherosclerosis—buildup of fatty plaque in the arteries, which can lead to higher levels of inflammation and an increased risk of heart attacks and stroke over time.
The research was inspired by a can of diet soda during a project meeting. “One of my students was sipping on this sugar-free drink, and I said, ‘Why don't you look into that?’” recalls senior author Yihai Cao, who studies chronic diseases related to blood vessel disorders at Karolinska Institute in Sweden.
Previous research has linked consumption of sugar substitutes to increased chronic disorders like cardiovascular disease and diabetes. However, the mechanisms involved were previously unexplored.
For this study, the researchers fed mice daily doses of food containing 0.15% aspartame for 12 weeks—an amount that corresponds to consuming about three cans of diet soda each day for humans. Compared to mice without a sweetener-infused diet, aspartame-fed mice developed larger and more fatty plaques in their arteries and exhibited higher levels of inflammation, both of which are hallmarks of compromised cardiovascular health.
When the team analyzed the mice’s blood, they found a surge in insulin levels after aspartame entered their system. The team noted that this wasn’t a surprising result, given that our mouths, intestines, and other tissues are lined with sweetness-detecting receptors that help guide insulin release. But aspartame, 200 times sweeter than sugar, seemed to trick the receptors into releasing more insulin.
The researchers then demonstrated that the mice’s elevated insulin levels fueled the growth of fatty plaques in the mice’s arteries, suggesting that insulin may be the key link between aspartame and cardiovascular health. Next, they investigated how exactly elevated insulin levels lead to arterial plaque buildup and identified an immune signal called CX3CL1 that is especially active under insulin stimulation.
“Because blood flow through the artery is strong and robust, most chemicals would be quickly washed away as the heart pumps,” says Cao. “Surprisingly, not CX3CL1. It stays glued to the surface of the inner lining of blood vessels. There, it acts like a bait, catching immune cells as they pass by.”
Many of these trapped immune cells are known to stoke blood vessel inflammation. However, when researchers eliminated CX3CL1 receptors from one of the immune cells in aspartame-fed mice, the harmful plaque buildup didn't occur. These results point to CX3CL1’s role in aspartame’s effects on the arteries, says Cao.
Looking ahead, Cao and his team plan to verify their findings in humans. Cao also foresees CX3CL1 as a potential target for chronic conditions beyond cardiovascular disease, given that blood vessel inflammation is involved in stroke, arthritis, and diabetes.
“Artificial sweeteners have penetrated almost all kinds of food, so we have to know the long-term health impact,” says Cao.
Compared to mice that never consumed the sweetener (left), aspartame-fed mice (right) showed damaged smooth muscle (red) and an increased presence of immune cells (green) in their arteries, indicating early signs of cardiovascular trouble.
Credit
Wu et al., Cell Metabolism
###
This work was supported by funding from the Swedish Cancer Foundation, the Strategic Research Areas–Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Foundation, the Karolinska Institute Foundation, the NOVO Nordisk Foundation, the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Research Council, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Hong Kong Centre for Cerebro-Cardiovascular Health Engineering, the Horizon Europe grant-PERSEUS, Key R&D Program of Shandong Province, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and State Key R&D Program of China.
Cell Metabolism (@Cell_Metabolism), published by Cell Press, is a monthly journal that publishes reports of novel results in metabolic biology, from molecular and cellular biology to translational studies. The journal aims to highlight work addressing the molecular mechanisms underlying physiology and homeostasis in health and disease. Visit http://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.
Stanford University chemists have developed a practical, low-cost way to permanently remove atmospheric carbon dioxide, the main driver of global warming and climate change.
The new process uses heat to transform common minerals into materials that spontaneously pull carbon from the atmosphere and permanently sequester it. These reactive materials can be produced in conventional kilns, like those used to make cement.
“The Earth has an inexhaustible supply of minerals that are capable of removing CO2 from the atmosphere, but they just don’t react fast enough on their own to counteract human greenhouse gas emissions,” said Matthew Kanan, a professor of chemistry in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and senior author of the Jan. 19 study in Nature. “Our work solves this problem in a way that we think is uniquely scalable.”
Enhanced weathering
In nature, common minerals called silicates react with water and atmospheric CO2 to form stable bicarbonate ions and solid carbonate minerals – a process known as weathering. However, this reaction can take hundreds to thousands of years to complete. Since the 1990s, scientists have been searching for ways to make rocks absorb carbon dioxide more rapidly through enhanced weathering techniques.
Kanan and Stanford postdoctoral scholar Yuxuan Chen developed and demonstrated in their lab a new process for converting slow-weathering silicates into much more reactive minerals that capture and store atmospheric carbon quickly. A grant from the Sustainability Accelerator at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability is now supporting efforts to move the research into practical applications.
“We envisioned a new chemistry to activate the inert silicate minerals through a simple ion-exchange reaction,” said Chen, lead author of the study, who developed the technique while earning a chemistry PhD in Kanan’s lab. “We didn't expect that it would work as well as it does.”
Many experts say that preventing additional global warming will require both slashing the use of fossil fuels and permanently removing billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. But technologies for carbon removal remain costly, energy-intensive, or both – and unproven at large scale. One of the technologies getting much interest and even early-stage investment lately is direct air capture, which uses panels of large fans to drive ambient air through chemical or other processes to remove CO2.
“Our process would require less than half the energy used by leading direct air capture technologies, and we think we can be very competitive from a cost point of view,” said Kanan, who is also a senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
Spontaneous carbonation
The new approach was inspired by a centuries-old technique for making cement.
Cement production begins by converting limestone to calcium oxide in a kiln heated to about 1,400 degrees Celsius. The calcium oxide is then mixed with sand to produce a key ingredient in cement.
The Stanford team used a similar process in their laboratory furnace, but instead of sand, they combined calcium oxide with another mineral containing magnesium and silicate ions. When heated, the two minerals swapped ions and transformed into magnesium oxide and calcium silicate – two alkaline minerals that react quickly with acidic CO2 in the air.
“The process acts as a multiplier,” Kanan said. “You take one reactive mineral, calcium oxide, and a magnesium silicate that is more or less inert, and you generate two reactive minerals.”
As a quick test of reactivity at room temperature, the calcium silicate and magnesium oxide were exposed to water and pure CO2. Within two hours, both materials completely transformed into new carbonate minerals with carbon from CO2 trapped inside.
For a more realistic test, wet samples of calcium silicate and magnesium oxide were exposed directly to air, which has a much lower concentration of CO2 than pure CO2 from a tank. In this experiment, the carbonation process took weeks to months to occur, still thousands of times faster than natural weathering.
The Stanford team says their approach can be used beyond the laboratory to capture CO2 at industrial scale.
“You can imagine spreading magnesium oxide and calcium silicate over large land areas to remove CO2 from ambient air,” Kanan said. “One exciting application that we’re testing now is adding them to agricultural soil. As they weather, the minerals transform into bicarbonates that can move through the soil and end up permanently stored in the ocean.”
Kanan said this approach could have co-benefits for farmers, who typically add calcium carbonate to soil to increase the pH if it's too low – a process called liming.
“Adding our product would eliminate the need for liming, since both mineral components are alkaline,” he explained. “In addition, as calcium silicate weathers, it releases silicon to the soil in a form that the plants can take up, which can improve crop yields and resilience. Ideally, farmers would pay for these minerals because they’re beneficial to farm productivity and the health of the soil – and as a bonus, there's the carbon removal.”
Cementing the future
Kanan’s lab can produce about 15 kilograms (about 33 pounds) of material a week. But trapping CO2 on the scale required to meaningfully affect global temperatures would require annual production of millions of tons of magnesium oxide and calcium silicate.
The researchers say the same kiln designs used to make cement could produce the needed materials using abundant magnesium silicates such as olivine or serpentine, which is found in California, the Balkans, and many other regions. These are also common leftover materials – or tailings – from mining.
“Each year, more than 400 million tons of mine tailings with suitable silicates are generated worldwide, providing a potentially large source of raw material,” Chen said. “It’s estimated that there are more than 100,000 gigatons of olivine and serpentine reserves on Earth, enough to permanently remove far more CO2 than humans have ever emitted.” (A gigaton equals 1 billion metric tons, or about 1.1 billion tons.)
After accounting for emissions associated with burning natural gas or biofuel to power the kilns, the researchers estimate each ton of reactive material could remove one ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Scientists estimate global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels exceeded 37 billion tons in 2024.
“Society has already figured out how to produce billions of tons of cement per year, and cement kilns run for decades,” Kanan said. “If we use those learnings and designs, there is a clear path for how to go from lab discovery to carbon removal on a meaningful scale.”
Matthew Kanan is also director of Stanford’s TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy. Yuxuan Chen is a postdoctoral scholar in materials science and engineering in the School of Engineering.
Thermal Ca2+/Mg2+ exchange reactions to synthesize CO2 removal materials
Article Publication Date
19-Feb-2025
U.S. facing critical hospital bed shortage by 2032
U.S. hospitals are battling unprecedented sustained capacity into 2024, largely driven by a reduction of staffed hospital beds, putting the nation on-track for a hospital bed shortage unless action is taken
University of California - Los Angeles Health Sciences
U.S. hospital occupancy after the end of the Covid-19 pandemic is significantly higher than it was before the pandemic, setting the stage for a hospital bed shortage as early as 2032, new research suggests.
In the decade leading up to the pandemic, U.S. average hospital occupancy was approximately 64%. In a study to be published in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Network Open, the team of UCLA researchers found that the new post-pandemic national hospital occupancy average is 75% -- a full 11 percentage points higher than the previous average.
“We’ve all heard about increased hospital occupancy during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, but these findings show that hospitals are as full, if not more so, than they were during the pandemic, even well into 2024 during what would be considered a post-pandemic steady state,” said Dr. Richard Leuchter, assistant professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the study’s lead investigator.
For their study, the researchers repurposed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Covid-19 data tracking dashboards to obtain hospital occupancy metrics from nearly every U.S. hospital between August 2, 2020 and April 27, 2024. They then combined these data with national hospitalization rates and the U.S. Census Bureau’s official population projections to model future hospital occupancy scenarios through 2035.
Hospital occupancy is calculated by dividing hospital census by the number of staffed hospital beds. The researchers examined both of these metrics over time, showing that the newly increased baseline in hospital occupancy is primarily driven by a 16% reduction in the number of staffed hospital beds rather than by an increase hospitalizations, which remained relatively unchanged from the pre- to post-pandemic years.
“Our study was not designed to investigate the cause of the decline in staffed hospital beds, but other literature suggests it may be due to healthcare staffing shortages, primarily among registered nurses, as well as hospital closures partially driven by the practice of private equity firms purchasing hospitals and effectively selling them for parts,” Leuchter said.
A national hospital occupancy of 75% is dangerously close to a bed shortage because it does not provide enough of a buffer against factors such as daily bed turnover, seasonal fluctuations in hospitalizations, and unexpected surges. According to the CDC, when national ICU occupancy reaches 75%, there are 12,000 excess deaths two weeks later, Leuchter said.
To model future hospital capacity and determine if the U.S. is at risk of experiencing a national bed shortage, the authors calculated the number of expected hospitalizations for each year between 2025 and 2035 by adjusting for an expected jump in hospitalizations due to an aging U.S. population. They found that if the hospitalization rate and staffed hospital bed supply do not change, average national hospital occupancy could reach 85% by 2032 for adult hospital beds.
“For general hospital beds that are not ICU-level, many consider a bed shortage to occur at an 85% national hospital occupancy, marked by unacceptably long waiting times in emergency departments, medication errors, and other in-hospital adverse events,” Leuchter said. “If the U.S. were to sustain a national hospital occupancy of 85% or greater, it is likely that we would see tens to hundreds of thousands of excess American deaths each year.”
Steps to avert a hospital bed crisis include preventing more hospital bankruptcies and closures, partly by revamping hospital reimbursement schemes and regulating private equity involvement in healthcare; addressing factors driving staffing shortages such as provider burnout, and changing policy to expand the pipelines of healthcare professionals.
An example of a government move that blocked that pipeline was the June 2024 decision by the U.S. State Department to freeze all new visas for international nurses, a potentially catastrophic decision that may harm Americans by precipitating staffing shortages, Leuchter said.
“In the slightly longer term, we need more innovative care delivery models that can reduce hospitalizations by diverting would-be admissions to specially-designed acute care clinics,” he said.
For instance, such a model is the Next Day Clinic, a program launched at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center within the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services (LAC-DHS) to avoid hospitalizations.
“The Next Day Clinic model pioneered at Olive View avoids hundreds of hospitalizations per year, and has been so successful that it has been adopted at UCLA Health’s flagship medical center,” Leuchter said. “If these types of care delivery models become widespread enough, that could help offset the projected increase in hospitalizations arising from an aging U.S. population.”
Additional study authors are Dr. Benjo Delarmente, Sitaram Vangala, Dr. Yusuke Tsugawa, and Dr. Catherine Sarkisian, MD of UCLA. Sarkisian is also affiliated with the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System Geriatric Research Education and Clinical Center.
The study was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (1K38 HL164955-01), the National Institute on Aging, (5K24AG047899, P30AG021684-16, R01AG068633, R01AG082991), the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (UL1TR001881), and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. (R01MD013913).
The U.S. has achieved a new post-pandemic hospital occupancy steady state 11 percentage points higher than it was pre-pandemic. This persistently elevated occupancy appears to be driven by a 16% reduction in the number of staffed U.S. hospital beds rather than by a change in the number of hospitalizations. Experts in developed countries have posited that a national hospital occupancy of 85% constitutes a hospital bed shortage (a conservative estimate). The findings of the current study show that the U.S. could reach this dangerous threshold as soon as 2032, with some states at much higher risk than others.
Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Richard K. Leuchter, MD, email rleuchter@mednet.ucla.edu.
Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.
# # #
Embed this link to provide your readers free access to the full-text article This link will be live at the embargo time
About JAMA Network Open: JAMA Network Open is an online-only open access general medical journal from the JAMA Network. On weekdays, the journal publishes peer-reviewed clinical research and commentary in more than 40 medical and health subject areas. Every article is free online from the day of publication.
