Scientists named 190 new plants and fungi species in 2025 – including gruesome spider-killing fungus

Copyright Gabriel Iturralde. Supplied by RGB Kew.

By Liam Gilliver
Published on 08/01/2026 - EURONEWS

Scientists warn that human activities are “eroding nature to the point of extinction” after releasing a list of new species named in 2025.

Almost 200 newplants and fungi were named new to science last year, with conservationists warning that many are already “threatened with extinction”.

Today (8 January), the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG) in London, along with its international partners, has revealed its top 10 species that were described in 2025. The list aims to highlight just how much of the natural world still remains unnamed.

“Describing new plant and fungal species is essential at a time when the impacts of biodiversity loss and climate change accelerate before our eyes,” says Dr Martin Cheek, senior research leader in RGB Kew’s Africa team.“It is difficult to protect what we do not know, understand and have a scientific name for.”

Dr Cheek adds that wherever his team looked, human activities are “eroding nature to the point of extinction”. He argues that failing to invest in taxonomy (aka classifying species), we risk dismantling the very systems that “sustain our life on Earth”.

So, here are 10 of the top plants and fungi described by scientists in 2025.


The bloodstained orchid

Close-up shot of the Telipogon cruentilabrum (aka the bloodstained orchid). Gabriel Iturralde. Supplied by RGB Kew.

Telipogon cruentilabrum is a new species of orchid found in the high Andean forests of Cotopaxi in Ecuador. Named after the bloodstained lip of the flower, the species grows on tree daisies, typically around 1.5 to 3 metres above the ground.

Its yellow and red-veined flowers mimic female flies to attract sexually aroused males for pollination. However, more than half of this species’ habitat has already been cleared, and tree felling continues due to mining and agriculture.

RBG says there are only around 250 known species of Telipohon in the world, with this particular species being one of four new plants described in 2025.

“They are notoriously difficult to cultivate, and species can only be identified when in flower,” the organisation adds.


‘Grusome’ spider-killing fungus

Purpureocillium atlanticum, a spider-killing fungus. Joao Paulo Machado De Araujo. Supplied by RGB Kew.

The newest member of the fungal kingdom may send a shiver down your spine. Purpureocillium atlanticum, found in the Atlantic rainforest of Brazil, belongs to a group of entomopathogenic fungi that parasites other organisms.

Otherwise known as zombie fungus, this creepy species infects trapdoor spiders buried in the forest floor inside their burrows, covering the spider almost completely with a soft mycelium.

From the corpse, a fruiting body emerges, passes through the trapdoor hole and is held above the ground to release its spores and continue the cycle.

The fire demon flower

Aphelandra calciferi, aka the fire demon flower. Rodolfo Vasquez. Supplied by RGB Kew.

Instantly recognisable by its bright orange-red and yellow flowers, this three-metre-tall forest shrub was named after Calcifer, the fire demon from the 2004 film Howl’s Moving Castle.

Scientists think the Aphelandra calciferi has great potential as a conservatory ornamental plant thanks to its striking appearance.

It is one of two new species from Peru published in a paper by the Peruvian-UK author team of Villanueva-Espinoza and John Wood, an honorary research fellow on Kew’s Americas team.

Christmas palm

Known locally as Amuring, this stunning red-fruited palm tree grows up to 15 metres tall. Now scientifically recognised as Adonidia zibabaoa, it grows on karst limestone ridges in a small area of typhoon-prone Samar Island, one of the Visayas of the Philippines. The species name derives from an old name for Samar.

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RBG says its designation as a new-to-science species was “challenging” as it was not immediately obvious what genus the tree belonged to. However, DNA analyses confirmed its placement in the genus Adonidia.

There are only two other species known in the genus, including the Christmas palm, one of the most widely cultivated tropical ornamentals in the world.

‘Living stone’

Lithops gracilidelineata, a succulent that looks just like a rock. 

Sebastian Hatt. Supplied by RBG Kew.

Scientifically named Lithops gracilidelineata subsp. Mopane, this species belongs to a group of plants famed for their stone-like camouflage.

While they may look like no more than a mere pebble at first glance, lithops are actually succulents with a single pair of leaves and a daisy-like flower.

The 38 known species are confined to arid regions in Namibia and South Africa, though some have also been found in Botswana. However, the new ‘mopane lithops’ differs from all others as it grows in a higher rainfall area with ‘mopane’ woodland. It also has a smooth, whitish grey leaf surface rather than cream or brownish pink.

Lithops are popular in cultivation, often as houseplants, but illegal over-collection from the wild to supply this market is driving the species towards extinction. Several species have already been categorised as Endangered or Vulnerable to Extinction by the IUCN.

A critically endangered snowdrop

Galanthus subalpinus, the tiny snowdrop that has already been declared as Critically Endangered. Ian McEnery. Supplied by RBG Kew.

This beautiful flower may look similar to the snowdrops you see scattered around the UK. However, it did not appear to match any known species as first observed by snowdrop enthusiast Ian McEnery.

Scientists have since traced its origin to the sub-alpine grasslands of Mount Korab in northern Macedonia and Kosovo. Now officially named Galanthus subalpinus, the tiny snowdrop has already been declared as Critically Endangered due to threats from collecting for the horticultural trade.

Overgrazing and fires are additional factors putting this species at risk.

Caterpillar orchid

A close-up shot of Dendrobium eruciforme, the caterpillar orchid. Andre Schuiteman. Supplied by RBG Kew.

The caterpillar orchid (Dendrobium eruciforme) gets its nickname because the tiny, creeping plants resemble a colony of caterpillars sitting on a tree trunk.

This is the smallest of six new species published by Indonesian scientists last year.

Five of the discoveries arise from Kew’s work with local partners to identify the most important areas to conserve in Indonesian New Guinea.

Fungus from grass roots

A high proportion of the fungi scientists have yet to describe are expected to be those not easily detected by the human eye. Magnaporthiopsis stipae, which was isolated from the roots of a grass last year, is a perfect example.

This is just one of 24 new species, 11 new genera and one new family published as new to science in a study of an order of fungi, which are mainly endophytes and the agents of plant diseases.

Banana/Guava-tasting tree fruit

Eugenia venteri. Fanie Venter. Supplied by RBG Kew.

Picking fruit from this 18-metre-tall tree from Papua New Guinea is relatively easy. They are produced on stems that run down from the trunk and along the ground for up to seven metres, producing white flowers.

Scientists say the fruit tastes like a hybrid of a banana and guava, with a eucalyptus aftertaste. The species, named Eugenia venteri, is thought to have evolved to have its flowers pollinated and seeds dispersed by giant ground rats found in the area.
Detaroid legume tree

Saving the biggest until last, this endangered tree can be found in the Cameroon rainforest – with a trunk diameter of 66 centimetres. Scientists have roughly calculated that the Plagiosiphon intermedium has a mass of 5,000 kg.

It is a detarioid legume (a member of the bean family) that is the first species to be added to the Plagiosiphon genus, previously with just five species, in nearly 80 years.

Detarioid legume trees grow in groups and depend on fungi that form symbiotic relationships with tree roots. The new species is known from only two locations, both in Ngovayang, one of Cameroon’s top hotspots for unique plant species, but it is currently unprotected.

 

Creating hallucination-free, psychedelic-like molecules by shining light on life’s basic building blocks

Discovery could lead to new drugs for psychiatric disorders

University of California - Davis

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UC Davis researchers have developed a new method that uses light to transform amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — into molecules that are similar in structure to psychedelics and mimic their interaction with the brain. Like psychedelics, these molecules activate the brain’s serotonin 5-HT2A receptors, which promote cortical neuron growth, and could be candidates to treat a host of brain disorders, such as depression, substance-use disorder and PTSD. However, they don’t trigger hallmark hallucinogenic behavior in animal models. 

The research was recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.  

“The question that we were trying to answer was, ‘Is there whole new class of drugs in this field that hasn’t been discovered?” said study author Joseph Beckett, a Ph.D. student working with Professor Mark Mascal, UC Davis Department of Chemistry, and an affiliate of the UC Davis Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics (IPN). “The answer in the end was, ‘Yes.’”

The research opens the door to a streamlined and environmentally friendly drug discovery platform for new serotonin-effecting drugs that confer the benefits of psychedelics without significantly distorting perception.    

“In medicinal chemistry, it’s very typical to take an existing scaffold and make modifications that just tweak the pharmacology a little bit one way or another,” said study author Trey Brasher, also a Ph.D. student in the Mascal Lab and an affiliate of IPN. “But especially in the psychedelic field, completely new scaffolds are incredibly rare. And this is the discovery of a brand-new therapeutic scaffold.” 

Discovering a new therapeutic scaffold

The researchers created a library of potentially therapeutic molecules by coupling various amino acids with tryptamine, a metabolite of the essential amino acid tryptophan. They then irradiated these molecules with ultraviolet light to transform them into new compounds of medicinal value.  

Computer simulations were used to test the binding affinity of 100 of these compounds at the 5-HT2A receptor.

Five candidates were selected for further lab testing to determine efficacy and potency. Efficacies of the selected compounds ranged from 61% to 93%, with the latter representing a full agonist — a compound capable of producing the maximum biological response from the 5-HT2A system.    

The team labeled the full agonist in the group as D5. They expected that administering the compound to mouse models would induce head twitch responses, a hallmark of hallucinogenic-like behaviors. 

However, that wasn’t the case. Despite fully activating the same receptor as psychedelics, D5 didn’t induce head twitch responses.     

“Laboratory and computational studies showed that these molecules can partially or fully activate serotonin signaling pathways linked to both brain plasticity and hallucinations, while experiments in mice demonstrated suppression of psychedelic-like responses rather than their induction,” Beckett and Brasher said. 

Next steps: why no hallucinations? 

The team plans to conduct follow-up studies to better understand if other serotonin receptors in the brain modulate or suppress the hallucinogenic-like effects of D5. 

“We determined that the scaffold itself possesses a range of activity,” Brasher said. “But now it’s about elucidating that activity and understanding why D5 and similar molecules are non-hallucinogenic when they’re full agonists.” 

Additional authors on the paper include Mark Mascal and Lena E. H. Svanholm, of UC Davis; Marc Bazin, Ryan Buzdygon and Steve Nguyen, of HepatoChem Inc.; John D. McCorvy, Allison A. Clark and Serena S. Schalk, of the Medical College of Wisconsin; and Adam L. Halberstadt and Bruna Cuccurazza, of UC San Diego. 

The research reported on here was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and Source Research Foundation. 

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Journal

Journal of the American Chemical Society

DOI

10.1021/jacs.5c19817 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Transforming Amino Acids into Serotonin 5-HT2A Receptor Ligands Using Photochemistry

 

January 2026 issues of APA journals feature new research on autism, pediatric anxiety, psychedelic therapy, suicide prevention and more

American Psychiatric Association

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WASHINGTON, D.C., Jan. 5, 2026 — The latest issues of four American Psychiatric Association journals (The American Journal of Psychiatry, Psychiatric Services, American Journal of Psychotherapy and Psychiatric Research and Clinical Practice) are now available online.

The January issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry brings together research on externalizing disorders, pediatric anxiety, autism, and inflammation-related depression. Highlights of the issue include:

 

• The effect of anti-inflammatory treatment on depressive symptom severity in depressed individuals with elevated inflammation
• A possible biomarker for pediatric anxiety disorder (lead author Julia Linke, Ph.D., is the guest on January's AJP Audio podcast episode).
• Strong evidence for the role of glutamatergic differences in understanding the biology of autism (AJP Deputy Editor Daniel Pine, M.D., highlights the study in this video).
• How the genetic architecture of impulsivity—mapped by integrating genomic, imaging, and clinical data—reveals neurodevelopmental pathways that shape risk across the lifespan.
• An overview discussing refinement of the ADHD phenotype (AJP Deputy Editor Daniel Pine highlights the study in this video).

The January issue of Psychiatric Services features the following:

 

• Crisis Outreach, Treatment Engagement, and Outcomes After Suicide Risk Screening in a Comprehensive Mental Health Platform
• Stepped Care Interventions for Psychosis Risk: Findings from Clinical High Risk for Psychosis Grantee Programs
• Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and Support Services for People with Serious Mental Illness Who Were Experiencing Homelessness
• Changes in Police Contact After Admission to the Assertive Community Treatment with Police Integration Program

 

American Journal of Psychotherapy, Volume 78, Issue 4, features:

 

• Considerations for Cross-Cultural Adaptations and Implementation of Interpersonal Psychotherapy
• The Role of Touch in Psychedelic Therapy
• The Role of Patient-Avatar Dynamics in Avatar Therapy
• Mood Lifters for Bipolar Disorder: A Feasibility Study
• Psychotherapy for Delusional Disorder: Theoretical Models and Therapeutic Techniques

 

 

Psychiatric Research and Clinical Practice, Volume 7, Issue 4, features:

 

• Quantifying the Societal Impacts of Schizophrenia
• Five‐Year Implementation of Zero Suicide: Lessons Learnt from an Academic Health System
• Psychiatric Advance Directives: An Analysis of Current Usage at a Large County Hospital
• Psychiatric Advance Directives Among Veterans with Serious Mental Illness

Journalists who wish to access the publications should email press@psych.org.

American Psychiatric Association
The American Psychiatric Association, founded in 1844, is the oldest medical association in the country. The APA is also the largest psychiatric association in the world with more than 39,200 physician members specializing in the diagnosis, treatment, prevention and research of mental illnesses. APA’s vision is to ensure access to quality psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. For more information, please visit www.psychiatry.org.

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Journal

American Journal of Psychiatry

‘The deepest sort of spiritual disorientation’ Historian Joseph Kellner on the zeitgeist of the Soviet collapse and its lessons for today’s democracies

January 1, 2026
Source: Meduza


For decades, Russia’s “wild 1990s” have been remembered for economic hardship, libertarian freedoms, and rampant crime. Historian Joseph Kellner suggests another defining feature of the era: profound spiritual disorientation. In his book, The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse, Kellner tells the cultural story of the “end of history” and argues that the USSR’s disintegration was the final blow to a centuries-old European idea of progress. He also describes what emerged from the ruins as a “seeking phenomenon” — an explosion of mystics, astrologers, and fringe sects in Russia in the early 1990s. For Meduza, journalist and author of the Playing Civilization research project Georgy Birger spoke with Joseph Kellner about what drove post-Soviet Russians toward radical new worldviews, how this spiritual crisis paved the way for Putinism, and why the West — now facing its own crises of meaning and truth — might be walking a similar path.

The following Q&A has been lightly edited and abridged for length and clarity.

Joseph Kellner

— For those unfamiliar with your work, can you briefly describe what your book is about?

— The book is, I believe, the first cultural history of the Soviet collapse. There are many good studies of late-Soviet culture; it’s a booming field right now. Previously, historians would have called it the Era of Stagnation and said that nothing significant happened in the 1970s and 1980s. Now, there’s a major effort by many scholars to reverse that and reassess late-Soviet culture. There are also histories of the collapse — roughly 1989 to 1993 — that focus, for good reasons, on the economic crisis and the various traumas of transition.

Instead, I focus on a spectacular and visible flourishing of new and radical worldviews, spiritualities, and orientations that cropped up all at once around the time of the collapse. That includes the popularity of Hare Krishnas, astrologers, apocalyptic sects, and [Anatoly] Fomenko’s New Chronology. I see all these things together as an acute manifestation of the cultural crisis that comes with the collapse.

What’s all this about?


The book takes up the people I collectively call “the seekers” and looks at two things. First, why did they come to believe the things they did? For instance, why was astrology so credible to so many people all at once? Or “extrasensory healing” [by TV psychics] like Kashpirovsky and Chumak? And second, why the seeking? Why in this period do you see this amazing public searching? Because not every crisis brings this kind of cultural ferment.

Essentially, I find that what unites all these people is a set of deep questions about the world. They are looking for orientation in a world where it has been lost. There are questions of intellectual authority: who can we believe, and where does true knowledge derive? Then, [there are] questions of identity: what does it mean to be a Russian at this time? In Russia, the identity question often takes this form of East versus West: are we Europeans, or are we not? And finally, questions about the direction of historical time — where it is headed and where it has been. There is a deep spiritual orientation to all this: how do we affix ourselves to something permanent when so much of our world has eroded?

— The question about time was probably tied to the concept of the “end of history.”

— Certainly. The concept of the “end of history” didn’t survive very long, but the notion was a triumphal one in the West and in the United States, where it was coined. In the Soviet Union, there was another, real sense to this concept. Soviet ideology was fixated on history, historical meaning, and the “right” direction of history. So, when that great vision collapsed completely, it left people afraid and unsure where anything was headed.

That is why people were looking to astrology, for instance; it offered a cyclical understanding of the world, putting the crisis in a much larger context. Or they looked to nostalgic worldviews — Hare Krishnas are, in fact, very nostalgic. They looked for different golden ages because the Soviet one so obviously failed.

— How did those questions about the direction of historical time manifest?

— When I look at these different groups — like the one around Fomenko’s New Chronology — I see a fixation on time. Fomenko is a Soviet mathematician who, in the 1990s, came out with this extraordinary revision of history, claiming all history happened in the last 1,000 years. He shifted all of history around and made a total, psychedelic new understanding of time.

I think the reason everyone was so fixated on time was that, during the crisis, there was a sense that the past was now unknown. Glasnost and the revelations of the Soviet press of the 1980s were all about uncovering Soviet crimes. Everything you learned in history class turned out to be untrue. History teachers were writing to the newspapers saying, “I can’t believe I’ve been lying to my students all this time.” There was no consensus anymore about what the past was.

Then, when the crisis is so acute, the future becomes equally dark. There is no natural “bottom” to the crisis, no sense of when it will end. People feel isolated and completely lost in time. That lends the sense of temporal displacement — of being nowhere. That is the deepest sort of spiritual disorientation.

— The way I understand it is that the loss of the Soviet timeline was, in a way, more psychologically damaging than the loss of the Soviet economy.

— The two things are hard to compare. The material crisis was staggering — male life expectancy dropped six years, murder and suicide rates spiked. But I do think the spiritual crisis is a meaningful compounding factor. After all, you can have an economic crisis of a similar scale — like the Great Depression — without this fundamental loss of orientation or this desperate attempt to reimagine everything about the world.

The spiritual crisis came from how certain Soviet ideology was about the big questions. Knowledge derived from reason along Western scientific lines; Soviet identity was a fixed thing with a clear place in world history. Even if people didn’t literally believe in communism per se by the 1970s and 1980s, it was the water they swam in. It was in the media and the education [system]: the values of Soviet society still rested on these Enlightenment values and the sense of progress. Seeing it collapse in a couple of years was spiritually jarring.

Perhaps the book’s biggest claim rests on the fact that Soviet communism and its value system were an heir to the Enlightenment and saw itself explicitly as carrying that mantle. And in this way, Soviet communism derived from the same time and place as 19th‑century liberalism. So, the collapse represented the end point of a very long, shared European arc of history, thought, and philosophy — a major, and perhaps the final, blow to the broader idea of historical progress, that shared 19th‑century belief among liberals and socialists that progress was effectively a law of history. Even after World War II, both sides of the Cold War remained fundamentally optimistic about progress, whereas 1989 and the Soviet collapse marked the end of this centuries‑long arc. This is an event whose consequences are still unfolding, including in the West, and whose full scale will be hard to grasp without greater historical distance.

In this sense, the “seekers” of the late-Soviet and early post‑Soviet period are like the canary in the coal mine: they are the first to go out actively searching for entirely new worldviews once this big idea of history has died.

— One thing I’ve found surprising is the claim that figures like Chumak or Fomenko were not just anti-rational charlatans, but also a way to preserve a scientific way of thinking. Can you explain that?

— Certainly. Kashpirovsky, for example, claimed authority as an educated psychiatrist; it was his medical background. The astrologers I focus on almost all have backgrounds in the hard sciences, such as mathematics, astronomy, or physics. At no point do they forsake that education; they still put enormous value on science. The dispute was over who defined science. And the truth is that it’s impossible to define pseudoscience. It is defined by whoever holds the scientific authority to do so.

In a time when official Soviet authorities were losing credibility, these people offered alternatives, but they did it in the language of science because there was still a deep understanding that science is a powerful window to the world. Even the Soviet Hare Krishnas, unlike their American counterparts, tried to demonstrate the scientific validity of their beliefs. It demonstrates a deep, lasting Soviet respect for science, even while, from the outside, it looks like unscientific ideas coming to the fore.

— Can you recall any immediate impact of seekers on Russian politics in the 1990s?

— It’s interesting because the seekers themselves were almost universally not invested in politics. They considered politics to be superficial and were not after political solutions. That is an important thing that gets lost. People try to draw lines from the 1990s to the Putin era to explain Putinism, and while one helps explain the other, these seekers were not necessarily proto-Putinists.

Rather, political fatigue was almost universal in the early 1990s. Having invested so much hope in Gorbachev’s reforms and seen them fail, then seeing [Russian President Boris] Yeltsin as an inspiration and quickly hating him — there was no sense that the political system was going to save people. So, as they had in the 1970s and 1980s, they looked elsewhere for meaning. They looked outside the official political world.

— But did this movement still affect the current state of Russia?

— Yes. What is remarkable is that Putinism has concrete, confident answers to the driving questions of the 1990s: the shape and direction of history, what it means to be Russian, and who you can trust. It has a clear view of the West and where Russia stands. The questions that plagued the 1990s are now “settled” in a somewhat frightening mode that is hostile to pluralism. That may be one reason for the appeal of Putinism — it provided answers in a very uncertain world. The right wing always has a very simple story to tell, and it can be a very compelling story.

— So, did these fringe theories of the 1990s simply migrate from the grassroots to the Kremlin?

— I think most of these specific currents that I wrote about subsided by the end of the 1990s. The energy behind extrasensory healing, astrology, and the Hare Krishnas was in retreat by the time Putin came on the scene. However, there are still mystical currents within Russian culture — for example, people often see Eurasianism as a mystic, quasi-scientific nationalism. So, there are continuities you can find, and I think Eurasianism is probably the easiest one to point out.

— In an article for Jacobin, you argue that similar things are happening in the U.S. now. Who would be the Kashpirovsky or Fomenko of this process?

— I don’t think we have them yet. We don’t have an equivalent seeking phenomenon, although we certainly have a lively world of conspiracy thinking. We don’t have a similar cultural crisis, at least not in the form that I described in the Soviet case. And we haven’t had a big economic crisis yet — though everyone is expecting it, whether from the debt ceiling games, an AI bubble, or fossil fuels. I wouldn’t be surprised if such a crisis caused a dramatic spiritual seeking or “Great Awakening.”

For now, the major cultural figures setting trends are more explicitly political and tend to be on the right wing — people laying out visions that get a lot of followers. People like [white nationalist] Nick Fuentes and [right-wing blogger] Curtis Yarvin. But I don’t know anyone who I would draw parallels directly to Kashpirovsky and Chumak.

[Billionaire Peter Thiel’s theories about the Antichrist] might be as close as we get — the merger of reactionary politics and fundamentalist evangelical Christianity with tech utopianism/dystopianism. That is the making of a frightening ideology. All the ingredients are here. If an American “Fomenkoism” were to emerge with a charismatic leader, I think it’s easy to imagine millions of readers because there is nobody in America who has the authority to dispute such a theory anymore.

— Historians rarely draw parallels between Russia’s case of de-democratization and current worldwide and U.S. trends. The usual explanation is that democracy was too young and fragile in Russia, and that’s why it crumbled. What arguments do you have in favor of learning from post-Soviet Russia’s experience?

— Well, I can’t dismiss out of hand that democracy requires institutional memory. Imagining a democratic Russia is a very difficult task, especially compared to the United States, where there is a deeply rooted sense of popular power. But the common feature of both countries, as they move in the opposite direction of democracy, is the current state of capitalism. In the 1990s, Russia got the business end of capitalism — the sharpest and most aggressive form of the system — applied to a country that, coming out of the Soviet experience, simply could not compete on the world market and was picked apart by foreign capital and by its own state through corrupt privatization under Yeltsin. The rise of the oligarchs in a state with weak institutions and a huge concentration of wealth in a small circle of people is very hard to square with democracy, because those people end up functioning as a kind of pseudo‑government, producing the mafia state of the 1990s.​

The Yeltsin government attempted to install neoliberal capitalism as it existed in the United States: eliminating subsidies, leaving no real space for unions, keeping taxes low, and placing great faith in markets to solve every problem. In Russia [this was a] catastrophic and very fast [process], whereas in the U.S., it has been a slower, forty‑year process with similar results. In both countries, this has meant huge inequality, a dramatic loss of faith in the political system and in democracy, and a concentration of power in a very small set of oligarchs — though Americans are allergic to that word, even as today’s billionaires surpass the Rockefellers and Carnegies of their time. These shared developments make the similarity of the reaction unsurprising, and what we are seeing now is the long‑standing conflict between capitalism and democracy becoming extremely sharp.

 

UBCO study finds microdosing can temporarily improve mood, creativity

Microdosing effects do not “hangover” to the next day

University of British Columbia Okanagan campus

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A new UBC Okanagan study found that people who microdose psychedelics feel better on the days they take them—but those boosts don’t seem to last.

This suggests, says Dr. Michelle St. Pierre, that perceived benefits may be acute rather than long lasting.

Dr. St. Pierre is a post-doctoral psychology researcher with UBCO’s Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She recently published a study in Psychopharmacology that tracks the daily experiences of people who microdose with psychedelics.

Microdosing involves ingesting small amounts of a psychedelic substance, commonly psilocybin mushrooms or lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD).

“Most doses vary from one-tenth to one-twentieth of a recreational dose,” Dr. St. Pierre says. “Typical practices alternate varying proportions of non-dosing days to limit the rapid tolerance that can develop with so-called classic psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD. Anecdotal reports suggest that this may also be intended to leverage residual effects that could carry over to non-dosing days.”

While interest in microdosing has grown rapidly, she notes that scientific research has only emerged over the past 15 years. This means popular use has outpaced the scientific support to back it up.

Using data from the Microdose.me project, the world’s largest international daily diary study of real-world microdosing, Dr. St. Pierre says the findings show people tend to feel more connected, creative, focused and productive on days they microdose, as well as increased wellbeing and contemplation. However, these effects didn’t appear to persist on non-dosing days.

“Microdosing appears to lift mood and mental functioning on the days it’s practiced, but not necessarily beyond that,” she adds. “These findings help clarify when and how microdosing effects are felt.”

More than 1,435 microdosers from 49 countries participated in the study. Each morning, participants were asked if they had microdosed and rated how they felt across variables such as connectedness, contemplation, creativity, focus, productiveness and wellbeing.

The research team also examined whether these day-level effects varied across factors such as gender, mental-health history, the substance being microdosed, and whether participants had previously taken larger doses of psychedelics.

Dr. St. Pierre explains that the results were consistent across nearly all groups.

“The only meaningful difference we observed was among people with a history of taking larger psychedelic doses, who showed slightly higher microdosing-day increases in creativity,” she says.

This pattern aligns with emerging evidence that full-dose psychedelic experiences may enhance creativity. One interpretation, Dr. St. Pierre notes, is that microdosing could “reactivate” or build upon these prior effects, though this idea remains speculative.

“We need future research designed specifically to test whether microdosing can amplify or extend the impacts of larger-dose psychedelic experiences,” she adds.

Overall, the study adds daily-level precision to a growing body of research suggesting microdosing may enhance wellbeing and cognitive performance—although in a short-term, day-specific way. While the results are an extension of earlier work, Dr. St. Pierre says this remains an observational study and further research is needed to separate expectation effects from genuine pharmacological changes.

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Journal

Psychopharmacology

DOI

10.1007/s00213-025-06913-9 

Method of Research

Literature review

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Daily self-assessment within a regimen of microdosing indicates enhanced psychological functioning on microdosing days relative to non-microdosing days