A history of psychedelic drug use is associated fewer suicidal thoughts, planning and attempts, according to survey results analyzed by Johns Hopkins and the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

In a national survey of over 190,000 U.S. adults, lifetime use of certain psychedelic drugs was associated with a 19 percent reduced likelihood of psychological distress within the past month, a 14 percent reduced likelihood of suicidal thinking within the past year, a 29 percent reduced likelihood of suicide planning within the past year and a 36 percent reduced likelihood of attempting suicide within the past year. 

By Temple Grandin, Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University

When I was an awkward teenager who did not fit in with the other kids, the logical Mr. Spock was a character I could really identify with. At this time, I did not know why I related to Spock because when I was a teenager, I did not know that my thinking process was different from that of most other people. I assumed that my logical picture-based thinking was the way that everybody thought.

Apple has found a new use for their iPhone - medicine. People had already created lots of apps, of course, but ResearchKit, due out next month, is the first Apple framework to make it easier. 

The framework allows new ways to create apps to track movement, take measurements, and record data and has three active modules: surveys, informed consent, and active tasks. Active tasks is the only one not intuitive - it means they can ask you to perform activities while the sensors are monitoring.

Amid all the dire warnings that machines run by artificial intelligence (AI) will one day take over from humans we need to think more about how we program them in the first place.

The technology may be too far off to seriously entertain these worries – for now – but much of the distrust surrounding AI arises from misunderstandings in what it means to say a machine is “thinking”.

One of the current aims of AI research is to design machines, algorithms, input/output processes or mathematical functions that can mimic human thinking as much as possible.

A new paper says they can detect sexism in a smile. 

A man’s true attitude towards the female sex can be detected according to how he smiles and chats to her, according to Jin Goh and Judith Hall of Northeastern University writing in Sex Roles. 

A new test that uses combinations of cells from a single donor’s blood can predict whether a new drug will cause a severe immune reaction in humans.

Drug discovery is an expensive, bureaucracy-laced process. Due to more restrictions requiring a lot more trials, drug discovery is an average 14 year process costing $2 billion and only 1 out of 5,000 drugs will get approved and out to the market. It's easy to imagine why once a company knows the product is not viable or safe, it is abandoned.

A Swiss teenager, recently returned home from a discotheque, came to the emergency department with classic sudden symptoms of stroke, only to be diagnosed with Lyme disease. The highly unusual case presentation was published in "Acute Lyme Neuroborreliosis with Transient Hemiparesis and Aphasia", Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Lighting technology is in a state of change. Incandescent bulbs, which have been around forever, have been banned in the United States but the heavily-subsidized replacement, compact fluorescent bulbs, run the risk of mercury poisoning if they break and have a glow that many don't find appealing. Light emitting diodes (LEDs) are likely the technology of choice in the mid-term future but they are expensive.