Smallest number of American teens and tweens in 25 years are currently using tobacco products.

According to the 2024 National Youth Tobacco Survey, only 8 percent of middle and high school students — or 2.25 million — reported using tobacco products in the past 30 days. By 2019, 23 percent, or just over 6 million, had reported current tobacco use, driven almost entirely by e-cigarette use, at 20 percent.

E-cigarettes are still the most popular choice, used by 6 percent of middle and high school students in 2024, researchers report Oct. 17. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Nicotine pouches – a product that releases nicotine when placed between the cheek and gum – came in second for the first time at nearly 2 percent, followed by cigarettes, cigars and smokeless tobacco. The National Youth Tobacco Survey began measuring use among college students in 1999.

More middle school students, at 10 percent, reported using any tobacco product in the past 30 days than high school students, at 5.4 percent. Just under 8 percent of high school students reported current use of e-cigarettes in 2024, down from 10 percent in 2023. This drop of 350,000 high school students was a large reason for the decline in current use of each product among all students surveyed.

Disparities in tobacco use among ages and adolescents from different racial and ethnic groups still exist. Past research has found that the tobacco industry has long targeted certain groups through advertising and marketing, including promoting menthol cigarettes in black communities and using tribal icons to target American Indians and Alaska Natives.

Tobacco use most often begins in adolescence, a time when exposure to nicotine, the addictive substance in tobacco, can be particularly harmful to adolescent brain development.SN: 30.6.15). Nicotine affects the ability to learn, remember and pay attention. Tobacco control programs at the federal, state and local levels have contributed to the decline in use, the researchers wrote.

Naloxone has saved thousands of lives by reversing opioid overdoses. But its success depends on someone nearby who can administer the medicine quickly (SN: 5/3/24). Many people are alone when they overdose.

A new implant may one day solve this problem. Inserted under the skin and powered by a battery, the device can detect the onset of an overdose and release naloxone directly into the bloodstream while simultaneously alerting first responders, researchers reported Oct. 23 in Advances in science. The device, called the Naloximeter, has only been tested on animals.

Researchers hope Naloximetry can help some of the highest-risk individuals: Those who are newly sober, either because they sought treatment or were incarcerated. People are 10 to 16 times more likely to die of an overdose in the first months after a period of sobriety, when their body’s tolerance to opioids has decreased, than they are further into recovery.

In 2023, more than 80,000 people in the United States died of opioid overdose (SN: 25.9.2024). “This problem with fentanyl is getting worse,” says Robert Gereau, a neuroscientist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “There is a great need for as many harm reduction efforts as possible.”

Common harm reduction techniques have included safe injection centers and hotlines, but new technologies offer promising alternatives when a bystander cannot be present (SN: 14.2.2024). Until now, apps and other devices can only monitor and alert responders. The naloximeter is the first device that can provide treatment—and do so immediately, in the narrow window when overdoses are still reversible. “That’s where this really shines compared to other interventions,” says Monty Ghosh, an addiction researcher at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, who was not involved in the study.

The Naloximeter sensor works by measuring the loss of oxygen in the blood – specifically, how fast it is falling and to what level. In a human version of this implant, once an overdose is detected, a warning alert will appear on the person’s cell phone so the person can tell if it’s a false alarm; otherwise, naloxone would be released.

Gereau and colleagues tested two different administration methods in rats and pigs. In trials with pigs, they found that the most effective method was an intravenous catheter, similar to a port used to treat cancer, built into the implant. It delivered 0.7 milliliters of naloxone within 60 seconds, which is “enough to start having a lot of effects on the brain,” says Joanna Ciatti, a materials scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Although it is still a long way from being tested in human clinical trials and sorting out ethical and logistical concerns, the prospect of such a device is exciting, says Ghosh. Its feasibility will depend on the invasiveness of the implant, its cost and, most importantly, whether people with substance abuse concerns, often wary of interventions, will be open to it.

Two towering medieval cities built by mobile herders along Central Asia’s Silk Road trade routes have been hidden in plain sight – until now.

Mountainous regions have traditionally been seen as barriers to trade and communication. But these ancient settlements, located roughly 2,000 meters above sea level, show that herding communities developed a distinct form of urban life where such activities flourished, archaeologist Michael Frachetti and colleagues report Oct. 23. Nature.

“Think of these high-rise cities as nodes in a network that moves power and trade across Asia and Europe,” says Frachetti, of Washington University in St. Louis.

Researchers have discovered buildings and cultural artifacts from only a few ancient settlements located more than 2,000 meters above sea level, such as Peru’s Machu Picchu. Despite the thin air, harsh climate, rugged terrain and limited agricultural land, it now appears that mountainous Central Asia was “an urban area” during the Middle Ages, Frachetti says.

The team focused on two archaeological sites in southeastern Uzbekistan: Tashbulak and Tugunbulak. Centuries of erosion and sediment accumulation have obscured the urban features of both sites, located five kilometers apart, beneath rolling grasslands. Large earthen mounds and pottery shards scattered across the landscape led to the discovery of Tashbulak in 2011 and Tugunbulak in 2015. These finds indicate that Tugunbulak was occupied from the 6th to the 10th centuries. The original inhabitants of Tashbulak arrived in the 8th century.

Using drones equipped with light detection and ranging, or lidar, technology, Frachetti and colleagues mapped the extent and layout of both sites. Lidar laser scans have previously looked through tropical jungles and land cover to reveal ancient urban networks in the Amazon, Central America and Cambodia (SN: 1/11/24; SN: 12/4/23; SN: 29.4.16).

Lidar maps of surface-level ridges on the ground where the walls once stood, augmented by computer reconstructions of those buildings, show that Tugunbulak covered just over a square kilometer. It stood as one of the greatest Central Asian cities of its time, says Frachetti.

The more than 300 structures at Tugunbulak included clusters of buildings with common walls, narrow corridors or roads running between these clusters, walled watchtowers along a ridge, and a central citadel or citadel.

Tugunbulak’s appearance mirrored that of small and large field cities in medieval Asia, researchers say. The hill town citadel, surrounded by a citadel or palace, overlooked a city surrounded by defensive walls.

Tashbulak covered roughly one-eighth of Tugunbulak’s territory, but it was still a vibrant community, Frachetti says. A series of large defensive structures overlooked a wide area of ​​platforms, walls and terraced houses. At least 98 structures identified so far resemble building types discovered at the larger site, researchers say.

Population size is difficult to estimate for both communities. But Frachetti suspects that a relatively constant number of year-round residents periodically swelled during gatherings for special events and commodity exchanges.

Lidar’s discovery of large communities at Tugunbulak and Tashbulak highlights the underappreciated ability of high-altitude cattle groups to band together as early city builders, says archaeologist Michael Fisher of the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany . The new study shows that “mountain ranges may actually be conduits for cultural and economic transmission, not barriers.”

The mountain ranges present few opportunities for agriculture, however, raising questions about how the populations of Tugunbulak and Tashbulak were fed.

Highland pastures supported herds of cattle, sheep, goats, and horses that could be traded or sold to obtain cultivated foods. Previous excavations at Tashbulak revealed remains of cereals, legumes, nut shells, fruit, fragments of chicken eggshells and cotton seeds. Regular shipments of these foods must have come from field settlements, says Max Planck archaeologist Robert Spengler, who participated in those earlier excavations.

Excavations conducted since 2022 suggest that large-scale iron production occurred at Tugunbulak and Tashbulak, Frachetti says. Iron represented a valuable trade item for the inhabitants of the mountain towns.

These mountain towns may also have provided rest stops for caravans traveling the Silk Road, a set of ancient trade and travel routes that ran from China to Europe. But excavations have not yet confirmed this possibility.

Life with diabetes usually involves lots of injections of insulin, the hormone that controls blood sugar. Recent research investigating a once-weekly vaccine finds it may help lessen the burden for some with the disease.

Two pharmaceutical companies have developed weekly insulin formulations and tested the drugs in late-stage clinical trials. This September, in New England Journal of Medicineresearchers reported promising results for efsitora, from Eli Lilly. For adults with type 2 diabetes, the drug worked like a once-daily insulin formulation. But a trial of adults with type 1 diabetes was reported in the same month in Lancetfound that there were more episodes of dangerously low blood sugar in the group taking efsitora than in the group taking a once-daily insulin.

Meanwhile, icodec, from Novo Nordisk, has received approval for use in adults with diabetes from the European Union and from Canada and several other countries. But the US Food and Drug Administration announced in July that it is not ready to approve the company’s application for icodec. In May, an FDA advisory committee had voted against moving the drug forward in part because of safety concerns over the increased risk of hypoglycemia — the clinical term for blood sugar that is too low — for those with type 1 diabetes.

It will likely take time before things shake out on whether, when, and for whom weekly insulin will become available in the United States. At present, clinical trials provide some insight into the utility and limitations of a weekly formulation. Scientific news spoke with two experts about weekly insulin, what’s challenging about trying to mimic the body’s system for regulating blood sugar, and what else would be helpful for people managing diabetes.

What is diabetes and how is it treated?

Diabetes develops when blood glucose levels become too high because the body has lost the ability to properly regulate this sugar – the body’s main fuel – with the hormone insulin. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease that destroys the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin. With type 2 diabetes, these cells do not produce enough insulin or the body does not respond to insulin effectively, or both. Over time, high blood sugar levels can damage the kidneys, heart, eyes and nerves.

About 38 million people have diabetes in the United States, roughly 12 percent of the population, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 2 million of them have type 1.

Managing diabetes means monitoring blood sugar levels throughout the day and, for those with type 1 and some with type 2, figuring out how much insulin to take. If the insulin dose is too high, the blood sugar drops too much. Effects can be felt quickly and can include tremors, nausea, fatigue, hunger, dizziness and irritability, among other symptoms. If blood sugar levels drop too low, a person can become confused, feel weak, have trouble walking, and even lose consciousness. Severe hypoglycemia is a medical emergency.

With diabetes, there’s “a lot of thinking about food and about numbers,” says Laura Young, an endocrinologist specializing in diabetes care at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine at Chapel Hill. “She never stops.”

People with type 1 and some with type 2 may face multiple daily insulin injections. Short-acting insulin covers the rise in glucose that comes with meals. Long-acting insulin that lasts about 24 hours manages the time between meals and overnight. Covering three meals and the rest of the day and night adds up to “at least four meals, and that’s probably the minimum,” says Young.

How does the body normally regulate blood sugar and why is this difficult to duplicate?

Special cells in the pancreas, called beta cells, produce insulin (SN: 12/11/07). Beta cells detect the amount of glucose in the blood and secrete the required amount of insulin, responding to changes in glucose due to meals, exercise, illness and stress. In the body, there’s “constant regulation to keep sugar in a good range, even if we’re not eating,” says endocrinologist Giulio Romeo of Harvard Medical School and the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston. “It’s hard to replicate our body’s ability to fine-tune” this process, says Romeo.

Insulin injections cannot mimic the beta cell response. How quickly an insulin is absorbed into the blood depends on where the injection is made. And while researchers have made innovative chemical modifications to insulin formulations, creating versions that last for 24 hours or more, long-acting insulins are unable to provide the same stable glucose management between meals that cells can. beta.

Instead, there are small rises and falls as the long-acting insulin is released, Romeo says. This means that there may be a little more or less insulin available over time. Plus, once a dose is taken, “you can’t change it,” says Romeo. If a long-acting dose turns out to be more than needed for the next 24 hours, a person may end up with low blood glucose levels.

How will once-weekly insulin be used?

Once-weekly insulin is intended to take the place of a once-daily long-acting vaccine. It can make a difference to people’s quality of life “having to take one less shot a day,” says Young. But the main thing will be “making sure it’s the right dose,” she says. With a once-daily injection, if the dose is too high, “it’s much easier to deal with hypoglycemia for that period of time versus the whole week.”

In clinical trials of two weekly formulations, there were more episodes of severe hypoglycemia in participants with type 1 diabetes who received insulin once weekly compared to those who received it once daily. This was not a problem with trials of participants with type 2 diabetes.

People with type 2 diabetes “still make some of their own insulin,” says Young, and “for the most part, have less variability in their blood sugar” than people with type 1 diabetes. This can reduce the risk of ending up with hypoglycemia. Weekly insulin “is certainly promising” for type 2 diabetes, she says. For type 1, “I think they’re going to have to show some more data and be a little more precise” about what people with type 1 might benefit from, she says, in terms of blood sugar variability. and other factors.

It’s harder to make the necessary adjustments “when you’re committed to a medication that’s injected once a week,” says Romeo. “I think people with type 1 need some level of daily regulation that makes weekly insulin probably not the best option overall.”

What other health care improvement would help people manage diabetes?

“The affordability of continuous glucose monitoring systems is really key,” says Romeo, to help expand access to these devices. Continuous glucose monitors read blood sugar levels 24 hours a day via a sensor placed under the skin. Without this technology, people test for glucose by pricking their finger for drops of blood several times a day. Using continuous glucose monitors to manage diabetes can reduce hospitalizations and improve quality of life for those on intensive insulin schedules. But it can be difficult to meet the eligibility requirements insurance companies set to get coverage for the devices, which can cost several thousand dollars out of pocket.

Young wants more people to access and benefit from diabetes education, which includes how to monitor blood sugar, how to inject insulin, understand the impact of activity and different foods on blood glucose, and more. A study published in 2022 found that only half of adults with diabetes reported receiving diabetes education. Those who did were more likely to take steps to manage their diabetes and receive clinical care than those who did not. Diabetes education “seems a little old-fashioned,” Young says, “but it’s really important.”

TV stars and terrorists may seem to have little in common. But after watching YouTube videos by members of a violent terrorist organization, Yotam Ophir realized that the two groups used similar tactics to connect with distant audiences. The terrorists dressed casually, looked into the camera when they spoke, and recounted their pasts in a fascinating, plot-driven manner, just like the actors.

When Ophir presented that theory in class as a junior at the University of Haifa in Israel, his teacher, communication scholar Gabriel Weimann, was so impressed that he encouraged Ophir to publish on the idea. This resulted in Ophir’s first academic paper, published in March 2012 in Perspectives on terrorism.

“I think [that paper] it opened the door to him, both outside and inside him, inside his mind,” says Weimann, now at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel.

Since then, Ophir has remained intrigued by how different people—whether terrorists, policymakers, journalists, or public health officials—communicate information and beliefs to wider audiences. The past 20 years have dramatically changed the way we interact with media, says Ophir, now a communications researcher at the University at Buffalo in New York. “All my research is about people’s efforts to cope with the insane and ever-increasing amount of information that now surrounds us 24/7.”

Ophir is particularly interested in understanding how disinformation — a topic on which he is writing a book — seeps into fields such as health, science and politics. “I hope our work can help [people] understand … what stands between people and the acceptance of … evidence,” says Ophir.

How the media covers epidemics

Ophir did not set out to become a communication researcher. “I wanted to be a musician,” he says.

But an introduction to mass communications class during her freshman year — also taught by Weimann — set Ophir on a new trajectory. On the first day of class, Weimann told the story of Jessica Lynch, a wounded American soldier who was supposedly captured by Iraqi fighters. Weimann showed the class the seemingly dramatic video of Lynch’s rescue. The video and the media frenzy surrounding its release had turned Lynch into a war hero.

But the portrayal was misleading. Lynch was not shot or stabbed as initially reported. And Iraqi soldiers had already abandoned the hospital Lynch was in by the time the US military arrived. Journalists, who had not witnessed the “rescue,” relied heavily on a five-minute video clip released by the Pentagon. A damning BBC inquiry later called the events “one of the most astonishing pieces of news management ever conceived”.

Ophir was taken aback by the way the entire staged operation appeared – made to look like a “Hollywood movie” – and the resulting media spin. “It touched a nerve and I was like, ‘Wow, I need to know more about this,'” he says.

Ophir went on to earn a master’s degree at the University of Haifa, studying how fictional characters can influence people’s beliefs. In 2013, Ophir transferred to the University of Pennsylvania for a PhD in the lab of communications researcher Joseph Cappella, who focused on the tobacco industry. Ophir first investigated how cigarette companies entice people to buy products known to cause cancer and other health problems.

But his focus changed in 2014 when an Ebola outbreak began sweeping West Africa. Ophir swallowed news about US medical personnel carrying the disease home. “It scared me personally,” he says.

Soon, however, Ophir found a disconnect between the science of how Ebola spreads and how it was being portrayed in the media. For example, many stories focused on the subway rides of an infected doctor who had returned to New York City. But Ebola is spread through the exchange of bodily fluids, which is unlikely to happen on a subway, so those stories mostly served to stoke fear, Ophir says. Curious to know more, Ophir shifted his focus. “I wanted to study the way the media talks about epidemics,” he says.

One of Ophir’s early challenges was figuring out how to identify patterns in reams of documents, Cappella recalls. “He took advantage of the computational techniques that were being developed and helped develop them himself.”

For example, Ophir automated its analysis of over 5,000 articles related to the H1N1, Ebola, and Zika epidemics in four major newspapers: New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today AND Wall Street Journal. Those articles were often at odds with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations for how to communicate information about infectious disease outbreaks, Ophir reported in May/June 2018. Health security. Few articles included practical information about what individuals could do to reduce the risk of catching and spreading the disease.

Ophir’s research convinced him that the United States was ill-prepared for an outbreak of infectious disease. “I was warning that we’re not ready for the next epidemic because we don’t know how to talk about it,” says Ophir. “Then COVID happened.”

Turning to science and the public

In recent years, Ophir and members of his lab have looked at how political polarization plays out in non-political spaces, such as app review sites. And they are beginning to try to identify fringe ideas and beliefs on extremist websites before they go mainstream. All of this work is related, says Cappella, in that it “describes the movement of information, and the movement of persuasive information, through society.”

Ophir’s latest research is a case in point. While it’s common for surveys to ask whether or not people trust science, Ophir wanted to understand people’s beliefs more nuancedly. In 2022, working in collaboration with researchers from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Center for Public Policy, he developed a survey to measure public perceptions of science and scientists. The team asked over 1,100 respondents over the phone about their political leanings and funding preferences. Ideology is linked to funding preferences, the team reported in September 2023 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For example, when conservatives perceived scientists as biased, they were less likely to support funding. The same was not true of liberals.

That work resulted in a predictive model that can estimate the gap between how science presents itself and the public perception of that presentation. Identifying such communication gaps is a key step in meeting today’s challenges, says Ophir. “We could come up with a solution to climate change tomorrow and half the country would reject it… We won’t be able to survive if we don’t learn to communicate better.”

It was like a Ph.D. student Dionna Williams realized fundamental flaws in the way medical science treats people who have HIV and also use illegal drugs or misuse prescription drugs.

People in this group often have worse outcomes than people with HIV who do not use these drugs. Drug use and addiction have been linked to faster HIV disease progression, a higher viral load, and worse symptoms, including brain-related problems.

For years, many doctors and scientists believed that these poor outcomes resulted from people not taking the antiretroviral therapies that keep HIV under control, says Williams, a neuroscientist now at Emory University in Atlanta. No one really tested that hypothesis, however—in part because people who report substance abuse were often excluded from HIV clinical trials.

The argument made no sense to Williams, who met HIV patients during a summer program while working on their Ph.D. at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. “Every person with HIV who has a substance use disorder can’t all be off their medication. Everyone can’t help but go to the doctor. This is not possible.” Even people who take their antiretroviral drugs regularly have bad results if they also use cocaine, for example. Perhaps there are biological reasons why HIV, its treatments and illegal drugs are such a bad mix, realized Williams, who uses the pronouns she and they. Their careers have been devoted to exploring these connections.

Earlier this year, for example, Williams and colleagues reported in CNS fluids and barriers, that in human cells in the lab, cocaine increased the ability of one anti-HIV drug to cross the brain’s protective barrier, while decreasing the ability of another. The team found that cocaine can also increase the amount of enzymes needed to convert the drugs into their active forms.

Such findings suggest that the problem is not always that people who use illegal drugs are not taking their prescriptions, but that they may need higher or lower doses or a different treatment.

Williams’ research includes those who are marginalized and excluded in part because Williams understands what it’s like to be an outsider.

“I own multiple marginalized identities. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone in science who is like me,” says Williams. “I am a non-binary black woman. I’m weird too. I am autistic. I am [a] the first generation [college student]. I am from a disadvantaged background.” Williams is also a single parent, martial artist and dancer.

Holding all those identities has helped Williams understand people of all kinds and be a better scientist and mentor, they say.

“She’s just an amazing young researcher,” says Habibeh Khoshbouei, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Gainesville, noting that Williams’ research fields — pharmacology, neuroscience and immunology — are diverse.

Perhaps most impressive is that Williams uses human cells and samples from people, says Khoshbouei. Most researchers, including myself, use laboratory animals such as mice or rats to study the brain and immune system. Laboratory animals have carefully controlled diet and living conditions. They are genetically similar. All this makes it easier to interpret the results of the experiments. Working with people and their cells requires addressing all the ways people change, and often requires hundreds of participants. But it is human differences that Williams wants to understand.

“The level of complexity and commitment and openness to working with actual human samples is beyond measure. It’s not comparable,” to working with animals, Khoshbouei says.

By working directly with human cells, Williams also bypasses the need to translate findings from animals. This means the findings may be more likely to stick.

A recent study—on how drugs affect the body in general—helps illustrate why results in humans don’t always match findings from animal studies. Williams and colleagues probed the bodies of rats, mice and rhesus macaques for the activity of 14 genes that produce proteins that detect cannabinoids, the active compounds in marijuana. Rodents and monkeys are often used as adjuncts to humans in medical studies, including studies looking at the potential health benefits of medical marijuana.

For animal studies to be useful, results must be comparable across species. But when the team looked at rodents and monkeys to see where chemical-sensing proteins — called endocannabinoid receptors — were located in the animals, the patterns didn’t match.

The mice made detectable levels of one of the main endocannabinoid receptors in their colon, kidney, spleen and visceral fat, the team reported Feb. 26 in Physiological Reports. Mice produced it mainly in the kidneys and colon, while macaques produced it in the spleen and visceral fat. There was even variation between individuals within a species. “Nothing is the same,” Williams says. “If we don’t understand that, we won’t be able to make good therapies.”

Similarly, some people may make too much or too little of the drug-sensing protein in certain organs, Williams says. Many scientists will dismiss the change as noise. “That’s not hype,” Williams says. “It’s really important information about human biology.”

Williams is “fearless,” says Gonzalo Torres, a neuropharmacologist at Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine. “She is not afraid to go into research fields [in which] she is not necessarily an expert.” Torres directs mentoring programs including the MINDS program for various junior faculty in the neurosciences, in which Williams participated.

Williams stands out for being smart, strategic, creative, tenacious and tenacious, Torres says. “She’s hungry, she wants to know, she wants to follow.” And Williams works hard to develop the skills and knowledge needed to answer their research questions. “Each time she’s going deeper, and going deeper, she grows and her research team grows. She’s becoming a superstar,” says Torres.

Williams credits their autism with helping “to connect the themes in a very interdisciplinary way.” Autism allows them to see beyond social norms and structures, they say. “We think differently. We see the world differently… When people say ‘It can’t be done,’ [I say]’Well, why not?’ Or ‘Nobody’s watching it, ‘Why not?'”