2025-05-10 03:28:12
The Talon-A2 vehicle air-launched from the world’s biggest aircraft and piloted itself at hypersonic speeds before landing in California.
Hypersonic vehicles have become the latest military prestige technology, and the US seems to be lagging its rivals. That could change after the successful flight of an autonomous and reusable hypersonic aircraft by US firm Stratolaunch.
In recent years, both China and Russia have unveiled missiles capable of hypersonic speeds, which means they can travel at more than five times the speed of sound. These weapons are both incredibly fast and highly maneuverable which makes them hard to track and intercept.
While the US is developing several hypersonic weapons, the country is widely seen as playing catch up against its two main adversaries. That’s why in 2022 the Pentagon launched the MACH-TB program to create low-cost options for testing hypersonic technology that could speed development.
As part of that program, Stratolaunch recently conducted two test flights of its reusable Talon-A2 hypersonic aircraft. This week the company confirmed that the vehicle had achieved speeds in excess of Mach 5 in both missions before safely landing at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
“We’ve now demonstrated hypersonic speed, added the complexity of a full runway landing with prompt payload recovery, and proven reusability,” president and CEO of Stratolaunch Zachary Krevor said in a statement. “Both flights were great achievements for our country, our company, and our partners.”
The Talon-A2’s design is reminiscent of the Space Shuttle. It’s 28 feet long and is powered by a 5,000-pound-thrust reusable rocket engine built by US startup Ursa Major. The vehicle was air-launched over the Pacific Ocean by Stratolaunch’s Roc carrier plane—the largest aircraft in the world—in December 2024 and again in March of this year.
While the company didn’t provide many details on the flights, such as altitude or top speed, Krevor confirmed to Ars Technica that it had performed a number of “high-G” maneuvers on its way back to Earth.
This is the first time the US has had a reusable hypersonic vehicle since the retirement of the rocket-powered X-15 crewed aircraft in 1968. But crucially, the Talon-A2 can fly autonomously, which should make it far more useful for testing hypersonic weapon systems.
“Hypersonic systems are now pushing the envelope in terms of maneuvering capability, maneuvering beyond what can be done by the human body,” Krevor told Ars Technica. “Therefore, being able to perform flights with an autonomous, reusable, hypersonic testbed ensures that these flights are exploring the full envelope of capability that represents what’s occurring in hypersonic system development today.”
The goal of the MACH-TB program is to create a testbed for defense companies to test various subsystems and materials in the punishing conditions generated by hypersonic speeds.
While Stratolaunch didn’t provide details about the payloads carried on these first two flights, Northrup Grumman said that one of the missions tested out its Advanced Hypersonic Technology Inertial Measurement Unit. The device is designed to help hypersonic vehicles navigate by keeping track of their movements from a known starting point using motion sensors.
Stratolaunch isn’t the only company involved in the program. US startup Rocket Lab has also created a suborbital version of its Electron rocket for use as a hypersonic testing platform. But the reusability of the Talon-A2 is likely to be attractive for companies looking to rapidly iterate on hypersonic designs.
That suggests the US might not be a laggard in the hypersonic race much longer.
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2025-05-07 02:35:33
How consciousness arises in the brain is no clearer after two big theories go head-to-head, but the competition’s design could push the field forward.
“Theories are like toothbrushes,” it’s sometimes said. “Everybody has their own and nobody wants to use anybody else’s.”
It’s a joke, but when it comes to the study of consciousness—the question of how we have a subjective experience of anything at all—it’s not too far from the truth.
In 2022, British neuroscientist Anil Seth and I published a review listing 22 theories based in the biology of the brain. In 2024, operating with a less restrictive scope, US public intellectual Robert Kuhn counted more than 200.
It’s against this background that Nature has just published the results of an “adversarial collaboration” from a group called the Cogitate Consortium focused on two prominent theories: global neuronal workspace theory and integrated information theory.
With so many ideas floating around and inherently elusive subject matter, testing theories has been no easy task. Indeed, debate between proponents of different theories has been vigorous and, at times, acrimonious.
At a particularly low point in 2023, after the initial announcement of the results Cogitate has now formally published, many experts signed an open letter arguing that integrated information theory was not only false but doesn’t even qualify as scientific.
Nevertheless, global neuronal workspace theory and integrated information theory are two of the “big four” theories that dominate current discussions of consciousness. (The others are higher-order representation theories, and the local re-entry—or recurrency—theory.)
The theories are hard to summarize, but both tie consciousness to the activity of neurons in different parts of the brain.
Advocates of these two theories, together with a number of unaligned theorists, generated predictions from the two theories about the kinds of brain activity one would expect to be associated with consciousness.
The group agreed that integrated information theory predicts conscious perception should be associated with sustained synchronization and activity of signals in a part of the brain called the posterior cortex.
On the other hand, they said global neuronal workspace theory predicts that a process of “neural ignition” should accompany both the start and end of a stimulus. What’s more, it should be possible to decode what a person is conscious of from activity in their prefrontal cortex.
These hypotheses (among others) were tested by “theory-neutral” teams from across the globe.
The results were not decisive. Some were in line with predictions of one or other of the theories, but other results generated challenges.
For example, the team failed to find sustained synchronization within the posterior cortex of the kind predicted by integrated information theory. At the same time, global neuronal workspace theory is challenged by the fact that not all contents of consciousness could be decoded from the prefrontal cortex, and by the failure to find neural ignition when the stimulus was first presented.
But although this study wasn’t a win for either theory, it was a decisive win for science. It represents a clear advance in how the consciousness community approaches theory-testing.
It’s not uncommon for researchers to tend to look for evidence in favor of their own theory. But the seriousness of this problem in consciousness science only became clear in 2022, with the publication of an important paper by a number of researchers involved in the Cogitate Consortium. The paper showed it was possible to predict which theory of consciousness a particular study supported based purely on its design.
The vast majority of attempts to “test” theories of consciousness have been conducted by advocates of those very theories. As a result, many studies have focused on confirming theories (rather than finding flaws, or falsifying them).
The first achievement of this collaboration was getting rival theorists to agree on testable predictions of the two theories. This was especially challenging as both the global workspace and integrated information theories are framed in very abstract terms.
Another achievement was to run the the same experiments in different labs—a particularly difficult challenge given those labs were not committed to the theories in question.
In the early stages of the project, the team took advice from Israeli-US psychologist Daniel Kahneman, the architect of the idea of adversarial collaborations for research.
Kahneman said not to expect the results to change anyone’s mind, even if they decisively favored one theory over another. Scientists are committed to their theories, he pointed out, and will cling to them even in the face of counter-evidence.
This kind of irrational stubbornness may seem like a problem, but it doesn’t have to be. With the right systems in place, it can even help to advance science.
Given we don’t know which theoretical approach to consciousness is most likely to be right, the scientific community ought to tackle consciousness from a variety of perspectives.
The research community needs ways to correct itself. However, it’s useful for individual scientists to stick to their theoretical guns, and continue to work within a particular theory even in the face of problematic findings.
Consciousness is a hard nut to crack. We don’t yet know whether it will yield to the current methods of consciousness science, or whether it requires a revolution in our concepts or methods (or perhaps both).
What is clear, however, is that if we’re going to untangle the problem of subjective experience, the scientific community will need to embrace this model of collaborative research.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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2025-05-06 05:14:57
A treatment developed from a snake enthusiast’s blood protected mice against 19 of the world’s deadliest venoms. But don’t try this at home.
For nearly 18 years, Tim Friede injected himself with doses of venom from the world’s deadliest snakes. A snake enthusiast, Friede was regularly at risk of snakebites and always kept vials of antivenom around. He began to wonder: Can I build up tolerance to snake venom?
After more than 850 injections at escalating doses and hundreds of snakebites from cobras, mambas, and taipans, he can now endure snake venom doses “that would normally a kill a horse,” Jacob Glanville, CEO of Centivax, Inc and author on a new antivenom study, said in a press release.
Friede’s risky self-experimentation could help others with lethal snake bites. Glanville and his team found antibodies in Friede’s blood that protected mice against 19 of the world’s deadliest snake toxins. Adding a previously approved antivenom chemical saved mice poisoned by 13 deadly snake species who otherwise would have succumbed to the neurotoxins.
Today’s antivenoms neutralize a few different types of poison at most. They are generally produced in horses and other animals, a practice that can lead to immune side effects. Friede’s human-derived antibodies, in contrast, are lower risk and can tackle multiple venoms at once.
To be clear, Friede did not subject himself to snake venom for the study, which was published in Cell, and the team warned people not to follow in his footsteps. His eccentric experiment led to a potential solution urgently needed for deadly snakebites, especially in underserved communities. But to state the obvious, “snake venom is dangerous,” Glanville told Nature.
Globally, over two million people are poisoned by snakebites each year. Hundreds of thousands succumb to the toxins, with young people and children at greatest risk.
Granville, a computational immune scientist, is well aware. He grew up in a remote village in Guatemala hours away from a hospital. People got snakebites, but even if the patient made it to a clinic, there often weren’t medications to combat the specific type of snake poison.
Existing antivenoms have saved lives. But they also have weaknesses. Most are made by injecting a specific snake venom into horses, sheep, and other animals. In response, their immune systems create antibodies—proteins that act as antivenom when isolated and given to humans. Because of their animal origins, however, these antidotes can trigger unwanted immune responses, weakening their efficacy or even stirring life-threatening allergic responses.
There’s another problem too. Snake venoms are not all alike. Each antivenom usually only neutralizes a handful of them. Scientists, including Granville, have long dreamed of a universal treatment. One way would be to inject multiple venoms into the same subject, training that person’s immune system to fight them all off. But most people wouldn’t survive.
Friede began collecting highly venomous snakes in high school. Each of his snakes could easily kill him with a single bite. For years, he stocked up on expensive antivenom. Then he tried something radically different: He began training his own immune system to defend against venom from each species of his beloved snakes.
For nearly two decades, he injected himself with ever-larger doses of venom from cobras, mambas, and other deadly snakes—16 types in total and roughly 850 doses. He also stuck his arm out towards his snakes, inviting hundreds of bites. Early in his self-experimentation, cobra bites put him into a multiday coma. But upon recovering, he decided to continue with the goal of potentially helping other snakebite patients.
Friede’s unusual story led to some online media exposure that caught Granville’s eye. Aiming to help scientists develop a universal antivenom, he had been searching for protein structures in snake venom shared across species.
“I remember calling Friede and being like, ‘Look, I know this is awkward, but I would love to get my hands on a little bit of your blood,’” Glanville told Science.
Glanville teamed up with study author Peter Kwong at Columbia University, who develops protein-based vaccines, to collect Tim’s blood and isolate its proteins. They hoped these might include supercharged antibodies to fight snake venom. The team first focused on 19 deadly snake species—including Friede’s favorite mambas, cobras, and taipans—all of which belong to the elapid family and represent over 300 poisonous snake species across the globe.
The researchers extracted DNA from Friede’s immune cells and developed a library of roughly two billion potential antivenom antibodies. Adding various snake toxins, including those from black mambas, Cape cobras, and others, they whittled the group down to two candidates.
Snake toxins come in two main forms—one is a long-chain molecule, the other short. Both of these paralyze the nervous system, making it hard to breathe and move. Eventually, they lead to paralysis and death. One of the team’s two antibody candidates grabbed onto the long-chain protein from 22 of 24 snake venoms. The other candidate neutralized short-chain proteins. Both targeted a conserved molecular structure embedded in multiple toxins, suggesting the antibodies could potentially seed a universal antivenom down the road.
As a proof of concept, the team combined both antibodies with an antivenom drug and gave this mixture to mice. The cocktail completely protected mice poisoned with 13 types of snake venom, all of them surviving what would otherwise have been deadly doses. The treatment also boosted the length of survival for another six types of venom, although only for a few hours.
“Once [the mice] started living, that was really exciting,” Kwong told The Scientist. “I was like ‘Oh my god, we actually have something that could actually work.’”
The results are only in mice, and much more work is needed before testing the treatment in humans.
For one, the antibody cocktail and venom where injected simultaneously in mice—in a way, giving them the antidote along with the poison. But snakebite victims don’t usually receive antivenom for hours or longer. A next step is to test the antivenom long after a snakebite.
Also, though the cocktail can tackle a broad range of venoms, it doesn’t neutralize toxins from the viper family. The team is already working on a separate treatment for those snakes.
“The final contemplated product would be a single, pan-antivenom cocktail or we potentially would make two: one that is for the elapids and another that is for the viperids because some areas of the world only have one or the other,” said Kwong.
The team is testing the antivenom in dogs with snakebites in Australia. If symptoms don’t improve within minutes, the dogs will be given a classic antivenom. Meanwhile, they’re working to lower production costs and make the therapy more portable for treatment in rural regions.
As for Friede, he ended his self-experimentation after donating blood for the study in 2018. While proud of his contribution, he discourages other people from repeating his journey.
Glanville agrees. “We did not advise Friede to do this and no one else needs to do this again—we have all the molecules we need,” he told Nature.
The post This Man Survived Hundreds of Deadly Snakebites. His Blood Holds the Key to a Potent New Antivenom. appeared first on SingularityHub.
2025-05-03 22:00:00
The US Has Approved CRISPR Pigs for FoodAntonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review
“There’s a chance the Genus pigs could turn out to be the most financially valuable genetically modified animal ever created—the first CRISPR hit product to reach the food system. After the approval, the company’s stock value jumped up by a couple of hundred million dollars on the London Stock Exchange.”
Eric Schmidt Apparently Bought Relativity Space to Put Data Centers in OrbitEric Berger | Ars Technica
“In the nearly two months since former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity Space, the billionaire has not said much publicly about his plans for the launch company. However, his intentions for Relativity now appear to be increasingly clear: He wants to have the capability to launch a significant amount of computing infrastructure into space.”
I Recorded Everything I Said for Three Months. AI Has Replaced My Memory.Joanna Stern | The Wall Street Journal
“I willingly wore a $50 Bee Pioneer bracelet that records everything I say and uses AI to summarize my life—and send me helpful reminders. …[This assistant] can recall every dumb, private, and cringeworthy thing that came out of my mouth. Is this the dawn of the AI surveillance state? Absolutely. Is it also the dream of hyper-personal, all-knowing AI assistants coming to life? Also absolutely.”
Aurora’s Driverless Trucks Are Making Deliveries in TexasAndrew J. Hawkins | The Verge
“After years of testing and validation, Aurora says its first fully autonomous tractor-trailers are operating on public highways in Texas. The company’s Class 8 trucks are now making customer deliveries between Dallas and Houston, having already completed 1,200 miles ‘without a driver,’ Aurora said.”
Grid-Scale Battery Storage Is Quietly Revolutionizing the Energy SystemUmair Irfan | Wired
“This energy storage technology is harnessing the potential of solar and wind power—and its deployment is growing exponentially. …If we can get it right, true grid-scale battery storage won’t just be an enabler of clean energy, but a way to upgrade the power system for a new era.”
2025 Is the Year of the Humanoid Robot Factory WorkerRussell Brandom | Wired
“2025 looks set to be the year that multipurpose humanoid robots, until now largely confined to research labs, go commercial. Some have already taken their first tentative robot steps into paid work, with Agility Robotics’ Digit moving items in a warehouse and Figure’s eponymous biped shipping out to commercial customers last year.”
Time Saved by AI Offset by New Work Created, Study SuggestsBenj Edwards | Ars Technica
“A new study analyzing the Danish labor market in 2023 and 2024 suggests that generative AI models like ChatGPT have had almost no significant impact on overall wages or employment yet, despite rapid adoption in some workplaces. The findings, detailed in a working paper by economists from the University of Chicago and the University of Copenhagen, provide an early, large-scale empirical look at AI’s transformative potential.”
This Chart Might Keep You From Worrying About AI’s Energy UseEmily Waltz | IEEE Spectrum
“The world is collectively freaking out about the growth of artificial intelligence and its strain on power grids. But a look back at electricity load growth in the United States over the last 75 years shows that innovations in efficiency continually compensate for relentless technological progress.”
What Happens When AI Starts to Ask the Questions?Gregory Barber | Quanta Magazine
“The dream chased by academics like Krenn, as well as tech giants and startups raising money on the prospect of ‘scientific superintelligence,’ involves folding AI into the creative aspects of science. Krenn, for example, hopes to create a system that would combine expert scientific systems, such as his physics simulators, with large language models that could sift through all the world’s knowledge and come up with new ideas and how to test them. Perhaps robots could then follow through on the experiments.”
Here’s Why We Need to Start Thinking of AI as ‘Normal’James O’Donnell | MIT Technology Review
“Rather than planning around sci-fi fears, Kapoor talks about ‘strengthening democratic institutions, increasing technical expertise in government, improving AI literacy, and incentivizing defenders to adopt AI.’ By contrast to policies aimed at controlling AI superintelligence or winning the arms race, these recommendations sound totally boring. And that’s kind of the point.”
We Now Know How AI ‘Thinks’—and It’s Barely Thinking at AllChristopher Mims | The Wall Street Journal
“All of this work suggests that under the hood, today’s AIs are overly complicated, patched-together Rube Goldberg machines full of ad-hoc solutions for answering our prompts. Understanding that these systems are long lists of cobbled-together rules of thumb could go a long way to explaining why they struggle when they’re asked to do things even a little bit outside their training, says Vafa.”
The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through May 3) appeared first on SingularityHub.
2025-05-03 05:39:13
To compete with Starlink, Amazon’s Project Kuiper plans to send over 3,000 internet satellites to orbit.
Satellite broadband could bring internet to every corner of the globe, but at present it’s dominated by one company—SpaceX. That could change soon. This week, Amazon launched the first batch of satellites for its Kuiper constellation.
While it might seem an extravagant way to get online, SpaceX’s Starlink system has proven very popular, with more than five million customers worldwide. But with a receiver priced at $349 and monthly subscription charges between $80 and $120, it’s not cheap.
Competition may bring those prices down soon. European provider OneWeb and China’s Spacesail constellations are already providing limited service to customers. And earlier this week Amazon kicked off the development of a planned constellation of over 3,000 satellites dubbed Project Kuiper by launching its first 27 broadband satellites.
“While this is the first step in a much longer journey to launch the rest of our low-Earth orbit constellation, it represents an incredible amount of invention and hard work,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on X after the launch. “Am really proud of the collective team.”
The first batch of satellites were carried into low-Earth orbit by a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, which blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida on Monday. The company confirmed all 27 have been switched on and are communicating with ground stations. The satellites were launched to an altitude of 280 miles but will now use electric propulsion to gradually ascend to a final operating altitude of 392 miles.
The company had earlier launched two prototype satellites in 2023, before de-orbiting them. But in a pre-launch statement the company said the new batch of satellites have been upgraded significantly, including new phased array antennas, processors, solar arrays, propulsion systems, and optical inter-satellite links.
ULA could launch as many as five more missions this year, according to Reuters, and over 80 missions are already lined up with ULA, European launch provider Arianne Space, and Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. But the company is well behind schedule, with this initial launch delayed by more than a year.
SpaceX has already launched 8,000 satellites and is now launching at least one Starlink mission every week to expand access and replace older satellites. Given that kind of head start and the associated operational experience, it may be hard for Amazon to knock SpaceX off its perch as the leading space-based broadband provider.
But Bezos has said there’s enough demand for both companies to thrive, and Amazon executives have told Reuters they believe Amazon’s experience in building successful consumer products and its already dominant cloud computing business will be major selling points for customers.
Given the roughly $20 billion it may cost Amazon to complete Kuiper, the company must be confident of some significant upside from the project. But there are growing concerns that it will add to the already significant problem of over-crowding in low-Earth orbit.
Starlink satellites perform around 50,000 collision-avoidance maneuvers every six months, according to SpaceX. Hugh Lewis, a space debris expert at the University of Southampton in England, told Scientific American that the addition of thousands more spacecraft by Kuiper and other mega-constellations could cause this number to grow to tens or even hundreds of millions a year, making an eventual collision more or less unavoidable.
Such a collision could be catastrophic, as it would litter low-Earth orbit with space debris and make navigation much harder. In a worst-case scenario, it could lead to a scenario known as the Kessler Syndrome, in which a chain reaction of collisions fills Earth’s orbit with debris making it unusable.
Given the vast sums invested by these companies to build mega-constellations, they have most likely given thought to these kinds of problems. But we’ll have to hope our desire to boost connectivity doesn’t end up bringing the space age to an abrupt end.
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2025-05-02 02:35:24
Fibromyalgia causes debilitating pain. Healthy gut bacteria soothed symptoms in a small trial.
Imagine waking up every day after a full night’s sleep feeling completely fatigued. Every muscle hurts. But you don’t have a fever or an infection. After years of diagnosis, doctors can’t tell you why the pain keeps growing. Painkillers offer little help. Eventually, you can no longer walk—and still, there’s no explanation.
That’s the story of Rina Green who has fibromyalgia, a mysterious condition that affects roughly four percent of the population, mostly women. Its symptoms are varied. Most people experience chronic debilitating pain, fatigue, sleep disruptions, and brain fog. Over time, nearly half develop depression. The pain can be so severe that, like Green, they can no longer walk or take part in daily activities.
Unlike a paper cut or scraped knee, fibromyalgia isn’t linked to obvious damage to tissues or organs. The condition was once believed to be just in patients’ heads. More recent studies, however, have found signs of dysfunctional nerve connections and inflammation throughout the nervous system in people with the disease. Their immune systems are out of whack, and so are their gut microbiomes—the collections of bacteria living in our digestive systems.
A new study in Neuron now suggests that the gut microbiome may be key to treating the disease. In a small clinical trial, 14 women with severe fibromyalgia took pills containing healthy, living gut bacteria from donors. Within a month, nearly all reported decreased pain. Green, now 38 years old, was able to leave her wheelchair and take short walks.
The results are the latest to highlight a connection between gut bacteria and the brain. Tinkering with this connection—through probiotics, for example—may offer a way to tackle chronic pain without directly accessing the brain using opioids or other painkillers.
We’re more microbe than human. A recent estimate suggests we carry three times more bacterial cells than human ones. They’re not just along for the ride. Over the past decade, scientists have linked various health outcomes to the mixture of microbes in the gut.
Some are tied to the brain. Called the gut-brain axis, scientists have shown that gut bugs can influence anxiety, depression, and memory depending on which chemicals they release. These might diffuse into the blood or zap nerves and send signals to the brain.
Older studies found people with depression or other brain disorders have altered gut microbiomes. Because microbes live synergistically with us, they pump out different chemicals—some of which impact the brain, depending on their type and abundance. Some researchers are hunting down these chemicals as they relate to mental health or antibiotic-resistant gut problems. Others are taking a simpler approach: Replacing “dangerous” bacteria with helpful bugs from healthy donors through a procedure called fecal microbiota transplant.
The strategy has been used to treat irritable bowel syndrome, antibiotic-resistant infections, and pain related to chemotherapy. More trials are testing if it can boost cancer immunotherapies.
In 2019, study author Amir Minerbi, director of the Pain Medicine Institute at the Rambam Health Campus in Israel, and colleagues found that the gut microbiome shifted in women with fibromyalgia. Comparing the microbiomes of 77 women with the condition to 79 without, they used AI to highlight signatures related to the disorder.
This led the team to wonder: Do altered microbiomes trigger chronic pain?
In the new study, the team first transplanted gut bacteria from women with or without fibromyalgia into mice. The animals had their microbiomes wiped out, allowing the new arrivals to settle.
In just a month, those receiving microbes from donors with fibromyalgia began experiencing similar symptoms. They were more sensitive to pain from pressure, cold, and heat. The mice also seemed to feel pain without stimulation. But their health was mostly intact otherwise.
The picture changed at four months. The animals began showing signs of depression similar to their donors. Their nerve signals also changed over time, pumping out excessive neuroactive chemicals that amp up data transmission—which could contribute to increased sensitivity to pain—and their immune systems shifted towards a more inflammatory response.
These symptoms were treatable with a two-step program. First, the team dosed the mice with antibiotics to wipe out “bad” gut bugs. Next, they transplanted microbes from healthy donors into their guts. The treated mice were perkier, with nearly normal sensitivity to pain.
Encouraged by the results, the team recruited 14 roughly middle-aged women with severe fibromyalgia. Despite taking at least two painkillers and undergoing lifestyle tutoring, all participants still struggled with excruciating pain and daily fatigue.
After purging gut bacteria with antibiotics, each participant received five microbiome transplants from healthy donors, once every two weeks, in the form of a pill.
The new bugs took hold inside their guts roughly a month after the first treatment. One week after the last treatment, 12 people reported less pain associated with cold or heat. They felt less anxious or depressed, and most were finally able to get a good night’s sleep.
“These findings are really impressive,” Andreas Goebel at the University of Liverpool, who was not involved in the work, told Nature.
Though promising, the study has its limits.
For one, it’s open-labeled, meaning both researchers and patients knew they were getting the treatment. That means placebo effects could be a factor in why they felt less pain. The study also only included women and female mice. The reason for this, explained the team, is that fibromyalgia predominately affects women. But the results pave the way for the approach to be studied in a larger, more diverse group of people.
The team is planning a randomized controlled clinical trial—the gold standard—in roughly 80 people. They’re also hoping to pin down specific bacterial species and environmental factors involved in pain, such as stress, infections, and other diseases. And they’re investigating several molecules and signaling patterns discovered in the study that differ in people with fibromyalgia.
For now, we can say “altered gut microbiota has a role in fibromyalgia pain, highlighting it as a promising target for therapeutic interventions,” wrote the team.
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