"Vegetative" Patients? - Whale Communication - Fluoride & IQ - Street Drugs

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Apr 15, 2026, 7:07:41 AMApr 15

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/magazine/vegetative-states-conscious-aware.html

Vegetative Patients May Be More Aware Than We Knew

By Katie Engelhart

The doctor told her that her husband was just a vegetable now. “And he’s always just going to be a vegetable.” Did he really say it like that? Vegetable? And, just? Well, that’s how she remembers it. In his notes, the doctor wrote that his patient’s prognosis was “Poor/Grave.”

A few weeks earlier, on Oct. 4, 2024, while on a trip out of town, Aaron Williams said that his stomach hurt. Then he started vomiting and couldn’t stop, and then he started screaming. His wife, Tabitha, tried to drive him back home to Aiken, S.C. — and she was almost there, maybe 30 minutes away, when Aaron’s body stiffened and his limbs flung out and he went quiet.

At the hospital, Aaron, who was 30, was found to be in cardiac arrest. Doctors performed CPR, and when it did not work, they did it again and again; Aaron’s small, lithe body — just 5-foot-8, 135 pounds — heaved under the force of it, until after five rounds of compressions his heart started beating again. Doctors inserted a breathing tube and attached it to a ventilator next to Aaron’s bed. Sitting at her comatose husband’s side, Tabitha could hear its quiet mechanical hiss.

As it turned out, Aaron, who has Type 1 diabetes, had not been taking his insulin. Part of it, maybe, was hubris; he had been a diabetic since forever, and he thought he knew his body well enough to know when his glucose levels were really off-kilter. Also, he didn’t have a prescription; Aaron and Tabitha had recently moved, with five of their children, and he still hadn’t found a new family doctor who would take Medicaid.

Doctors did a CT scan, an electroencephalogram (EEG) and later an M.R.I., and they saw evidence of a global anoxic brain injury and “severe cortical dysfunction.” There was cerebral swelling too: so much that his brain pushed outward against his skull, partly flattening the folds and ridges that covered its surface. When he was examined, Aaron had no blink reflex, and he didn’t respond to sound.
© 2026 The New York Times Company

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/15/sperm-whales-alphabet-vocalizations-similar-humans

Sperm whales’ communication closely parallels human language, study finds

Oliver Milman

We may appear to have little in common with sperm whales – enormous, ocean-dwelling animals that last shared a common ancestor with humans more than 90 million years ago. But the whales’ vocalized communications are remarkably similar to our own, researchers have discovered.

Not only do sperm whale have a form of “alphabet” and form vowels within their vocalizations but the structure of these vowels behaves in the same way as human speech, the new study has found.

Sperm whales communicate in a series of short clicks called codas. Analysis of these clicks shows that the whales can differentiate vowels through the short or elongated clicks or through rising or falling tones, using patterns similar to languages such as Mandarin, Latin and Slovenian.

The structure of the whales’ communication has “close parallels in the phonetics and phonology of human languages, suggesting independent evolution”, the paper, published in the Proceedings B journal, states. Sperm whale coda vocalizations are “highly complex and represent one of the closest parallels to human phonology of any analyzed animal communication system”, it added.

The findings are the latest discovery about the lives of sperm whales by Project Ceti (standing for Cetacean Translation Initiative), an organization that has studied whales off the coast of Dominica in an attempt to find out what they are saying. Last month, the project released video of a sperm whale giving birth while other whales supported it.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/fluoride-drinking-water-iq-no-evidence

Fluoride in U.S. drinking water does not reduce IQ, a new study finds

By Elie Dolgin

Two U.S. states and more than a dozen cities and counties have moved in the past year to stop adding fluoride to community drinking water, citing research suggesting the mineral could harm children’s brain development.

But a new analysis of cognitive outcomes tracked over decades finds no evidence that water fluoridation is associated with lower adolescent IQ or diminished mental abilities later in life, researchers report April 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The results, based on standardized intelligence testing of more than 10,000 people in Wisconsin followed since their senior year of high school in 1957, challenge the idea that typical fluoridation levels in public drinking water pose a neurodevelopmental risk, a central point of contention in ongoing policy debates.

“It’s very strong data,” says Steven Levy, a dentist and public health researcher at the University of Iowa in Iowa City who was not involved in the research. “There’s no strong signal at all coming through that should give us concern.”

However, given the politically charged nature of water fluoridation and continued differences in how researchers interpret the available evidence, the findings are unlikely to be the last word on the issue.

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/14/nx-s1-5783750/overdose-fentanyl-medetomidine-xylazine

Historic decline in U.S. overdose deaths threatened by changing street drug supply

Brian Mann

Earlier this year, Naida Rutherford, the coroner in Richland County, South Carolina, was helping investigate what appeared to be a mysterious overdose. The case had many of the hallmarks of a typical fentanyl death.

"Every sort of physical manifestation, like the foam coming from the mouth and nose, as if they had an overdose," Rutherford said. "Their blood tested negative for any substance, which was very odd."

Her team was stumped, so Rutherford expanded the testing, looking for new compounds. "That's where we found the cychlorphine," she told NPR, referring to one of the incredibly potent synthetic opioids spreading fast in the U.S. street drug supply.
Sponsor Message
The state of Virginia has seen drug overdose deaths plunge by more than 40% in a single year. Many other states are seeing improvements above 30%. Why is this happening? Researchers say it may be a combination of factors, some hopeful and some painful.

"This is the first time we've seen it in South Carolina, which is very scary because none of us knew to test for it."

Experts say the U.S. addiction crisis is evolving fast, in ways that appear both hopeful and incredibly dangerous. The peril comes from a street drug supply that chemists now describe as a "synthetic soup."

Where once most drug users mostly consumed plant-based substances such as cocaine and heroin, drug gangs and cartels have shifted to producing and selling synthetic substances made from industrial chemicals.
© 2026 npr

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/10/science/thomas-s-langner-dead.html

Thomas S. Langner, Who Linked Social Ills to Mental Illness, Dies at 102

By Michael S. Rosenwald

Thomas S. Langner, a sociologist who helped lead a landmark study of New Yorkers that revealed striking insights about the social, cultural and economic forces that shape mental illness, died on March 16 at his home in Sandy Hook, Conn. He was 102.

His wife, Susan Kassirer, confirmed the death.

When “Mental Health in the Metropolis: The Midtown Manhattan Study” was published in 1962, headline writers had a field day with the top-line finding: that only 18.5 percent of Manhattan residents could be considered psychologically well adjusted, while 23 percent showed significant impairment in daily functioning.

“City Gets Mental Test, Results Are Real Crazy,” Newsday declared. The Daytona Beach Morning Journal wondered: “New York Living for ‘Nuts’ Only?”

The actual substance of the two-part study — the second installment appeared in 1963 — was the challenge it posed to the widely held view in psychiatry that biological and individual factors are the primary drivers of mental illness.

Professor Langner, along with a team of psychiatrists, anthropologists and social workers at Cornell University Medical College (now Weill Cornell Medicine), spent more than a decade studying 1,660 people who lived on the East Side of Manhattan, between 59th and 96th Streets.

The researchers concluded that developing mental illness didn’t simply come down to a genetic lottery.