ADHD = Hypercuriosity - Decoding Animal Speech - GLP1 Pill - Ultraprocessed Foods

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Sep 17, 2025, 7:07:11 AMSep 17

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/adhd-advantage-hypercuriosity

People with ADHD may have an underappreciated advantage: Hypercuriosity

By Sujata Gupta

Anne-Laure Le Cunff was something of a wild child. As a teenager, she repeatedly disabled the school fire alarm to sneak smoke breaks and helped launch a magazine filled with her teachers’ fictional love lives. Later, as a young adult studying neuroscience, Le Cunff would spend hours researching complex topics but struggled to complete simple administrative tasks. And she often obsessed over random projects before abruptly abandoning them.

Then, three years ago, a colleague asked Le Cunff if she might have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, a condition marked by distractibility, hyperactivity and impulsivity. Doctors confirmed her colleague’s suspicions. But fearing professional stigma, Le Cunff — by then by then a postdoctoral fellow in the ADHD Lab at King’s College London — kept her diagnosis secret until this year.

Le Cunff knew all too well about the deficits associated with ADHD. But her research — and personal experience — hinted at an underappreciated upside. “I started seeing … breadcrumbs pointing at a potential association between curiosity and ADHD,” she says.

People within the ADHD community have long recognized that the condition can be both harmful and helpful. Researchers, though, have largely focused on the harms. And those studying treatments tend to define success as a reduction in ADHD symptoms, with little regard to possible benefits.

That’s starting to change. For instance, Norwegian researchers asked 50 individuals with ADHD to describe their positive experiences with the disorder as part of an effort to develop more holistic treatments. People cited their creativity, energy, adaptability, resilience and curiosity, researchers reported in BMJ Open in October 2023.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02917-9

AI is helping to decode animals’ speech. Will it also let us talk with them?

Rachel Fieldhouse

Deep in the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mélissa Berthet found bonobos doing something thought to be uniquely human.

During the six months that Berthet observed the primates, they combined calls in several ways to make complex phrases1. In one example, bonobos (Pan paniscus) that were building nests together added a yelp, meaning ‘let’s do this’, to a grunt that says ‘look at me’. “It’s really a way to say: ‘Look at what I’m doing, and let’s do this all together’,” says Berthet, who studies primates and linguistics at the University of Rennes, France.

In another case, a peep that means ‘I would like to do this’ was followed by a whistle signalling ‘let’s stay together’. The bonobos combine the two calls in sensitive social contexts, says Berthet. “I think it’s to bring peace.”

The study, reported in April, is one of several examples from the past few years that highlight just how sophisticated vocal communication in non-human animals can be. In some species of primate, whale2 and bird, researchers have identified features and patterns of vocalization that have long been considered defining characteristics of human language. These results challenge ideas about what makes human language special — and even how ‘language’ should be defined.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many scientists turn to artificial intelligence (AI) tools to speed up the detection and interpretation of animal sounds, and to probe aspects of communication that human listeners might miss. “It’s doing something that just wasn’t possible through traditional means,” says David Robinson, an AI researcher at the Earth Species Project, a non-profit organization based in Berkeley, California, that is developing AI systems to decode communication across the animal kingdom.

As the research advances, there is increasing interest in using AI tools not only to listen in on animal speech, but also to potentially talk back.

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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/sep/16/daily-weight-loss-pill-orforglipron-cut-body-weight-by-a-fifth

Daily weight loss pill can help cut body weight by a fifth

Andrew Gregory Health editor

A daily pill for weight loss can help people reduce their body weight by as much as a fifth, according to a trial that could pave the way for millions more people to shed pounds.

The drug, called orforglipron, is manufactured by Eli Lilly and targets the same GLP-1 receptors as weight loss injections such as Mounjaro and Wegovy. In a trial of 3,127 adults, one in five people who took the once-a-day tablet for 72 weeks lost 20% or more of their body weight.

Weight loss jabs have been transformative but pill versions are seen as a holy grail because they are easier to store, distribute and administer and are also expected to be cheaper, offering fresh hope for the millions of people trying to lose weight.

Orforglipron is a GLP-1 agonist, a type of medication that helps lower blood sugar levels, slows the digestion of food and can reduce appetite.

The weight loss seen among people taking the tablet is not as stark as that among patients taking tirzepatide (Mounjaro), which is also made by Eli Lilly, but experts believe the tablet will be more accessible and convenient compared with injections.

Orforglipron is not yet approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or regulators in other countries. Eli Lilly has said it expects substantial demand when the new pill is launched.

The company published a snapshot of the results in August and the full paper detailing the findings has now been published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented to the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes in Vienna, Austria.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02754-w

Are ultra-processed foods really so unhealthy?

Nic Fleming

In the early 2000s, Brazilian nutrition researcher Carlos Monteiro made a puzzling discovery that led to an epiphany. While trawling survey data on household spending to try to understand why rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes were rising so rapidly in his home country, he was surprised to note that people were buying smaller quantities of sugar, salt and other ingredients generally associated with these conditions than they had in previous decades.

Only when Monteiro and his colleagues dug deeper did they find the culprit. People were buying less sugar to prepare cakes and desserts, but eating more of it in pre-made pastries and breakfast cereal. They were buying less salt, but consuming more of it in frozen pizzas, chicken nuggets and dehydrated packet soups. “We realized the problem was our traditional dietary patterns were being replaced by foods that are processed so many times that they can no longer be recognized in the final products. We called them ultra-processed foods.”

Monteiro, a nutrition and public-health researcher at the University of São Paulo, first used the term ultra-processed food (UPF) in a paper in 2009, arguing that people interested in promoting healthy diets should focus more on the degree, extent and purpose of processing than on nutrient profiles1. It was a radical idea that caught the attention of other researchers, who, over the next decade or so, published dozens of papers linking UPFs with obesity and a range of other health problems.

Governments took notice, too. In 2014, Brazil began advising people to avoid UPFs. Other countries, including France, Belgium and Israel, followed suit. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has been a critic of UPFs, saying in January that they are “poisoning the American people”. In May, the US government announced plans for a research agenda to support nutrition policy and improve people’s diets, in part by improving understanding of the impacts of UPFs on health.