Friday Delights
Life on Venus, Brexit, Ketamine
Is there life outside of Earth? This question has captivated humans for the longest time. Whether it is intelligent or not, finding life outside of our home planet will be a massive discovery. This time, scientists believe there is a chance to find life inside our own solar system — namely on Venus. Scientists discovered phosphine in the clouds of Venus, and one of the explanations for its presence is the existence of life on the planet.
Of course, there is no way to tell by just looking at Venus with telescopes — we must send probes and collect samples. Luckily, a company in New Zealand, called Rocket Lab, had already started work on such a mission, even before the discovery was made. They are developing a small satellite called Photon, and are planning to send it on their own rocket somewhere around 2023. This is definitely one of the space-related things I am most excited about in the next couple of years.
In the last few years, British politics have been, rightfully, dominated by the problem of Brexit — how should it be done, who should be in charge of doing and what is the best way to execute it are all questions that demand immediate answers. However, there is another question that is definitely worth exploring — how did we get here in the first place?
Here is an amazing lecture by Prof Dorling (University of Oxford), looking at why and how Brexit happened, where the vote came from, and why there was a referendum in the first place. I also recommend reading this article, which digs deep into the Conservative party and the European Research Group that was formed and acted as a party within a party.
Last week a friend of mine sent me this study from 2014, where ketamine was given to patients with treatment-resistant depression. Probably the most exciting aspect of the study is the fact that improvement was detected just 24-hours after administering the drug. I had some vague idea that drugs used to combat depression usually take 6–12 weeks to produce any viable effects, so I decided to do a little research.
Turns out we still haven’t fully understood why ketamine is useful in combating depression. This paper is a good reference point for some of the studies done, looking at 28 research papers on using ketamine to treat depression. The results strongly suggest that ketamine has a rapid and sustained antidepressant effect on treatment-resistant depression patients.
The benefits of those discoveries go beyond the use of ketamine. The research reveals that ketamine is efficient because it acts on the glutamatergic system in the brain — a discovery that led to the development and FDA approval of other drugs like esketamine, bruxanolone and buprenorphine. There has been a lot of talk about psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD and their use in treating depression and anxiety disorders. However, the story of ketamine is proof that there are plenty of other chemicals which are worth exploring in the fight against depression.
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Today’s bonus video is a timelapse of Tesla’s Shanghai Gigadactory production line. As you can expect, there are lots of robots.
