Five Bay Area Labs Fail to Replicate Lasting Psilocybin Effects in Mice
A study involving five laboratories at UC Berkeley, UCSF and Stanford found that a single psilocybin dose produced short-term effects in mice but did not reliably reproduce lasting behavioral benefits 24 hours later. The study appeared Monday in Nature Neuroscience.
By the Bay Area Brief staff · Edited by Seamus McKenna · · 2 min read
Downtown San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley from the hills. Photo: Michael from San Jose, California, USA / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (cropped, resized and color-graded). Archive photo of the area; not a photo of the events in this story.
A study involving five laboratories at UC Berkeley, UCSF and Stanford found that a single psilocybin dose produced short-term effects in mice but did not reliably reproduce lasting behavioral benefits 24 hours later. The study appeared Monday in Nature Neuroscience.
Berkeley News and The Daily Californian described parallel experiments designed around the same methods, an effort to test reproducibility rather than simply produce a new positive finding.
The findings do not settle whether psychedelics can help humans. The experiments used one dose and a limited set of conditions, and researchers warned against broad conclusions. Berkeley doctoral student Odilia Lu said other doses or designs might yield different results; researchers also stressed the limits of using mouse behavior to model human psychiatric experiences.
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At CoRL in Austin, NVIDIA introduced GR00T 2, an open world-action model for robots. The company said it reached 95% average success on 50 tasks with five demonstrations each. Weights are due in December.
A UC Riverside scientist who skied into the backcountry found plastic particles at all seven Sierra sites sampled; the snowpack supplies about 30% of California's fresh water.
Lightspeed led the round. Warp wants to bring drug-discovery chemistry work that is often sent to contractors in China back to U.S. labs run by chemists, AI and robots.
