Rogan ‘genuinely concerned’ about drone sightings after 'sniffer' theory emerges

 Podcast king Joe Rogan said the mysterious drones that have buzzed around the tristate area have left him “genuinely concerned” Sunday after watching a video that floated an unverified theory about the unmanned devices sniffing out harmful substances.

John Ferguson, the CEO of a remote aircraft system company in Kansas, claimed in a drawn-out TikTok video on Saturday the drones are attempting to “smell” either a gas leak, “radioactive material,” or something else on the ground.

“The only reason why you would ever fly an unmanned aircraft at night is if you’re looking for something,” Ferguson said in the clip, noting he doesn’t believe the drones are nefarious.

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Rogan weighed in on the new drone theory on Sunday.Zuffa LLC via Getty Images

“So my belief is they’re trying to smell something on the ground – gas leak, radioactive material, whatever,” the CEO said.

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Ferguson added that the theory was his best guess based on his expertise and just his opinion on the drone mystery that’s gripped the East Coast and admitted “I’ve not bounced this off anybody.”

“So if you think it’s bulls–t, whatever, that’s cool. I don’t want to spread misinformation, as we know that there’s a lot of that going around,” he said in the TikTok video.

But his theory resonated with many online including Rogan, who offered his two cents on the drones that have unnerved New Jersey and New York residents for weeks.

“This is the first video about these drones that has got me genuinely concerned,” he wrote on X on Sunday.

The popular podcast host previously called the claims from the US government “sus” after White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the drones were not a public safety concern, and many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft.

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The drone sightings have unnerved residents.MCSO

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Drones pepper the New Jersey sky on Dec. 5.@DougSpac

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas also downplayed concerns about the drones on Sunday, claiming part of the drone sightings are based on relaxed regulations that allow the devices to fly at night.

“Some of those drone sightings are, in fact, drones,” he said. “Some are manned aircraft that are commonly mistaken for drones. And we do see duplicative reporting.”

The Post has sought comment from DHS over the latest theory.

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The theory came from a new TikTok video posted on Saturday.tiktok / @john.ferguson73

A wide range of pols – both Republicans and Democrats — have been making noise about the seemingly endless drone sightings in the tri-state area. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer called on the feds to deploy radar technology to identify the swarms of drones.

Schumer, along with New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim sent a letter to the FBI, Homeland Security, and the Federal Aviation Administration last week demanding an explanation about what is to “identify and address the source of these incursions.”

https://nypost.com/2024/12/15/us-news/joe-rogan-says-hes-genuinely-concerned-about-drone-sightings/

Microglia: The double-edged sword in Alzheimer's progression

 Microglia are known to play an important role in Alzheimer's disease, but exactly what they do has remained a mystery. Scientists in the Bart De Strooper Lab at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease have unraveled the varying roles of microglia in Alzheimer's at different stages of the disease. Their research was published in Nature Communications.

Many of the risk genes for Alzheimer's point toward a central role of microglia, the macrophage cells that act as one of the main methods of immune defense in the central nervous system. Yet exactly how they play a role in the disease has remained unclear for scientists.

"The role of microglia in Alzheimer's has been puzzling for researchers due to contradictory findings of past studies," Nóra Baligács, first author of the paper and Ph.D. researcher in the De Strooper Lab, explains. "Some hypothesized that microglia cleared amyloid-β (Aβ) plaques—the biological signature of Alzheimer's disease—from the brain, while others were convinced that microglia were involved in spreading Aβ to different parts of the brain."

Due to this discrepancy, researchers in the De Strooper Lab hypothesized that the role of microglia in Alzheimer's may depend on the stage of the disease. To test this, they used a drug to take away microglia from the brains of Alzheimer's mouse models, both before and after the formation of Aβ plaques.

Different roles in different stages

They found that when microglia were depleted before plaques were present, fewer plaques formed in the brains of these mice. This suggests that when microglia are present at an early stage, they are involved in creating plaques in the brain. However, when microglia were depleted after the formation of plaques, the plaques became more compact and less pathology was observed in neurons.

"From these experiments, we concluded that microglia do indeed have different functions at different stages at the disease: in the early stages, they perform a 'good' role and in the later stages a 'bad' one," says Baligács. "But we didn't stop there—we were also curious to know why microglia do different things at different stages of Alzheimer's."

When they read existing research on this topic, the team discovered that in early stages of the disease, microglia are not yet activated. At the early stages, they're mostly homeostatic, and become activated only later on in the disease. They believed that these homeostatic microglia may be the ones responsible for spreading the plaques, while the activated ones may be the ones responsible for compacting them.

To test this, the lab transplanted human microglia into the Alzheimer's mouse model. These human microglia contained a risk gene that prevents microglia from responding and getting activated, making them homeostatic. The researchers found that in the Alzheimer's mouse models with the homeostatic microglia, there were more and bigger plaques in the brain, in addition to more pathological neurons.

"Our study confirms that homeostatic microglia play a detrimental role at the beginning of Alzheimer's disease, causing more plaques, while the activated microglia may provide a protective role later on in Alzheimer's," Bart De Strooper, group leader at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research, concludes. "These findings clarify conflicting reports, confirm microglia as key drivers of amyloid pathology, and raise questions about optimal therapeutic strategies for the disease."

More information: Nóra Baligács et al, Homeostatic microglia initially seed and activated microglia later reshape amyloid plaques in Alzheimer's Disease, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-54779-w

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-12-microglia-edged-sword-alzheimer.html

How opioid abuse can change the brain

 "This is your brain on drugs," the old anti-drug admonition says, and now a new study has found there's something to that chestnut.

Opioid addicts experienced structural and functional changes in specific regions of their brains, MRI scans show.

These changes are important to understand, given that around 2.5 million adults in the U.S. have opioid use disorder, researchers said. There were more than 81,000 overdose deaths involving opioids in 2023.

"Our goal is to understand better what could have caused these alterations to inform new treatment targets," said researcher Dr. Saloni Mehta, a postdoctoral associate with the Yale School of Medicine's Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging.

For the study, published Dec. 10 in the journal Radiology, researchers compared brain scans of people addicted to opioids with those of non-addicts, using scans performed between February 2021 and May 2023.

Specifically, researchers looked at structural MRI scans for 103 people with opioid addiction and 105 non-addicts, and functional MRI scans for 74 addicts and 100 controls.

Functional MRI scans can measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, while structural scans take snapshots of the shape of different brain regions.

The scans showed changes in brain regions that contain large amounts of opioid receptors, researchers said.

Some regions like the thalamus and the right medial temporal lobe of the brain were smaller in opioid addicts, while others like the cerebellum and brainstem were larger.

These brain regions also appeared to have increased functional connectivity between them, researchers said.

The results also showed some differences between men and women when it came to brain changes linked to opioid addiction.

"Previous studies have been performed on small sample sizes, many of which included no women," Mehta explained in a journal news release. "Ours is a moderate sample size, approximately half of which is female."

"We found that alteration patterns in the medial prefrontal cortex—a core region involved in many mental health conditions—were different between men and women in the group with opioid use disorder," Mehta added. "This highlights the importance of assessing sex differences in opioid use disorder neuro-imaging studies."

Now that these differences have been found, researchers will investigate what they mean and how they might influence a person's behavior, Mehta said.

Future research also needs to figure out whether these brain changes are permanent, or if they subside after a person receives treatment for their addiction, he added.

"Our eventual goal is to examine how brain alterations in individuals with opioid use disorder may be linked to outcome measures," Mehta said.

More information: Saloni Mehta et al, Alterations in Volume and Intrinsic Resting-State Functional Connectivity Detected at Brain MRI in Individuals with Opioid Use Disorder, Radiology (2024). DOI: 10.1148/radiol.240514