This Week in Science: Reversing Alzheimer’s damage, the safest place on Earth, and more!
First up: Oceanographers exploring a sonar blip assumed they’d find a shipwreck. Instead, they stumbled onto an eerie scene that looked like the ocean’s own ‘Backrooms’.
Also this week:
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More than 5,000 feet beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, scientists encountered a truly alien landscape that might just haunt your dreams.
The remotely operated dive was part of an expedition aboard the Okeanos Explorer to map and survey the Gulf, led by marine biologist Diva Amon and echinodermologist Charles Messing.
The boat’s sonar had picked up on some kind of structure about 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles) down. It had the hallmarks of a sunken ship: a large structure surrounded by some loose, smaller ones.
From the shadows of the Gulf’s seafloor, an eerie landscape emerged.
A barren, sandy plain littered with rusted, white cubes – some busted open with the impact of falling, their plastic intestines and copper arteries exposed.
The oddly unsettling imagery feels a little like the ROV has passed through into the deep sea’s ‘backrooms’.
Read the full story here.
Slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease is the goal of most existing treatments, but reversing it is much harder. That’s because once neurons are lost, the adult brain lacks the ability to replace them.
But new research, led by scientists at the University of South Carolina, has shown promise in regrowing neurons in brain  organoids, and restoring cognition in mouse models of Alzheimer’s. 
“After just two injections, these mice became smarter,” says Peisheng Xu, professor of pharmaceutics at the University of South Carolina and corresponding author of the new study, published in the journal Cell Biomaterials. 
“Even after one injection, we already saw these mice’s behavior differ from that of the nontreated ones.”
Read the full story here.
Sometimes it seems like there’s no end to the catastrophic dangers we face as a species.
Nuclear armageddon.  Climate change. Pandemics. AI. Supervolcanoes. The list is a long one.
But if all hell really does break loose and some kind of unprecedented global disaster strikes, where would you go?
What would be the safest place to seek shelter, to lie low and ride out the storm, and hopefully survive to see a brighter day?
In the first study of its kind, published in Global Challenges, scientists have identified what appears to be the overall safest place in the world in the event of an unmitigated calamity.
Read the full story here.
Most breakfast advice focuses on what to put on your plate.
But a large study of US adults suggests the clock may deserve attention, too: The time you consume your first and last calories of the day could be linked to how long you live.
The findings show an association, not proof that changing the clock changes a person’s fate. Still, they add to evidence that health may depend not only on what we eat, but when.
Read the full story here.
Would you eat a cookie that was made from plastic?
Technically, we’re all ingesting an ungodly amount of plastic already, in the form of micro- and nanoscopic particles in our food.
But now, researchers from Southern Illinois University (SIU) Carbondale are trying to get us to eat the stuff on purpose.
It takes the form of cookies they call µBites, which, if you know your scientific notation symbols, is pronounced “microbites”.
They may sound even less appetizing than all the bugs we might have to eat in the future, but these cookies have undergone a whole lot of processing to make them (theoretically) safe to eat, nutritious, and hopefully tasty.
Read the full story here.
There are numerous kinds of diets that can help you to lose weight if you’re overweight or obese, and if all you want to do is shed some pounds, you have options.
We also know that certain kinds of diets can offer specific benefits to our health beyond mere weight loss alone.
But what’s less clear is how popular diets stack up against one another in terms of those extra benefits, specifically with regard to reversing poor cardiometabolic health caused by obesity, such as high blood fats, fatty liver disease, and prediabetes.
In a new study published in Cell Metabolism, scientists set out to find which of three popular diets commonly recommended for obesity might pack the biggest punch for improving overall metabolic health.
Read the full story here.
Watch the video above for a recap of the top stories from this week!