Ketamine Improves Bipolar Depression Within Minutes Bipolar disorder is a serious and debilitating condition where individuals experience severe swings in mood between mania and depression. The episodes of low or elevated mood can last days or months, and the risk of suicide is high. Antidepressants are commonly prescribed to treat or prevent the depressive episodes, but they are not universally effective. For these reasons, better treatments for depression are desperately needed. A group of researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health, led by Dr. In this new study, they administered a single dose of ketamine and a single dose of placebo to a group of patients on two different days, two weeks apart. When the patients received ketamine, their depression symptoms significantly improved within 40 minutes, and remained improved over 3 days. Importantly, and for the first time in a group of patients with bipolar depression, they also found that ketamine significantly reduced suicidal thoughts.
The World's Richest Countries And Biggest Economies, In 2 Graphics : Planet Money Gross Domestic Product — GDP — may have its limits. But it's a useful, broad measure for looking at national economies. It's basically the total dollar value of all of the goods and services a country produces in a year. Here are all the countries with GDP of over $100 billion: Notes GDP at current exchange rate for 2010. Having a very large GDP means a country is an important economic player in the world. A better measure for looking at the wealth or poverty of a nation's citizens is GDP per capita (adjusted for the fact that $1 buys more in some countries than in others). Here are all the countries in the world with GDP per capita over $15,000 a year: GDP per capita (purchasing power parity), 2010. Perhaps the most striking difference between the two graphs is China, which has the second biggest economy in the world but is still very poor. It's also worth noting that GDP per capita is just an average. Update: The World Bank does not list Taiwan as a separate country.
Ghostly jets seen streaming from Milky Way's core Newly discovered γ-ray jets (pink) and bubbles (purple), shown in this artist's conception, suggest that the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way was active as recently as 20,000 years ago. Astronomers have found the best evidence yet that the dormant gravitational monster that lies at the centre of the Milky Way — a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A* — recently emitted a pair of γ-ray jets. As they feed on stars and clouds of gas that stray too close, black holes at the centres of other galaxies create bright jets that can be seen across cosmic distances. But the Milky Way's black hole shows no signs of such activity. Finkbeiner and Meng Su, also of Harvard-Smithsonian, reported their findings in an article posted 29 May on the preprint server arXiv.org1. The jets may also be responsible for another intriguing Galactic feature: two giant γ-ray-emitting bubbles of gas that Finkbeiner and his colleagues reported in 2010 using the same telescope2.