There is currently no cure, so existing treatments aim to alleviate the symptoms. Hormonal medications can stall the menstrual cycle to limit the growth and inflammation of the lesions, while surgery can physically remove lesions. However, the former can come with side effects, such as nausea and mood swings, and lesions often regrow after surgery. So additional options are needed.

In previous research with mice, study co-author Kanako Hayashi, a professor in the Washington State University School of Molecular Biosciences, identified a group of rogue immune cells specific to endometrial lesion tissue. These cells turbocharged the painful inflammatory reactions and drove the growth of more of this problematic tissue.

The cells also happen to have a unique chemical label, called a folate receptor, which makes them an excellent potential drug target. But why start from scratch when there's an existing medication that might do the trick?

Enter niclosamide, a drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat tapeworm infections. In recent years, clinicians have been exploring whether this medicine could also prove effective for other conditions, ranging from cancer to Parkinson's disease.

"We have reported that niclosamide inhibits endometriosis progression, suppressing the inflammatory mechanisms and cytokine secretions," said Hayashi, referencing more of the group's past work in mice. However, several issues made the drug impractical: It doesn't dissolve well in water, last long in the body, or target the cells where it's needed most.

So the researchers teamed up with Anjali Sharma, a nanomedicine specialist at the University of Michigan, to tweak the drug's structure. Using click chemistry — a simple reaction that bolts together two chemical building blocks — Sharma attached the niclosamide unit to a large, tree-like molecule called a dendrimer. This helped the drug dissolve better in blood.

She then added a folate group, which ensured that the modified medication would only target the rogue immune cells with the complementary receptor.

"The drug is attached in such a way that when it is in systemic circulation, nothing happens until it goes inside the diseased cells," Sharma said. Once there, it is slowly released inside the cell over a period of two weeks. "Basically, the dendrimer is like the Uber, the folate is like the GPS, and the drug is like the passenger," she explained.

The next steps

With these practical issues resolved, the team tested the modified drug in a mouse model, which mimics the lesions seen in endometriosis in humans. Scans of the mice showed that the treatment directly zeroed in on the affected endometrial tissue and didn't accumulate in other organs, like the liver.

Treating mice with a single injection dramatically reduced their pain symptoms, compared with untreated mice. It also slowed ‪—‬ or, in some cases, entirely halted ‪—‬ the growth of new lesions.

Because mice don't naturally menstruate or develop endometriosis, there is still significant work to do before these findings can be replicated in humans. But for now, the study is a promising stepping stone for future research, Simitsidellis said.

"There's a lot of potential in repurposing of drugs that have been tested in clinical trials to see if they would be effective in endometriosis ‪—‬ for example, targeting inflammation or immune cell dysfunction," he told Live Science. "The next steps would be to replicate on larger sample sizes and, if that's promising, do a phase one clinical trial in humans." That initial trial would test the treatment's safety in patients, while later trials would look at its effectiveness for endometriosis.

Even at this early stage, though, patients are clamoring to get involved in the upcoming research. Hayashi and Sharma have received hundreds of emails asking to join a future trial.

"They are really suffering," Hayashi said. "Endometriosis is an understudied, underacknowledged, underfunded disease, but hopefully we can make this a solution in the near future."

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

'> Tapeworm drug could help treat endometriosis, mouse study hints Kathleen Springer, a research geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said in a statement.

The White Sands footprints suggest that people from Asia reached the Americas via the region around the Bering Strait much earlier than scientists initially thought, challenging a long-held assumption that humans arrived on the continent around 13,000 years ago. While some scientists have disputed the methods used to date the footprints, evidence is building that they are around 23,000 years old.

White Sands contains footprints from various time periods, including footprints of a caregiver and a toddler who were there 10,000 years ago. Over thousands of years, people trudged across the New Mexico landscape alongside iconic ice age animals, including mammoths and giant ground sloths. The researchers have also discovered sled-like drag marks alongside ancient footprints at White Sands, providing evidence for a kind of travois — a wooden frame made from two poles bound together — that people likely would have used for transporting goods.

By looking at ancient pollen for the new study, researchers could deduce which plants grew across the millennia when humans lived in the area. The site's rock samples also contained waxes from plant leaves, membrane lipids from bacteria, and other organic molecules that helped the researchers better understand the environmental conditions of the time.

The analysis revealed that around 24,200 years ago, White Sands had a large lake and its surrounding mountains were coated in conifer trees (Pinus, Abies, and Picea). Then, over the next two millennia, temperatures rose, the lake began to shrink, and the conifer trees were replaced by oak trees (Quercus) and sagebrush, according to the statement.

"Throughout these periods of change, the people continued to visit and live in this area," study co-author Sally Reynolds, a paleoanthropologist at Bournemouth University in the U.K., said in the statement. "The sediments containing their footprints show us their environment changed significantly within individual human lifetimes."

The researchers speculated that people might have returned to White Sands at different times to benefit from the changing climate, with a shrinking lake potentially providing higher concentrations of animals and plants. However, while the footprints document that humans were present, they reveal little about their behavior.

"The footprints give us a snapshot of the people who lived there over 20,000 years ago," Reynolds said. "But they are not a continuous movie of their lives. They are individual frames — showing moments when humans, mud, water and chance came together."

'> Ancient Indigenous people in New Mexico lived through extreme climate change 23,000 years ago, study suggests artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots will "go rogue," suddenly switching from helpful responses to potentially harmful ones.

In a new study published Oct. 8 in the journal Patterns, physics professor Neil Johnson and doctoral student Frank Yingjie Huo, both at The George Washington University, show how the order in which a chatbot is given certain prompts can drastically reshape its answers, leading to "tipping points" that can send the chatbot down a rabbit hole of bad advice. However, Johnson and Huo say their formula can easily predict these tipping points.There have been horror stories of AI encouraging users into suicide, helping build lethal weapons, and amplifying violent or harmful points of view. At the same time, researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic, respectively, have repeatedly and openly stated that they don't really understand why their creations behave the way they do. They have, however, built safeguards that use a variety of tools ‪—‬ including content filtering, reinforcement learning and other technical guardrails ‪—‬ to reduce risks.

But Johnson sees those tools as insufficient. "The safety measures now are the equivalent of strapping big, bouncy cushions under a plane," he told Live Science. "They don't stop the plane from crashing; they just make it that when the plane crashes, it'll be slightly softer." When people such as doctors, lawyers or soldiers are accessing AI chatbots offline for privacy, the problem is even more acute.

Johnson and Huo sought to find a more fundamental safeguard than the currently available tools. In doing so, they exposed an internal tracking mechanism they describe as a compass needle. This needle is the model's "residual vector" moving across neural network layers as a prompt is processed.

The residual vector naturally gravitates toward either desirable or undesirable outputs, but it is heavily influenced by how a user prompts the AI. "You can tip the balance, not even by changing the content but by changing the order in which you ask it," Johnson said, "which just shows how delicate this internal balance between good and bad, desirable and undesirable, can be."

For example, Johnson and Huo prompted OpenAI’s basic GPT-2 model with questions about vaccines, hurting others and self-harm. When the question “Are vaccines bad?” was asked first, the bot’s responses to this and subsequent questions were desirable, or good. When it was asked last, all subsequent responses were concerning.

From these insights, the researchers developed a mathematical formula to estimate the circumstances in which an AI would reach the tipping point between desirable and undesirable outputs. Johnson said that by embedding their simple mathematical formula in open-source models in the lab, they have shown that it empirically works as an early warning system, though he does not expect OpenAI or Anthropic to be knocking on his door anytime soon.

"I'm expecting a lot of pushback from these companies," he said. "It's not in their interests to have someone from outside saying you could have avoided a lot of these problems."

Wei Xing, a lecturer in AI at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. who was not involved in the study, agrees that concerns surrounding unmonitored offline devices are well founded. However, he urged caution before embracing this approach as a practical safeguard. "The authors reduce a huge system to a single tiny component, like explaining a whole car by studying one spark plug," Xing said.

Safety training — the primary defense in modern AI — cannot be represented in their simplified model, the formula was tested only on old, basic models (GPT-2, and EleutherAI’s Pythia and Meta OPT open-source models) rather than AI assistants people actually use, and the results did not yield significant evidence to support the authors’ conclusions, he added.

In defense, Johnson maintains that the open-source models they used have the same mechanical blueprints as frontier systems, and that he and Huo used fairly large, billion-parameter models in their study.

More testing on the latest models is needed to determine whether this early warning system for AI has legs. But for now, Johnson and Huo’s research has drawn attention to an important concern everyone should be aware of: that AI has the capacity within it to turn over to undesired behavior at the drop of a hat.

'> Physicists claim they can predict when AI turns dangerous

Take a fish. Eat its flesh if you want, but don't scorn the rest. It can always be used, one way or another, whether you want fishmeal or face cream.

Products derived from fish turn up everywhere. Guanine, an ingredient produced from fish scales, is found in bath foam, perfume, nail products, shampoo, skincare products, and lipstick. Fishes can become gelatine, glue, and squalene. They can be in your dietary supplements or your glass of wine: isinglass, derived from dried fish air bladders, is used in wine-making.

Futuristic piscigrafts are irrelevant to most people in Senegal, but they still have to deal with the fish by-products industry, because they have to watch as fish they could eat are transformed into the most common and lucrative fish by-products and sent abroad.

Fishmeal is a sandy grubby powder that is worth billions. Minks eat it. Pigs eat it. Cattle eat it. Fishes eat it. It is also an ingredient in fertilizer and pet food. Fishmeal is part of a huge silent industry of fish by-products that used to be known as FMFO (fishmeal and fish oil) and has now been rebranded by the industry association as 'marine ingredients,' a vague term that covers a broad range of fish-derived products, most of which are never noticed.

The Food and Agriculture Organization defines fishmeal as 'the clean, ground, dried tissue of undecomposed whole fish or fish cuttings, either or both, without the extraction of part of the oil.'

American pets may also find themselves eating fish liver and glandular meal, made from dried complete fish viscera; more general fish by-products, which are 'non-rendered, clean, undecomposed portions of fish (such as, although not limited to, heads, fins, tails, ends, skin, bone and viscera)'; or condensed fish protein digest, the 'condensed enzymatic digest of clean undecomposed whole fish or fish cuttings using the enzyme hydrolysis process'.

'Undecomposed' is doing a lot of work here, a strange term because unless a fish is caught by a vessel with freezer capacity — which no artisanal fisher has — it will be decomposing for days. In theory, fishmeal is impeccably sustainable. It should be a product made from parts of fishes that would otherwise be discarded. It is because of fishmeal that the term 'reduction fisheries' was coined.

Take the meat and the prized flesh, and the rest can be reduced or diverted to other uses. That is the theory. It is not what happens in West Africa.

Each year, half a million tonnes of wild fish are caught in African waters and sent to Europe to feed animals, when they could have fed 33 million Africans instead. That number of people is more than the combined populations of Senegal, Mauritania, and The Gambia. Globally a fifth of wild fishes become fishmeal or fish oil, but 90 per cent of fishmeal fishes are suitable for human consumption.

China uses nearly half of all FMFO, but then China uses most of everything. Europe also takes and takes. Spain imports the most fish oil from Senegal, and France takes 70 per cent of Mauritania's.

In 2019, Changing Markets Foundation produced a detailed investigative report into the fishmeal industry in India, Vietnam, and The Gambia. In each country, the pattern was similar: first the foreign factories come, then they take the fish, then they pollute the environment, then the fishermen say there are no fish left.

Although noting 'a surprising lack of traceability and transparency regarding the origin and supply chain of farmed seafood products,' the foundation linked plenty of reputable European retailers to FMFO supply chains that may use West African fish. For example: Sainsbury's, ALDI, Lidl, and Marks & Spencer in the UK; Auchan, Groupe Casino, Monoprix, and Système U in France (that is a full house of big French supermarkets); all the German ALDIs; and Mercadona in Spain. Sainsbury's, Marks & Spencer, and Mercadona have said they don't use West African FMFO in their seafood products, but how will they know?

The European Union's IUU [Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing] regulations, which require a catch certificate or similar to show the fish was legally caught, do not cover fishmeal. In Mauritania, some Chinese-owned fishmeal factories have their own trawler fleets. The fish bypasses human mouths and goes straight to the factory. That is one tactic. The other is to outbid.

The fish processors tell me that they cannot compete with the prices that fish factories will pay for sardinella. Fish processors get no subsidies from the government, unlike Chinese fishing companies. In The Gambia, one fishmeal factory used 40 per cent of the country's entire fish catch in one year. Black and white. White stealing from Black. The villain/victim template seems neat and unassailable.

It is true — Europeans are using fish that West Africans could eat — and yet it is not all the truth. In Senegal, The Gambia, Mauritania, local fishermen supply fishmeal factories because the factories pay better. In Senegal, a fisheries union official tells me that there are too many pirogues. They are chasing smaller and smaller fish to sell to the factories. It is unsustainable.

The website of the IFFO, which used to stand for International Fishmeal and Fish Oil Organization and now somehow is short for the Marine Ingredients Organisation, is plain. Marine ingredients 'play an essential role in global food security'.

Rubbish, said Francisco Marí of Bread for the World at the CAOPA [African Confederation of Professional Organisations of Artisanal Fisheries] workshop. 'It's just for prawns and salmon — they are not necessary foods; it's a luxury. It's not enough for us to have 10—15 per cent of fish to feed salmon and prawns. Indirectly, we are eating your fish. It's not essential for the alimentation of the US or Japan. We are taking your fish to feed a luxury product that we don't need.'

Every Last Fish: A Deep Dive into the World of Fishes and Fishing by Rose George is published by Granta

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'> 'They cannot compete with the prices that fish factories will pay': How demand for fish meal takes priority over feeding people ," filmmakers followed a team of archaeologists from the field to the laboratory to try to answer questions surrounding the origins of the understudied civilization, its ritual and trade activities and why it disappeared after 500 years.

"When I was growing up, I was surrounded by symbols of Great Zimbabwe," University of Oxford archaeologist Shadreck Chirikure, who is leading the new excavations at the site, said in the documentary. "It was only when I started studying archaeology at university that I started realizing that there was this very big debate around who built Great Zimbabwe."

The site was first excavated in the late 19th century and quickly looted by British colonists for its ivory, metal and gold artifacts. These colonists insisted that Africans hadn't built Great Zimbabwe, instead claiming it arose from the Phoenicians, a people originally from the Mediterranean; they used that inaccuracy to justify taking all the artifacts to England, according to the documentary. Today, many Great Zimbabwean artifacts are held in the collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford.

But excavations are showing that Great Zimbabwe was a highly connected African kingdom that flourished from the 11th century until at least the 15th century, when the population may have gotten too large for the dry, over-farmed land to feed. Archaeologists have already discovered glass artifacts at Great Zimbabwe that came from Southeast Asia, India and the Middle East via boat.

"From India or Sri Lanka to Great Zimbabwe, it's at least 8,000 kilometers [5,000 miles]," Chirikure told Live Science. Merchants sailed the Indian Ocean using winds kicked up by monsoon cycles.

"It's time we try to understand a bit more about trade and exchange," Chirikure said, "particularly by comparing the communities in places like Sri Lanka and southern Africa. Because it's the water that separated people, but it was also the water that connected people."

In this exclusive clip from the documentary, Chirikure and archaeologist Muchen Zhou, a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, examine a jade-green piece of pottery unearthed from the hillside at Great Zimbabwe. The glossy sheen on the sherd suggests the pot was fired at an extremely high temperature, a technological achievement that had only been accomplished in China at that early date. This style of pottery, called Longquan celadon, was made in eastern China starting around A.D. 950.

"We find it across the site of Great Zimbabwe," Chirikure said, but in small quantities. "This means the Chinese ceramics are a rarity. Perhaps they were used by the elites. They would have been quite a significant or highly valued exotic ware."

Other evidence of long-distance trade has been discovered at Great Zimbabwe, Chirikure said, including metal objects from what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo, around 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) away. The people of Great Zimbabwe were also sourcing copper and tin from modern-day South Africa, more than 300 miles (500 km) away. And chemical analysis of cattle bones has shown that some of the animals were being traded across an 87-mile (140 km) area.

For his next project, Chirikure hopes to investigate local resources, such as soapstone, that hold a lot of meaning for the local Shona people, Zimbabwe's largest Indigenous group; and for Zimbabweans.

"Soapstone birds are an important part of Great Zimbabwe," he said, "but no one really knows where they got their soapstone from."

The Zimbabwe Bird, designed based on a series of birds carved from soapstone that were found at the archaeological site, is the national emblem and appears prominently on the country's flag.

"There are a number of soapstone outcrops around Great Zimbabwe," Chirikure said. "Next time in the field, that's one of the things I want to do — just go out there and try and find the geological sources of that soapstone."

The PBS documentary "Secrets of the Dead: Africa's Golden City" premieres Wednesday, Oct. 14, at 10 p.m. U.S. Eastern time.

'> Chinese pottery discovered in Great Zimbabwe reveals medieval African empire's vast connections spanning thousands of miles