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Two comatose patients were taken off life support. What happened in their brains stunned scientists.

Research into our dying moments can help us understand Near Death Experiences, or even cheat death altogether.

Photo by Juliana Araujo the artist on Unsplash

A woman in the sun.

The one thing we all have in common is death. It's inevitable, and yet it's under-studied and often overlooked by many in the scientific community, even though it's the crux (or the bane, depending on who you ask) of existence.

A staggering number of people have reported Near Death Experiences (NDEs) after certain criteria were met. This includes, but is not limited to, seeing a bright light, feeling disassociated from one's body, and feeling a sense of overwhelming peace. In fact, according to research, studies show that one in ten people report having had a NDE.

More and more researchers are taking notice and using these self-described NDEs as roadmaps for their empirical studies of what physically happens in the brain as we're dying .

death, dying, near death experiences, science, brain waves Lord Byron on his death-bed commons.wikimedia.org

Death and dying are a fascinating, perplexing puzzle for doctors and researchers. In 2024 article for The Guardian titled, "The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense,’" author Alex Blasdel discusses the focused curiosity Jimo Borjigin, Ph.D., a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, has on the topic. "She had read about the near-death experiences of certain cardiac-arrest survivors who had undergone extraordinary psychic journeys before being resuscitated. Sometimes, these people reported travelling outside of their bodies towards overwhelming sources of light where they were greeted by dead relatives. Others spoke of coming to a new understanding of their lives, or encountering beings of profound goodness."

The thing of it is, one doesn't have to have a belief in a "higher" power to experience these events. A self-described atheist has given many talks and interviews about her experience.

A self described atheist shares her NDE experience www.youtube.com, Coming Home Channel

Borjigin was a skeptic but began to investigate. In a 2023 piece for Michigan Medicine, lead research editor Kelly Malcolm writes that Borjigin led the study for The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. She and her team found two patients who "upon removal of ventilator support, showed an increase in heart rate along with a surge of gamma wave activity, considered the fastest brain activity and associated with consciousness."

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Altered states, indeed. To get more specific, when one of the patients (referred to as Patient One) was taken off life support, something extraordinary happened. Blasdel reports, "In the moments after Patient One was taken off oxygen, there was a surge of activity in her dying brain. Areas that had been nearly silent while she was on life support suddenly thrummed with high-frequency electrical signals called gamma waves. In particular, the parts of the brain that scientists consider a 'hot zone' for consciousness became dramatically alive."

It gets even more fascinating. Blasdel continues, "For about two minutes after her (Patient One's) oxygen was cut off, there was an intense synchronisation of her brain waves, a state associated with many cognitive functions, including heightened attention and memory. The synchronisation dampened for about 18 seconds, then intensified again for more than four minutes. It faded for a minute, then came back for a third time."

In other words, the patient's life may have flashed before their eyes, as the cliché goes. Unfortunately, Patient One didn't recover, but based on the brain waves, it's likely they experienced a cacophony of neurotransmitters exploding into light, guiding them through tunnels of memories. Maybe?

Upworthy spoke with Dr. Elreacy Dock, DBH, D.Th., Certified Grief Educator, and Adjunct Professor of Thanatology. She shares that NDEs have actually been reported in about 17 percent of patients, with a notable amount coming from cardiac arrest survivors. The why of it is much more tricky. "Theories as to why they may occur, which range from the possibility of cerebral anoxia and a significant release of neurotransmitters to other alternatives such as having consciousness independent of the brain."

brain, mind, life, death, research A plastic model of a brain. Photo by Lisa Yount on Unsplash

Furthermore, there are probably a lot more that aren't even talked about than we even know. "It has been argued that NDEs are far more prevalent than documented and that some remain unreported because people have difficulty recalling NDEs due to trauma, heavy sedation or medication use, and impaired memory," Dock concludes.

Dock reiterates that, "Some researchers believe that these waves may reflect a 'life recall' process that is similar to what some individuals have mentioned encountering in near-death experiences (e.g., a life review). Studies have also shown that when near-death experiencers have recalled their memories of these experiences, these were associated with delta and theta brain waves. These are generally attributed to trance states, episodic memory, and recollection of past events, which makes these NDE memories distinguishable as actual experiences rather than imagined experiences."

The idea being that the patient who can recall their NDE isn't making it up. Their brain waves prove that their experience, no matter what it's attributed to, was very real to them and not a fictionalized part of their imagination.

She also notes, as have many researchers, that while these NDEs are often reported as positive, that's not always the case. "It is not uncommon for individuals to report negative experiences, some of which have also been said to influence an increase in suicidal ideation among those who have made previous attempts."

The trailer for the docuseries "Surviving Death." www.youtube.com, Netflix

This is discussed at length in Netflix's docuseries Surviving Death, which ran the gamut of emotions from those who experienced NDEs and lived to tell about them. Some saw it as a spiritual awakening, while others were merely baffled by how odd the experience was. Many had beautiful sensations to report, while others felt darkness and fear. Much like life itself, our experience with death sounds pretty personalized.

As Blasdel writes, "Death may be far more alive than we ever thought possible."

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A 13-year-old boy has become the first person to be cured of a deadly brain cancer

DIPG used to be a death sentence. Now there might be some hope.

Lucas Jemeljanova, then aged 5, with his parents and sister a year before he was diagnosed with DIPG. (via Facebook)
Lucas Jemeljanova poses with his family a year before being diagnosed with cancer (Facebook)

It's a parent's worst nightmare: Taking your child to the doctor and receiving a life-changing diagnosis. It only adds to the heartbreak when they find out there may be no effective treatment at all, and that all they can do is hope for the best.

Few diagnoses strike fear in the heart of parents and doctors more than a cancer called diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, or DIPG. Primarily found in children, DIPG is a highly aggressive brain tumor that is uniformly fatal, with less than 10 percent of children surviving longer than two years after diagnosis. The tumors grow fast and on extremely vital areas like the spine and brain stem, making them exceptionally hard to remove. Though young patients have been treated with radiation, chemotherapy, and surgeries, no one had ever been cured of the fatal cancer.

But for the first time ever, a 13-year-old boy from Belgium named Lucas Jemeljanova has beaten the odds.


cancer, childhood cancer, pediatric cancer, kids, medicine, healthcare, research, innovation, clinical trials, DIPG Various brain scans. Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Diagnosed with DIPG at age six, Lucas’ doctor Jacques Grill told Lucas’ parents, Cedric and Olesja, that he was unlikely to live very long. Instead of giving up hope, Cedric and Olesja flew Lucas to France to participate in a clinical trial called BIOMEDE, which tested new potential drugs against DIPG.

Lucas was randomly assigned a medication called everolimus in the clinical trial, a chemotherapy drug that works by blocking a protein called mTOR. mTOR helps cancer cells divide and grow new blood vessels, while everolimus decreases blood supply to the tumor cells and stops cancer cells from reproducing. Everolimus, a tablet that’s taken once per day, has been approved in the UK and the US to treat cancers in the breast, kidneys, stomach, pancreas, and others—but until the BIOMEDE clinical trial, it had never before been used to treat DIPG.

cancer, childhood cancer, pediatric cancer, kids, medicine, healthcare, research, innovation, clinical trials, DIPG Lucas Jemeljanova poses with his mother (lesja Jemeljanova / Facebook)

Though doctors weren’t sure how Lucas would react to the medication, it quickly became clear that the results were good.

“Over a series of MRI scans, I watched as the tumor completely disappeared,” Grill said in an interview. Even more remarkably, the tumor has not returned since. Lucas, who is now thirteen, is considered officially cured of DIPG.

Even after the tumor was gone, Grill, who is the head of the Brain Tumor Program in the Department of Child and Teenage Oncology at Gustave Roussy cancer research hospital in Paris, was reluctant to stop Lucas’ treatments. Until about a year and a half ago, Lucas was still taking everolimus once every day.

“I didn’t know when to stop, or how, because there was no other reference in the world,” Grill said.

While Lucas is the only one in the clinical trial whose tumor has completely disappeared, seven other children have been considered “long responders” to everolimus, meaning their tumors have not progressed for more than three years after starting treatment.

cancer, childhood cancer, pediatric cancer, kids, medicine, healthcare, research, innovation, clinical trials, DIPG Lucas Jemeljanova with his mother (Facebook) (lesja Jemeljanova / Facebook)

So why did everolimus work so well for Lucas? Doctors think that an extremely rare genetic mutation in Lucas’ tumor “made its cells far more sensitive to the drug,” Grill said, while the drug worked well in other children because of the “biological peculiarities” of their tumors.

While everolimus is by no means a cure, the trial has provided real hope for parents and families of children diagnosed with DIPG. Doctors must now work to better understand why Lucas’ tumor responded so well to the drug and how they can replicate those results in tumor “organoids”—artificially-grown cells that resemble an organ. After that, said Marie-Anne Debily, a researcher in the BIOMEDE trial, “the next step will be to find a drug that works as well on tumor cells.”

A more recent clinical trial tested a new immunotherapy treatment on young DIPG patients and showed promising results. Many of the patients' tumors shrank and several participants saw functional improvements in their symptoms and day-to-day lives. But only one of the 11 patients has seen success that rivals Lucas' — a young man identified only as Drew, who has been thriving tumor-free for over four years after receiving treatment.

Once considered a definitive death sentence, there is real hope for the first time. But there's much more research and work to be done. Until then, however, Lucas’ doctors are thrilled.

“Lucas’ case offers real hope,” said Debily.

cancer, childhood cancer, pediatric cancer, kids, medicine, healthcare, research, innovation, clinical trials, DIPG Lucas Jemeljanova with his parents and sister (lesja Jemeljanova / Facebook)

This article originally appeared last year. It has been updated.


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Researchers tested a bottle of Fiji Water against a glass of tap water. This is what they found.

Bottled water is filthy.

Image via Canva

A lab technician tests bottles of water

Here are six facts from the video above by The Story of Stuff Project that I'll definitely remember next time I'm tempted to buy bottled water.



- YouTube www.youtube.com


1. Bottled water is more expensive than tap water (and not just a little).



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A Business Insider column noted that two-thirds of the bottled water sold in the United States is in individual 16.9-ounce bottles, which comes out to roughly $7.50 per gallon. That's about 2,000 times higher than the cost of a gallon of tap water.

And in an article in 20 Something Finance, G.E. Miller investigated the cost of bottled versus tap water for himself. He found that he could fill 4,787 20-ounce bottles with tap water for only $2.10! So if he paid $1 for a bottled water, he'd be paying 2,279 times the cost of tap.

2. Bottled water could potentially be of lower quality than tap water.



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Fiji Water ran an ad campaign that was pretty disparaging about the city of Cleveland. Not a wise move. The city ordered a test of the snooty brand's water and found that Fiji Water contained levels of arsenic that weren't seen in the city's water supply.

How was that possible? Sarah Goodman of the New York Times explains:

" Bottled water manufacturers are not required to disclose as much information as municipal water utilities because of gaps in federal oversight authority. Bottom line: The Food and Drug Administration oversees bottled water, and U.S. EPA is in charge of tap water. FDA lacks the regulatory authority of EPA."

3. The amount of bottled water we buy every week in the U.S. alone could circle the globe five times!



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That sounded like it just had to be impossible, so we looked into it. Here's what our fact-checkers found:

"According to the video, ' People in the U.S. buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week.' National Geographic says for 2011, bottled water sales hit 9.1 billion gallons (roughly 34 billion liters).

A 'typical' water bottle is a half-liter, so that's about 68 billion bottles per year. Divided by 52 weeks would be a little over 1 billion bottles of water sold per week in the U.S. Because that's based on a smaller 'typical' bottle size, it seems reasonable that a half billion bottles a week could be accurate.

The Earth is about 131.5 million feet around, so yep, half a billion bottles of varying sizes strung end-to-end could circle the Earth five times."

4. Paying for bottled water makes us chumps.



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Beverage companies have turned bottled water into a multibillion-dollar industry through a concept known as manufactured demand. Bottled water advertisements used a combination of scare tactics (Tap water bad!) and seduction (From the purest mountain streams EVER!) to reel us in.

Well, we now know their claims about the superior quality of bottled water are mostly bogus. And research shows that anywhere from a quarter to 45% of all bottled water comes from the exact same place as your tap water (which, to reiterate, is so cheap it's almost free).



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5. Bottled water is FILTHY.

It takes oil — lots of it — to make plastic bottles. According to the video, the energy in the amount of oil it takes to make the plastic water bottles sold in the U.S. in one year could fuel a million cars. That's not even counting the oil it takes to ship bottled water around the world.

And once we've guzzled our bottled water, up to 80% of the empty bottles end up in landfills or noxious-gas-producing incinerators. The rest is either recycled or shipped to countries like India where poor people without environmental and labor protections have to deal with it.

On top of all that, the process of manufacturing plastic bottles is polluting public water supplies, which makes it easier for bottled water companies to sell us their expensive product.

6. There are 750 million people around the world who don't have access to clean water.


A child dies every minute from a waterborne disease. And for me, that's the core of what makes bottled water so evil.

The video wraps by comparing buying bottled water to smoking while pregnant. That may sound extreme, but after learning everything I just did about the bottled water industry, I can't disagree.



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If you're properly disgusted, here are a few ways you can help destroy the bottled water industry:

  1. Don't buy bottled water. Get a reusable water bottle. The savings will add up.
  2. Rally your schools, workplaces, and communities to ban bottled water.
  3. Demand that your city, state, and federal governments invest in better water infrastructure.

This article originally appeared 10 years ago.

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Weather reporter shares 'forced convection' hack that'll cool your hot car faster than A/C

You may look a little funny, but it beats sweating in your seat.

via Canva/Photos

A woman in a hot car.

It’s remarkable how, when it gets a little warm outside in the summer, the interior of your car can become a blazing inferno. A big reason for the discrepancy between the outside air temperature and the interior of your car is the same reason the planet is getting warmer: the greenhouse effect.

When you close your car windows and it's warm outside, the heat can’t escape because longwave radiation can’t pass through windows as easily as shortwave radiation. That’s why temperatures can go from comfortably cool when you get out of your car to blazing within minutes.

In fact, if it’s 80 degrees outside, it only takes 10 minutes for the car’s inside temperature to rise to 99 degrees and an additional hour to reach 137 degrees. That’s why it’s important never to leave your pet in the inside of your car, even when it feels cool outside.

hot car, cool car, man with fan, summer car, summer heat, sweating, A man in a hot car.via Canva/Photos

How to cool a hot car in the summer

So, how do you cool your car down when it feels like a volcano inside in the middle of summer? Victoria Fenn Alvarado, a reporter with Canada’s The Weather Network, shared a science-based hack to cool your car even faster than blasting the air conditioner. First, you open the passenger-side window down. Then you open the driver's side door and step outside of the car. "Open and close the door paridly, about seven to 10 times. Once you complete his step, you can step inside your vehicle, and now you can drive away comfortably," Alvardo said.

It may look unusual to others in the parking lot to see you using your car door like a massive fan, but the hack is effective because it utilizes forced convection to replace the hot air with cool, fresh air. “Opening and closing the door acts as a pump, allowing warm air to exit rapidly. Paired with having the window open on the other side, this motion creates a pressure drop inside the vehicle, pulling in outside air, essentially replacing the warm air with fresh air,” Alvarado continues.

Hannah Fry further explained the phenomenon in a viral TikTok video. Fry is Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and the host of numerous popular podcasts and television shows.

How to cool your hot car using forced convection

@fryrsquared

That age-old dilemma of choosing between having a non-sweltering car or baffling a passerby because you look like a fool who doesn't know how to use a door


“The reason why it works is that when you open and close the door, especially if you do it quickly, the door, as it's moving outwards, it sweeps out all of the air that's in its way, creating this sort of area of low pressure that you get here,” Fry said. “And then that sets up something called bulk flow, which is where all of the hot, sweaty, horrible air inside the car is drawn outwards.”

The hack is one of the strange things that seems obvious, but most people probably haven’t considered. However, once you see it in action, it’s impossible not to think: Why didn’t I think of that? Here’s to enjoying the rest of your summers, knowing that even if it gets a bit warm outside, you always have a cool car to look forward to.

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