Pyschoactive Siestas: Rethinking the Role of Consciousness in Psychedelic Therapy

What if the magic of psychedelics isn’t in the trip, but in what happens beneath the surface of consciousness? At Stanford, Dr. Boris Heifets and his team are challenging the idea that mystical experiences are essential to healing—by testing psychedelics on anesthetized patients to isolate their biochemical effects. In his article, Jones interviews these scientists as they push past FDA roadblocks and into the murky realm of non-ordinary states, unlocking new methods of mental health treatment.

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The Sun and all its Warmth

Kylie Ziemke is 2025’s 3rd-place winner of the Catalyst Creative Contest. She is a senior double majoring in Neuroscience and Psychology. She has always enjoyed using writing to bridge the intersection between science and humanity; in other words, the world as it is, and the world as we experience it. She wrote “The Sun and All its Warmth” to explore how our personal experiences and emotions warp how we perceive the passage of time. It is a story of grief so all-consuming it stops time itself, but it is also a story of perspective and of the light at the end of the tunnel.

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Space, Time, and Relativity: The Next Frontier

Joshua Thomas, the second place winner of the 2025 Creative Contest, is a second-year Molecular Biology student pursuing a Bridging Disciplines Program (BDP) Certificate in Social Inequality, Health, and Policy. This piece represents what he believes science to be: the exploration of the next frontier—pushing beyond the known into the vast unknown.

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Echoes Through Time

Meet the 1st place winner of the 2025 Creative Contest, Argentina Mora! Argentina Mora is a junior Cell and Molecular Biology major, where they explore the intersection of science and art. Their mixed-media piece, "Echoes Through Time", visually represents the fluid nature of time through the lens of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. By juxtaposing raw emotion with cosmic structures, the piece captures the distortion of time in moments of nostalgia and regret.

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Legislation Spotlight: FRI Course Credits for SDS Majors

In this legislation spotlight, Torabi highlights Neena Varanasi’s legislation on offering course credit for Statistics and Data Science majors in FRI. If you’re an FRI student in SDS, check out this legislation to learn more about how students in NSC are working to make it easier for you to incorporate research into your degree plan!

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