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The used oil from your french fry order may be fueling your next flight

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Monday, September 29, 2025

Le Diplomate had an emergency. After a week of frying frites, the kitchen at Washington’s famous standby for French cuisine was full to bursting with used grease.Two waist-high storage tanks in the back of the restaurant sloshed to the brim with dark, viscous oil. During the weekend rush, the staff stored some of the spent grease in plastic tubs, but they were quickly running out of places to put it.Restaurants are prohibited from dumping grease down the drain because it would clog city sewers. So on a Tuesday afternoon, James Howell nimbly backed his truck into an alley behind Le Diplomate. He hopped down from the cab and snaked a rubber hose to the kitchen. Then with the flip of a switch and a loud drone, the hose slurped the used cooking oil into the truck’s gleaming steel 2,200-gallon tank.James Howell of Mahoney Environmental collects used cooking oil behind Duke’s Grocery in Washington. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)Three bottles — with raw oil on the left, half-processed produce in the middle and refined aviation fuel on the right — in the Neste laboratory in Rotterdam. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)The spent grease that restaurants unload as waste has become a valuable commodity. If you’ve been on a plane lately, there’s a chance that used cooking oil has helped launch you into the sky. Refineries recycle waste oil into kerosene pure enough to power a Boeing 777. The process is expensive — but it can create 70 to 80 percent less planet-warming pollution than making jet fuel out of crude oil, experts say.Last year, airlines burned 340 million gallons of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) — nearly all of it made from used cooking oil or animal fat leftover from meat packaging.A series examining innovative and impactful approaches to addressing waste.That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 114 billion gallons of fuel airlines burned overall, which create 2.5 percent of humanity’s carbon pollution, according to the International Energy Agency. But airlines have vowed to use much more SAF to lower their greenhouse emissions. European regulators have set strict rules requiring airlines to use more SAF over time, while U.S. regulators dole out tax credits to coax companies into buying it.This is the airlines’ main plan for dealing with their greenhouse emissions. Upgrading new planes with more efficient engines helps a little. And, one day, planes may run on electric batteries or hydrogen fuel cells — but those are still decades away and may never work for long flights. To manage most of their climate impact for the foreseeable future, airlines are betting everything on alternative fuels.“Ninety-eight percent of [our greenhouse emissions] come from the fuel we burn,” said Lauren Riley, chief sustainability officer at United Airlines. “We’ll continue to look everywhere we can around technology and innovation of the aircraft itself and the engine, but we have to look at replacing our fuel.”Experts say this plan can work, but it’ll require fuel refiners to dramatically raise SAF production and find new raw materials besides old cooking oil to turn into kerosene. Depending on what they use and how they refine it, this new class of fuel could make flying more sustainable or cause a whole new set of environmental headaches.Howell, of Mahoney Environmental, collects used cooking oil in Washington. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)Harvesting the world’s greaseOn his rounds one day in early May, Howell made about two dozen stops at commercial kitchens around Washington, including an upscale cafe in the Michelin Guide, an assisted-living facility, a soul food spot where old chicken bones clogged the hose and an Italian restaurant where two unfortunate rats had drowned in a grease bin while diving for a wayward meatball. By midafternoon, his truck had about 1,200 gallons of grease in its belly.The company he works for, Mahoney Environmental, pays a few cents a gallon for the waste fat it collects from 90,000 businesses in the United States. Hundreds of companies gather grease around the globe — with an especially large haul in Southeast Asia, where densely packed restaurants serve up so much fried food that they’ve become the waste oil equivalent of Saudi Arabia’s rich petroleum fields.Waste oil from kitchens and animal tallow leftover from meatpacking plants used to be recycled into livestock feed. But now, they are mostly turned into fuel: Fat molecules hold a lot of energy, and they’re relatively easy to rearrange into diesel and kerosene.Turning fat into fuel keeps grease out of the landfill and petroleum in the ground. The demand, though, has begun to outstrip the supply.“There’s only so many waste oils to go around, and … you can’t really squeeze out much more,” said Nikita Pavlenko, who leads the aviation and fuels team at the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation. “People aren’t going to be frying more food or processing more cattle to get waste tallow to make fuel. You’re kind of stuck with what you have.”A hose is deployed to suck used cooking oil into the tank of a collection truck. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)Storage tanks for the feedstock (oil or tallow) at Neste in Rotterdam. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)As regulators push companies to buy and make more fuel from fat, the price of grease has been rising, along with the crime surrounding it.Thieves sometimes steal grease from collection bins and sell it themselves. Once, Howell said, he stopped at a restaurant only to find an empty bin and a confused cook, who told him an unmarked van had come by earlier and siphoned off their oil.Grease fraud is a problem, too. In some areas, used cooking oil sells for more than new cooking oil, prompting hucksters to sell virgin oil — including palm oil, which is associated with deforestation in Southeast Asia — as if it were used. It’s hard to catch, since fresh oil spiked with a little restaurant grease is almost indistinguishable from the real thing.“You’re potentially paying a premium for something that is worse than fossil fuel,” Pavlenko said.Fuel companies crack down on fraud by hiring inspectors to go out and check that their grease suppliers really are pumping their product out of deep fat fryers. On his route, Howell takes pictures of every bin before and after he drains it and uploads the proof to a Mahoney Environmental app that verifies where his oil came from.At the end of the day, Howell unloads his truck at a depot, where the oil is filtered to remove water, flour, spices and any other floating food chunks.Lab shift supervisor Jeroen van der Heijden in the laboratory at Neste. Neste produces sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), with a key presence in the Netherlands at its Rotterdam refinery. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)Turning fat into fuelUsed grease is a global commodity. Once it’s collected, tanker ships and pipelines carry it to fuel refineries around the world — much like they do for crude oil.Grease ships arrive a couple of times a week at a refinery in Rotterdam run by Neste, the world’s top producer of sustainable jet fuel.How grease is turned into jet fuelThe Neste facility, located in Europe’s largest port, is ramping up production of SAF made from used cooking oil. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)Fueling the appetite for sustainable fuelIn 2023, a Boeing 777 flew across the Atlantic Ocean burning fuel made from nothing but waste fat and sugar. The flight was a first, but it was really a publicity stunt — carrying Virgin Atlantic bigwigs, not paying passengers. The fuel is too expensive, and too scarce, for that to make business sense.Instead, Neste blends its french fry fuel with standard kerosene made from crude oil before delivering it to airports.SAF is almost identical to standard jet fuel, and it releases just as much CO2 when it’s burned. But experts say there’s a key difference: Drilling for oil takes carbon that was locked away underground and releases it into the atmosphere. Making fuel from used cooking oil and tallow takes carbon that was already circulating through the air and the bodies of plants and animals and recycles it. No new carbon moves from underground storage into the atmosphere.Sample vials at Neste. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)Site director Hanna van Luijk at Neste. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)It takes energy to collect and transport used cooking oil, rearrange fat molecules into jet fuel and get that fuel to planes. But, overall, making and burning SAF adds as much as 80 percent less carbon to the atmosphere as making and burning fossil fuel from crude oil.Because there isn’t enough waste oil in the world to satisfy the airline industry’s thirst, companies are developing other ways to make low-carbon jet fuel. One option is to grow more crops like soy that can be crushed for oil and turned into jet fuel — although that raises the risk that more land will be cleared for farming in fragile ecosystems like the Brazilian Amazon. Environmentalists have raised similar concerns about raising more corn, sugar cane or beets to create ethanol and convert it into kerosene.“The problem with crop-based biofuels is it takes land to produce them at a time when we’re already expanding cropland … which means more deforestation, and the carbon losses are far greater than the potential savings from reducing fossil fuel use,” said Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment.Alternately, farmers could grow more cover crops on their fields between their regular planting seasons, which would create a new source of plant oils or ethanol without using extra land. Some companies have experimented with turning trash into jet fuel, but the most prominent player went bankrupt last year. Others are splitting water molecules to harvest their hydrogen and combining it with captured carbon to make fuel.Experts say it will take a combination of all these methods to make enough green fuel to power the world’s planes.Howell, of Mahoney Environmental, collects used cooking oil behind Umai Nori. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)The one thing every alternative fuel recipe has in common is that they are more expensive than fossil fuel — and experts say they always will be. Making SAF from waste oil is “locked in at a cost which is about two times the cost of fossil jet, and it’s going to be entirely reliant on subsidies,” according to Pavlenko. The other methods could be even more expensive, even after they’ve had time to raise production and lower costs.The future of the industry will depend on whether the United States keeps tax credits in place and the European Union stands by its green fuel mandates. Neste is expanding its Rotterdam refinery in anticipation of stricter E.U. blending rules, and in the United States, the first large-scale SAF operations started pumping out fuel in recent years in response to new tax credits that have since been weakened.Back at Le Diplomate, amid the evening dinner rush, frites flow out of the kitchen to feed hungry diners who are unwittingly helping launch planes into the sky with every bite.

We followed the trail of grease from the kitchens of Le Diplomat and other D.C. restaurants to the commercial planes using alternative fuels.

Le Diplomate had an emergency. After a week of frying frites, the kitchen at Washington’s famous standby for French cuisine was full to bursting with used grease.

Two waist-high storage tanks in the back of the restaurant sloshed to the brim with dark, viscous oil. During the weekend rush, the staff stored some of the spent grease in plastic tubs, but they were quickly running out of places to put it.

Restaurants are prohibited from dumping grease down the drain because it would clog city sewers. So on a Tuesday afternoon, James Howell nimbly backed his truck into an alley behind Le Diplomate. He hopped down from the cab and snaked a rubber hose to the kitchen. Then with the flip of a switch and a loud drone, the hose slurped the used cooking oil into the truck’s gleaming steel 2,200-gallon tank.

James Howell of Mahoney Environmental collects used cooking oil behind Duke’s Grocery in Washington. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Three bottles — with raw oil on the left, half-processed produce in the middle and refined aviation fuel on the right — in the Neste laboratory in Rotterdam. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)

The spent grease that restaurants unload as waste has become a valuable commodity. If you’ve been on a plane lately, there’s a chance that used cooking oil has helped launch you into the sky. Refineries recycle waste oil into kerosene pure enough to power a Boeing 777. The process is expensive — but it can create 70 to 80 percent less planet-warming pollution than making jet fuel out of crude oil, experts say.

Last year, airlines burned 340 million gallons of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) — nearly all of it made from used cooking oil or animal fat leftover from meat packaging.

A series examining innovative and impactful approaches to addressing waste.

That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 114 billion gallons of fuel airlines burned overall, which create 2.5 percent of humanity’s carbon pollution, according to the International Energy Agency. But airlines have vowed to use much more SAF to lower their greenhouse emissions. European regulators have set strict rules requiring airlines to use more SAF over time, while U.S. regulators dole out tax credits to coax companies into buying it.

This is the airlines’ main plan for dealing with their greenhouse emissions. Upgrading new planes with more efficient engines helps a little. And, one day, planes may run on electric batteries or hydrogen fuel cells — but those are still decades away and may never work for long flights. To manage most of their climate impact for the foreseeable future, airlines are betting everything on alternative fuels.

“Ninety-eight percent of [our greenhouse emissions] come from the fuel we burn,” said Lauren Riley, chief sustainability officer at United Airlines. “We’ll continue to look everywhere we can around technology and innovation of the aircraft itself and the engine, but we have to look at replacing our fuel.”

Experts say this plan can work, but it’ll require fuel refiners to dramatically raise SAF production and find new raw materials besides old cooking oil to turn into kerosene. Depending on what they use and how they refine it, this new class of fuel could make flying more sustainable or cause a whole new set of environmental headaches.

Howell, of Mahoney Environmental, collects used cooking oil in Washington. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

Harvesting the world’s grease

On his rounds one day in early May, Howell made about two dozen stops at commercial kitchens around Washington, including an upscale cafe in the Michelin Guide, an assisted-living facility, a soul food spot where old chicken bones clogged the hose and an Italian restaurant where two unfortunate rats had drowned in a grease bin while diving for a wayward meatball. By midafternoon, his truck had about 1,200 gallons of grease in its belly.

The company he works for, Mahoney Environmental, pays a few cents a gallon for the waste fat it collects from 90,000 businesses in the United States. Hundreds of companies gather grease around the globe — with an especially large haul in Southeast Asia, where densely packed restaurants serve up so much fried food that they’ve become the waste oil equivalent of Saudi Arabia’s rich petroleum fields.

Waste oil from kitchens and animal tallow leftover from meatpacking plants used to be recycled into livestock feed. But now, they are mostly turned into fuel: Fat molecules hold a lot of energy, and they’re relatively easy to rearrange into diesel and kerosene.

Turning fat into fuel keeps grease out of the landfill and petroleum in the ground. The demand, though, has begun to outstrip the supply.

“There’s only so many waste oils to go around, and … you can’t really squeeze out much more,” said Nikita Pavlenko, who leads the aviation and fuels team at the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation. “People aren’t going to be frying more food or processing more cattle to get waste tallow to make fuel. You’re kind of stuck with what you have.”

A hose is deployed to suck used cooking oil into the tank of a collection truck. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)
Storage tanks for the feedstock (oil or tallow) at Neste in Rotterdam. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)

As regulators push companies to buy and make more fuel from fat, the price of grease has been rising, along with the crime surrounding it.

Thieves sometimes steal grease from collection bins and sell it themselves. Once, Howell said, he stopped at a restaurant only to find an empty bin and a confused cook, who told him an unmarked van had come by earlier and siphoned off their oil.

Grease fraud is a problem, too. In some areas, used cooking oil sells for more than new cooking oil, prompting hucksters to sell virgin oil — including palm oil, which is associated with deforestation in Southeast Asia — as if it were used. It’s hard to catch, since fresh oil spiked with a little restaurant grease is almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

“You’re potentially paying a premium for something that is worse than fossil fuel,” Pavlenko said.

Fuel companies crack down on fraud by hiring inspectors to go out and check that their grease suppliers really are pumping their product out of deep fat fryers. On his route, Howell takes pictures of every bin before and after he drains it and uploads the proof to a Mahoney Environmental app that verifies where his oil came from.

At the end of the day, Howell unloads his truck at a depot, where the oil is filtered to remove water, flour, spices and any other floating food chunks.

Lab shift supervisor Jeroen van der Heijden in the laboratory at Neste. Neste produces sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), with a key presence in the Netherlands at its Rotterdam refinery. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)

Turning fat into fuel

Used grease is a global commodity. Once it’s collected, tanker ships and pipelines carry it to fuel refineries around the world — much like they do for crude oil.

Grease ships arrive a couple of times a week at a refinery in Rotterdam run by Neste, the world’s top producer of sustainable jet fuel.

How grease is turned into jet fuel

The Neste facility, located in Europe’s largest port, is ramping up production of SAF made from used cooking oil. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)

Fueling the appetite for sustainable fuel

In 2023, a Boeing 777 flew across the Atlantic Ocean burning fuel made from nothing but waste fat and sugar. The flight was a first, but it was really a publicity stunt — carrying Virgin Atlantic bigwigs, not paying passengers. The fuel is too expensive, and too scarce, for that to make business sense.

Instead, Neste blends its french fry fuel with standard kerosene made from crude oil before delivering it to airports.

SAF is almost identical to standard jet fuel, and it releases just as much CO2 when it’s burned. But experts say there’s a key difference: Drilling for oil takes carbon that was locked away underground and releases it into the atmosphere. Making fuel from used cooking oil and tallow takes carbon that was already circulating through the air and the bodies of plants and animals and recycles it. No new carbon moves from underground storage into the atmosphere.

Sample vials at Neste. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)
Site director Hanna van Luijk at Neste. (Ilvy Njiokiktjien/For The Washington Post)

It takes energy to collect and transport used cooking oil, rearrange fat molecules into jet fuel and get that fuel to planes. But, overall, making and burning SAF adds as much as 80 percent less carbon to the atmosphere as making and burning fossil fuel from crude oil.

Because there isn’t enough waste oil in the world to satisfy the airline industry’s thirst, companies are developing other ways to make low-carbon jet fuel. One option is to grow more crops like soy that can be crushed for oil and turned into jet fuel — although that raises the risk that more land will be cleared for farming in fragile ecosystems like the Brazilian Amazon. Environmentalists have raised similar concerns about raising more corn, sugar cane or beets to create ethanol and convert it into kerosene.

“The problem with crop-based biofuels is it takes land to produce them at a time when we’re already expanding cropland … which means more deforestation, and the carbon losses are far greater than the potential savings from reducing fossil fuel use,” said Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment.

Alternately, farmers could grow more cover crops on their fields between their regular planting seasons, which would create a new source of plant oils or ethanol without using extra land. Some companies have experimented with turning trash into jet fuel, but the most prominent player went bankrupt last year. Others are splitting water molecules to harvest their hydrogen and combining it with captured carbon to make fuel.

Experts say it will take a combination of all these methods to make enough green fuel to power the world’s planes.

Howell, of Mahoney Environmental, collects used cooking oil behind Umai Nori. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

The one thing every alternative fuel recipe has in common is that they are more expensive than fossil fuel — and experts say they always will be. Making SAF from waste oil is “locked in at a cost which is about two times the cost of fossil jet, and it’s going to be entirely reliant on subsidies,” according to Pavlenko. The other methods could be even more expensive, even after they’ve had time to raise production and lower costs.

The future of the industry will depend on whether the United States keeps tax credits in place and the European Union stands by its green fuel mandates. Neste is expanding its Rotterdam refinery in anticipation of stricter E.U. blending rules, and in the United States, the first large-scale SAF operations started pumping out fuel in recent years in response to new tax credits that have since been weakened.

Back at Le Diplomate, amid the evening dinner rush, frites flow out of the kitchen to feed hungry diners who are unwittingly helping launch planes into the sky with every bite.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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Although existing therapies address some of the symptoms, they don’t provide a cure.Organoids are typically grown in Matrigel, a jelly-like substance extracted from mouse tumour cells that allows the cells to assemble into 3D structures. Griffith wanted to put epithelial cells, which compose the uterine lining, with stromal cells that support that lining. In the body, these cells need to communicate with each other to bring about the changes that occur with the monthly cycle. But Matrigel is packed with proteins that can hamper the cell-to-cell communication. So Griffith and her colleagues developed a hydrogel that’s entirely synthetic.Griffith’s team has also been working on the next step, a model of abnormal endometrial tissue that the researchers can use to test therapies for the condition. Because blood vessels are crucial to maintaining this tissue, Griffith knew she wanted to include them. To do this, she and her colleagues placed the organoid on a microfluidic chip surrounded by cells that form blood vessels. “We put all of these cells in together at the beginning in a gel, and the blood vessels form spontaneously,” she says. “So the organoids turn into lesion-like structures,” she adds. “It’s actually kind of wild.”Griffith and her team have created these model systems from the cells of about a dozen people with endometriosis, and they’re beginning to use them to test compounds that could be promising therapies for the condition.Turco, meanwhile, has developed her endometrial organoid into a model of menstruation. Her team treated the endometrial organoids with hormones to mimic what happens when the endometrial lining is regenerating. Then the researchers stopped the hormones to mimic the start of menstruation. In the uterus, the lining breaks up naturally. In the model, however, the researchers break the organoids up mechanically. When the cells are put back into a gel, the organoids reform. “And you can keep doing this over and over again,” she says.The model allows them to study the mechanisms at work during regeneration. “That’s not possible to study in humans — like ever,” Turco says. Researchers have long thought that the stem cells that lie beneath the surface of the lining are solely responsible for regenerating it. But Turco’s research suggests that cells on the surface might have a role, too.The vagina, ovaries and moreFor Kathryn Patras, a microbiologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, organoids are a way to explore the diversity of bacteria that colonize the vagina and how they influence human health. A healthy vaginal microbiome can help to prevent harmful bacteria from taking over. A disrupted microbiome, however, seems to increase a woman’s risk of catching a sexually transmitted infection and of experiencing complications during pregnancy.The vaginal microbiome is particularly tricky to study in mice. Its composition is entirely different from that of humans. And introducing a human microbiome into the mouse vagina is nearly impossible. Patras tried for years. “It just failed splendidly,” she says.So Patras and her colleagues harvest naturally existing stem cells from the human vagina and coax these cells to form organoids. These mini-vaginas are hollow balls, not tubes. And because the researchers are trying to study the vaginal lining, which isn’t spherical, they break up the organoids to make “open-faced tissue layers”, says Patras. On one side, the cells have media that nourishes them. On the other, “they’re seeing air, which is what they would see in the human tissue,” she says.One of the team’s goals is to look at whether beneficial microorganisms that are found typically in the vagina, such as Lactobacillus, can protect the vaginal tract from being colonized by harmful microbes. Although the assumption has long been that the pathogens that cause urinary tract infections come from the gut, some research suggests that the vaginal microbiome could play a part. Preventing colonization there might reduce the risk of infections in the urinary tract.Ovaries are also getting the organoid treatment, both for studying fertility and the transition to menopause, which comes with a host of aggravating symptoms and an increased risk of heart disease, stroke and osteoporosis.Francesca Duncan, a reproductive biologist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois, and her colleagues are using ovarian organoids to study reproductive ageing. Researchers in this field have focused conventionally on the ovary’s follicle. “That’s the kind of functional unit,” says Duncan. It’s the part that generates hormones and contains the developing egg. About a decade ago, however, researchers in her lab discovered that, in mice, it’s not just the egg that ages — the ovary becomes inflamed and stiffer with age. She suspects that this ovarian ageing could influence both the number and quality of the eggs and, therefore, affect fertility.Duncan wanted an in vitro model to study this ageing process and whether drugs might be able to reverse it. Plenty of labs have managed to grow follicles outside the ovary. They’ve even managed to get those follicles to give rise to eggs. But Duncan wanted to study the other cells that make up the ovary. When a graduate student suggested trying to grow an ovarian organoid, Duncan was sceptical. “It seemed like a fad,” she says. But the student was so enthusiastic that Duncan gave the project the green light. The research has already been “really, really fruitful”, she says.So far, Duncan’s team has created ovarian organoids from the ovaries of mice and rhesus macaques, finding, for example, that the stiffening of individual cells in the ovary might be responsible for how the ovary tissue stiffens as it ages.The team’s next step is to develop human ovarian organoids to screen compounds that could stave off this stiffening or even reverse it, Duncan says.Researchers are also using organoids to study ovarian cancer, the fifth-leading cause of cancer-related deaths in women. Some teams are studying how the disease emerges by examining organoids that mimic the fallopian tube. That’s because research suggests that the vast majority of the deadliest ovarian cancers actually originate there. Other groups are modelling ovarian and other cancers of the female reproductive tract by growing organoids from tumour tissue that has been taken from people with the disease.Although researchers are learning a great deal from organoids that represent a single tissue or cell type, some teams are hoping to learn even more by combining them with other organoids or incorporating them into more-complex systems. Endometrial organoids can be combined with placental organoids to study a fuller picture of invasion, for example. Or they can be mixed with lab-created embryo models to study implantation.Even these more-intricate organoids won’t capture the full complexity of human tissue. But they don’t have to. Organoids might be a reductionist model, but “still they’re revealing so much,” Turco says. “I keep getting surprised.”This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on September 23, 2025.

Animals
Chemicals
Culture

Scientists Find Brain Circuit That Locks Alcohol Users in Addiction Cycle

Researchers at Scripps Research have shown in an animal model that the brain learns to pursue alcohol as a way to find relief, rather than only for its rewarding effects. What drives a person to keep drinking alcohol despite the harm it causes to their health, relationships, and overall well-being? New research from Scripps Research [...]

Scientists have pinpointed a hidden brain circuit that may explain why withdrawal drives people back to alcohol. Credit: ShutterstockResearchers at Scripps Research have shown in an animal model that the brain learns to pursue alcohol as a way to find relief, rather than only for its rewarding effects. What drives a person to keep drinking alcohol despite the harm it causes to their health, relationships, and overall well-being? New research from Scripps Research points to a possible answer: a small midline brain region helps shape how animals learn to drink in order to relieve the stress and discomfort of withdrawal. In a study recently published in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, the Scripps Research team examined brain activity in the paraventricular nucleus of the thalamus (PVT) in rats. They discovered that when rats linked environmental cues with alcohol’s ability to ease withdrawal symptoms, activity in this brain region increased, reinforcing relapse behaviors. By uncovering this pathway, the study highlights one of addiction’s most persistent aspects—using alcohol not for enjoyment but to avoid suffering—and may pave the way for new therapies for substance use disorders (SUDs) and related conditions such as anxiety. “What makes addiction so hard to break is that people aren’t simply chasing a high,” says Friedbert Weiss, professor of neuroscience at Scripps Research and senior author of the study. “They’re also trying to get rid of powerful negative states, like the stress and anxiety of withdrawal. This work shows us which brain systems are responsible for locking in that kind of learning, and why it can make relapse so persistent.” “This brain region just lit up in every rat that had gone through withdrawal-related learning,” says co-senior author Hermina Nedelescu of Scripps Research. “It shows us which circuits are recruited when the brain links alcohol with relief from stress—and that could be a game-changer in how we think about relapse.” From behavior to brain maps About 14.5 million people in the United States are estimated to have alcohol use disorder, a condition that includes a spectrum of harmful drinking behaviors. Similar to other forms of substance addiction, it is marked by recurring cycles of withdrawal, abstinence, and relapse. In 2022, researchers Weiss and Nedelescu investigated these processes in rats to better understand how learning shapes addiction in the brain. At the outset, the animals linked alcohol with pleasurable effects and were motivated to drink more. But as they went through repeated periods of withdrawal and relapse, the drive to drink became much stronger. Once the rats learned that alcohol could relieve the distress of withdrawal—an example of negative reinforcement, or the easing of a “negative hedonic state”—they pursued alcohol more intensely and continued seeking it even in challenging conditions. “When rats learn to associate environmental stimuli or contexts with the experience of relief, they end up with an incredibly powerful urge to seek alcohol in the presence of that stimuli –even if conditions are introduced that require great effort to engage in alcohol seeking,” says Weiss. “That is, these rats seek alcohol even if that behavior is punished.” In this study, the researchers set out to identify the specific networks of brain cells that drive the learning process in which environmental cues become linked to the relief of a negative hedonic state. Using advanced whole-brain imaging in rats, they analyzed cellular activity to determine which regions became more responsive to alcohol-associated cues. Four groups of rats were compared: one group that had experienced withdrawal and learned that alcohol reduced a negative hedonic state, and three separate control groups that had not developed this association. Although multiple brain regions showed heightened activity in the withdrawal-experienced group, one region in particular stood out: the paraventricular nucleus of the thalamus (PVT), a structure already recognized for its involvement in stress and anxiety. “In retrospect, this makes a lot of sense,” says Nedelescu. “The unpleasant effects of alcohol withdrawal are strongly associated with stress, and alcohol is providing relief from the agony of that stressful state.” The researchers hypothesize that this negative hedonic state, and the activation of the PVT in the brain as a response, is critical for how the brain learns and perpetuates addiction. A better understanding of addiction The implications of the new study extend well beyond alcohol, the researchers say. Environmental stimuli conditioned to negative reinforcement—the drive to act in order to escape pain or stress—is a universal feature of the brain, and can drive human behavior beyond substance use disorders such as anxiety disorders, fear-conditioning and traumatic avoidance learning. “This work has potential applications not only for alcohol addiction, but also other disorders where people get trapped in harmful cycles,” says Nedelescu. Future research will zoom in even further. Nedelescu and colleagues at Scripps Research want to expand the study to females and to study neurochemicals released in the PVT when subjects encounter environments associated with the experience of this relief from a negative hedonic state. If they can pinpoint molecules that are involved, it could open new avenues for drug development by targeting those molecules. For now, the new study underscores a key shift in how basic scientists think about addiction. “As psychologists, we’ve long known that addiction isn’t just about chasing pleasure—it’s about escaping those negative hedonic states,” says Weiss. “This study shows us where in the brain that learning takes root, which is a step forward.” Reference: “Recruitment of Neuronal Populations in the Paraventricular Thalamus of Alcohol-Seeking Rats With Withdrawal-Related Learning Experience” by Hermina Nedelescu, Elias Meamari, Nami Rajaei, Alexus Grey, Ryan Bullard, Nathan O’Connor, Nobuyoshi Suto and Friedbert Weiss, 5 August 2025, Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science.DOI: 10.1016/j.bpsgos.2025.100578 This work was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health (Ruth L. Kirschstein Institutional National Research Service Award T32AA007456, K01 DA054449, R01 AA027555, and R01 AA023183). Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.

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This Invasive Vampire Fish Is Helping Researchers Understand the Human Nervous System in Jaw-Dropping Ways

The sea lamprey looks like it’s from another planet, but this ancient creature has a surprising amount in common with humans

This Invasive Vampire Fish Is Helping Researchers Understand the Human Nervous System in Jaw-Dropping Ways The sea lamprey looks like it’s from another planet, but this ancient creature has a surprising amount in common with humans A sea lamprey shows off its nightmarish mouth. NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory via Wikimedia Commons under CC By-SA 2.0 Key takeaways: Sea lampreys and research Sea lampreys have large neurons and synapses, making them ideal for neuroscience research. Scientists study the creatures to learn more about how we might recover from spinal cord injuries. With a suction-cup mouth and over 100 teeth, the sea lamprey has earned the nickname "vampire fish" and comparisons to sea monsters. Sea lampreys are one of the world’s most ancient fish species, killing prey by latching their suction-cup mouth onto a fish's skin and rasping away the fish's flesh with a rough tongue to feed on blood and bodily fluids. Sea lampreys sound like something from a horror movie, but the creatures have been crucial to almost two centuries of neuroscience research. Neuroscientists study sea lamprey spinal cells, which the animals can regenerate if their spinal cord is damaged, as a model to understand the human nervous system, spinal cord injuries and neurological disease. The evolution of human brains and nervous systems is also closely tied to these alien-like creatures. Neurologists and zoologists began studying lampreys in the 1830s, examining their nerve cells to understand how the spinal cord works. Lamprey research took off after 1959, when biologists first described lampreys’ ability to regenerate spinal cord neurons and eventually swim after spinal damage. Sea lampreys are ideal for neuroscientists to work with because the animals have large nerve cells and synapses, making observation easier than in other species. “The synapses are so big that you can see them, and you can record from them and access them very easily,” says Jennifer Morgan, neuroscientist at the University of Chicago’s Marine Biological Laboratory. The creatures also have a similar molecular and genetic toolkit to humans, she says, which can make it simpler to translate research from lampreys to humans and find tools that work in both species. Lampreys thrive in different types of water, all over the globe. “[Lampreys] have been found on every continent except for Antarctica,” says Morgan, whose lab uses sea lampreys for research. “So, they’re very hearty animals and super easy to maintain.” The sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) filter feeds as a larva but becomes parasitic once it reaches adulthood, latching onto fish and feeding on their blood. They can feed on trout, salmon and other large, commercially important fish, and one sea lamprey can destroy up to 40 pounds of fish per year. Much of the supply of sea lampreys for research comes from the Great Lakes, where lampreys wreak havoc on the fishing industry. Although the species is native to the Atlantic Ocean, improvements in the late 1800s and early 1900s to canals connecting Lake Ontario and Lake Erie to the ocean enabled lampreys to bypass Niagara Falls, which had previously been a natural barrier. From there, lampreys invaded the lakes, where they have no natural predators. By the 1960s, lampreys had devastated trout fisheries in the region and a control program began to weed them out using pesticides. Sea lampreys’ invasion of the Great Lakes has actually boosted their use in research. Over the last century, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission has directed considerable amounts of research funding toward lampreys, to study their life cycle and how to eradicate them. This put more lampreys in labs, resulting in studies on other aspects of their anatomy and evolution. Collectors catch wild lampreys in the Great Lakes, says Morgan, and send them to the lab in coolers. “Great Lakes fisheries harvested these lampreys, and they wanted scientists to understand them more,” says Robb Krumlauf, developmental biologist and scientific director emeritus at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, who also researches lampreys sent from the Great Lakes. “They had a natural supply that they could give to those who are interested in the research.” Although lampreys look like they’re from another planet, they have more in common with us than it might seem. Lampreys branched off from other vertebrates about 500 million years ago, so they have some of the oldest traits in the lineage: they’re at the base of the vertebrate branch of the evolutionary tree. Because of this, studying lampreys’ genomes can clarify important evolutionary steps in the lineage—like when vertebrates developed jaws, or arms and legs. Sea lampreys survived multiple mass extinction events, including the asteroid 66 million years ago that wiped out roughly 80 percent of life on Earth. “It’s a chance to have a glimpse of the past. It’s sort of like a living fossil,” says Krumlauf. Krumlauf studies how sea lamprey evolution and human evolution are related through how our faces and heads develop. The brain region that shapes facial and cranial features is similar across vertebrates, from lampreys to chickens to mice to zebrafish, even though all these animals’ heads look quite different. “There’s a common toolkit,” says Krumlauf. “If you have building materials, and they’re all the same, you can build a garden shed or you can build a mansion––what’s different is the way the blueprint is put together.” Studying lampreys shows how these blueprints evolved in the earliest vertebrates, says Krumlauf. His research links facial and head development in the animals to the development of craniofacial abnormalities in humans. The evolutionary history of lampreys and other vertebrates also helps scientists like Yi-Rong Peng, ophthalmologist and neurobiologist at UCLA, illuminate the evolution of vision. Peng’s research has found lamprey retinal cells are similar to those of other vertebrates, such as mice, chickens and zebrafish. Such a finding suggests retinal vision, like humans have, evolved early in the vertebrate lineage. Studying the overlaps between animal retinas gives a window into how vertebrates saw the world 500 million years ago. And understanding how the retina first formed in humans can help Peng’s research team study retinal cell degeneration that leads to blindness. Morgan’s lab studies how sea lampreys regenerate spinal cords, and its work could lead to advances that help humans recover from spinal damage. When researchers cut a sea lamprey’s spinal cord, it becomes paralyzed but can regenerate nerve connections. The process does not have to be perfect to work, adds Purdue University science historian Kathryn Maxson Jones. Lampreys’ original neuron connections don’t reform in the same way, but cells grow in flexible ways to compensate for damage––biology can take different routes to achieve the goal of a spinal cord that works again. And the large size of lampreys’ cells and synapses enable the research team to closely examine the whole process. A microscopic view of a sea lamprey’s reconnected spinal cord shows how it healed after being cut. Daniel Cojanu, Under Current Productions Sea lampreys are also crucial to Morgan’s research on Parkinson’s disease. A specific protein’s accumulation in the brain is linked to the progression of the disease, so injecting that protein into lamprey synapses allows the researchers to observe how it affects the nervous system. This gives insight into how the disease progresses in the human nervous system and how exactly neurons can recover. Scientists observe how damaged lamprey neurons regenerate and how many synaptic connections are restored, guiding how to target treatment in human brains. Morgan’s research team hopes to move from understanding nervous system damage in lampreys and humans to how to fix it. When you cut your finger and the area becomes numb, that’s because of damage to the nerve endings in the finger, which is part of your peripheral nervous system, explains Morgan. But you do eventually get feeling back, because humans can regenerate cells in the peripheral nervous system––just not in our central nervous system. But lampreys can. “When lampreys regenerate the spinal cord and recover function, they are using a lot of the same changes in gene expression that occur during regeneration of the peripheral nervous system in mammals,” says Morgan. “Why we can’t do that in our spinal cord is a big question. But I think learning from the adaptations of these animals, that can do these really neat feats of nature like regeneration, will tell you something about the recipe that needs to happen, the conditions that need to be met,” adds Morgan. And the parallels between lampreys’ brain features and ours make crucial research possible when studying human brains isn’t an option. “It often points us in the direction of things we would’ve never looked at in humans,” says Krumlauf. Get the latest Science stories in your inbox.

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Will Portland weaken its policy to phase out diesel, replace it with biofuels?

Portland’s Renewable Fuels Standards Advisory Committee is poised to recommend delaying the phase-out -- but the decision on how to move ahead will be made by city leaders.

Portland leaders may soon weigh whether to roll back parts of the city’s signature climate policy on replacing diesel with renewable fuels, a first-in-the-nation standard critical to reducing emissions and harmful particulate matter pollution. The policy, adopted by the City Council in 2022 and aimed at medium and heavy trucks, phases out the sale of petroleum diesel by 2030, gradually replacing it with diesel blended with renewable fuels at increasingly higher increments.Council members had hailed the diesel phase-out as a tool to reduce pollution in low-income neighborhoods often located near freeways with high concentrations of diesel emissions. As part of the policy, a 15% blend requirement began in 2024, a 50% blend will be required by 2026 and a 99% blend by 2030. Medium and heavy trucks affected by the policy include delivery trucks, school and transit buses, dump trucks, tractor trailers and cement mixers. But Portland’s Renewable Fuels Standards Advisory Committee is poised to recommend weakening the phase-out. The committee was established in July 2023 to advise the city Bureau of Planning and Sustainability director on technical and economic issues related to the renewable fuel supply as well as meeting the policy’s fuel requirements. A draft memo, made public in advance of the committee’s meeting this week, shows the committee is planning to ask the city to reduce the 2026 biofuel percentage requirement from 50% to 20% and delay implementation until 2028 or 2030. The memo was obtained by the Braided River Campaign, a Portland nonprofit that advocates for a green working waterfront, and shared with The Oregonian/OregonLive. The proposed rollback essentially would allow trucks to continue to emit black carbon or “soot” at a higher level and for longer than under the original plan.The draft also recommends pausing for at least two years strict restrictions on the type of feedstock used to make renewable fuels – a standard that three years ago was hailed as the most innovative, emission-reducing part of Portland’s diesel phase-out. The pause would allow retailers to fall back on using biofuels made from feedstocks such as soybean, canola and palm oils which have been linked to much higher carbon emissions, displacing food production and causing deforestation. The draft memo, addressed to Planning and Sustainability’s Director Eric Engstrom, says the changes would respond to unfavorable biodiesel and renewable diesel market conditions in Oregon and Portland, including the scarcity of low-carbon intensity feedstocks such as used cooking oil and animal tallow.It’s unclear who will decide on the future of the diesel phase-out. While Engstrom has sole discretion to make changes to the program’s rules, the City Council holds the authority to amend city code. Engstrom did not immediately comment on whether the recommended changes would require rule or code changes. Portland officials have said they are fully committed to electrification of trucks but that transition will take many years. Moving from diesel to biofuels is an interim step, they said, allowing for faster emission and particulate matter reductions. The committee’ draft recommendation comes as Portland leaders are debating the future of the Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub, a 6-mile stretch on the northwest bank of the Willamette River where most of Oregon’s fuel supply is stored. Zenith Energy, which operates a terminal at the hub that has drawn environmental opposition, has promised the city to convert from fossil fuel loading and storage to renewable fuels. Other companies at the hub are also eyeing renewable fuels as a new income stream. Earlier this week, the city unveiled four alternatives for the hub, one of which allows for unlimited renewable fuel expansion. Environmental advocates said the committee’s recommendations are unacceptable and would gut the renewable fuel policy’s environmental credibility.“This is a complete walk-back of a promise made to Portlanders,” said Marnie Glickman, Braided River Campaign’s executive director. “The city sold this policy on the promise of a rapid decline in carbon pollution. Now, before the strongest rules even take effect, the industry-dominated advisory board is asking for a hall pass to continue using the cheapest, dirtiest biofuels.” The committee is set to refine the memo at its meeting on Thursday and may vote on the recommendation. It must submit the final recommendation to Engstrom by mid-October. Biofuel cost is one of the major reasons the committee cites for the recommended changes. “If the RFS (renewable fuel standard) is left unchanged, the cost of the diesel fuel in Portland could get significantly higher in the City of Portland compared to the rest of the state of Oregon due to the combined higher requirement of renewable content and lower carbon intensity,” the memo said. The draft memo also says Portland’s program has trouble competing with other regional markets such as California for scarce low-carbon intensity biofuels. It also mentions Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill excluding feedstocks supplied from countries outside North America from tax incentives – which is likely to further reduce the supply of low-carbon feedstocks. Glickman said she’s also concerned about the committee’s potential conflict of interest when making recommendations to the sustainability director – a fact the draft memo acknowledges. Six of the seven members of the advisory committee are representatives of fuel producers and suppliers – including bpAmerica, Phillips 66 and the Western States Petroleum Association. The committee’s only non-industry member – Andrew Dyke, a senior economist at ECOnorthwest – declined to comment on the draft memo. In 2006, Portland became the first city in the U.S. to adopt a renewable fuel standard, which required the city’s fuel retailers to sell a minimum blend of 5% biodiesel. The city updated the policy in 2022 to a full diesel phase-out. The current policy far exceeds the federal and state renewable fuel standards.If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

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