📌 TOPINDIATOURS Hot ai: Strange Mushroom Makes You See Tiny People Chilling on Eve

Magic mushrooms, an informal group of fungi that contain the naturally occurring psychedelic substance psilocybin, are known for inducing powerful hallucinations. They can induce feelings of euphoria, a sense of belonging in the world, and distort reality by messing with the brain’s visual cortex, turning the world into a trippy, shimmering pocket dimension full of pulsating geometric patterns.

Now we’re hearing about a lesser-known species, known for its umami-forward flavor in China, which can induce far more specific hallucinations — when not prepared correctly by a chef, that is.

As the BBC reports, the mushroom, Lanmaoa asiatica, can cause you to see countless tiny people everywhere you look. Doctors in the Yunnan province of China are treating hundreds of cases a year of people having visions of small, “pint-sized, elf-like figures” crawling around and climbing up walls.

“At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, ‘Don’t eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people,’” University of Utah doctoral candidate in biology Colin Domnauer told the broadcaster.

“It seems like very common knowledge in the culture there,” he added.

The hallucinations can last a very long time, up to three days after a 12-to-24-hour onset, and often result in hospitalizations. That’s considerably longer and more severe than the average psilocybin trip.

“One elder tribesman in Papua New Guinea describes this effect, explaining how ‘he saw tiny people with mushrooms around their faces. They were teasing him, and he was trying to chase them away,’” Donmauer wrote in a November piece for the University of Utah.

“When I lifted the tablecloth higher, the heads came off and stuck to the bottom of the cloth and the bodies kept marching in place… I did this many times, at two-minute intervals, and each time they were there, marching and grinning… I measured them, too… they were [one inch] high,” a professor in Yunnan told Donmauer, recounting his own trip.

Domnauerhas been trying to hunt down the origins of the mushroom and investigate how it affects the brain, producing such surprisingly similar hallucinations in different people.

“It sounded so bizarre that there could be a mushroom out there causing fairytale-like visions reported across cultures and time,” he told the BBC. “I was perplexed and driven by curiosity to find out more.”

The appearance of tiny humans after ingesting the mushrooms does appear in academic literature, describing them as “liliputian hallucinations,” or “elusive little people.”

Even Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist known for being the first to synthesize, ingest, and learn about the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), failed to identify the molecules that caused the mysterious hallucinations.

The mushrooms got their formal Latin name in 2015, yet many questions remain about their psychedelic qualities, a gap Donmauer is hoping to fill with his research.

In experiments involving mice, he found that the animals fell into a stupor after being administered extracts of the mushroom.

Donmauer has also determined that the L. asiatica mushrooms do not contain psilocybin, the substance that gives magic mushrooms their hallucinogenic qualities.

The main thing that sets it apart is that trips don’t vary greatly depending on the individual, unlike those triggered by psilocybin which can differ greatly.

The “perception of little people is very reliably and repeatedly reported,” Donmauer told the BBC. “I don’t know of anything else that produces such consistent hallucinations.”

The researcher has yet to eat the mushroom himself. Given the length of the trips and the chances of being hospitalized, we can’t blame him.

“While many questions remain, one thing is for certain: Lanmaoa asiatica reminds us that the world of mushrooms, even those found in markets and on dinner plates, conceals mysteries and wonders we’ve yet to imagine,” Donmauer wrote in his piece for the University of Utah.

“Somewhere between traditional folklore and modern biology, between the wild forest floor and the sterile scientific laboratory, lies a story still unfolding, a story that may begin with something as seemingly innocuous as a bowl of mushroom soup,” he added.

More on magic mushrooms: Evidence Grows That Tripping on Shrooms Might Increase Your Lifespan

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📌 TOPINDIATOURS Hot ai: When You Learn How Low the 2025 Murder Rate Was, You’ll Re

The headlines of 2025 painted a portrait of America in chaos, driven by the financial logic of America’s media ecosystem. It’s number one product isn’t news, but fear.

“NYC youth crime doubled since controversial state Raise the Age Law kicked in,” exclaims one hysterical New York Post headline from September. “Business owners express frustration over crime surge in Federal Hill,” reads a banner from FOX45 News, a local outlet in Baltimore. “Office shooter’s rampage shows terrifying rise of motive-free violence, experts warn,” goes a Fox News heading from August.

The scary headlines were all underscored by inflammatory rhetoric from the Trump administration, which continued to insist that America’s cities are crime-ridden hell holes well into the new year.

Selective media coverage of crime certainly isn’t a new phenomenon, though it’s worth revisiting — especially because new data suggests 2025 was actually one of the least violent years for the US in over a century.

According to fresh Council on Criminal Justice crime statistics, Axios reports, murder rates fell 21 percent last year across the 35 largest cities in the US. It’s the single largest one-year-drop ever, the publication reports, and possibly the lowest homicide rates we’ve seen as a nation since the year 1900 — when the last generation of frontier outlaws were still robbing train cars.

Homicide wasn’t the only crime that fell in 2025. Out of 13 crimes tracked by the Council on Criminal Justice, 11 of them were lower last year than in 2024. Aggravated assaults, for example, fell by 9 percent across the 35 cities, while gun assaults and robberies dropped off by 22 and 23 percent, respectively. (The only category that increased was drug crimes, up 7 percent — and which are nonviolent.)

To sum up it all up: the sensationalized crime coverage dominating the evening news stands in stark, frustrating contrast to the actual data. In 2026, American media is dominated by just six billion-dollar media conglomerates, an arrangement which has held for well over a decade.

Under this system, news becomes commodified — clicks and views drive revenue, the core function of any business. Media companies have a financial incentive to churn out hysterical headlines and “Nightcrawler”-esque violence porn over rational breakdowns of actual statistics, nevermind the social and financial conditions that give rise to crime.

With so many Americans reliant on the commercialized news cycle for information about the world, it’s no wonder our politics are still steeped in debates over “law and order,” driven by a crisis that doesn’t seem to exist.

More on media criticism: Media Execs Prepare for AI to Bring End of Journalism Industry

The post When You Learn How Low the 2025 Murder Rate Was, You’ll Realize How Profoundly the Media Has Failed the American People appeared first on Futurism.

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