Lifeboat Foundation

A newly discovered example of wood construction by humans is nearly 500,000 years old and has archaeologists rethinking how technologically advanced these pre-homo-sapiens may have been.

The researchers compiled an extensive dataset of over 1,200 distinct cell groups, estimating size ranges, mass, and cell counts for each group across 60 tissue systems in three reference humans — an adult man, woman, and child.

“For the first time, we have systematically measured the size and abundance of cells across all major tissues and organs,” said Dr. Hatton. This spans seven orders of magnitude from tiny red blood cells to large muscle fibers.

While many contemporary works focus on molecular profiling, this study adopts a classical cell biology approach, quantifying morphological features of known cell types. The team integrated decades of histological and anatomical research to establish a framework. They discovered a striking near-inverse relationship between cell size and abundance, implying a trade-off between the two variables.

Though drug developers have achieved some progress in treating Alzheimer’s disease with medicines that reduce amyloid-beta protein, other problems of the disease, including inflammation, continue unchecked. In a new study, scientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT describe a candidate drug that in human cell cultures and Alzheimer’s mouse models reduced inflammation and improved memory.

The target of the new “A11” molecule is a genetic transcription factor called PU.1. Prior research has shown that amid Alzheimer’s disease, PU.1 becomes an overzealous director of inflammatory gene expression in the brain’s microglia immune cells. A11 suppresses this problematic PU.1 activity, the new research shows, by recruiting other proteins that repress the inflammatory genes PU.1 works to express. But because A11 concentrates mostly in the brain and does not reduce PU.1 levels, it does not appear to disrupt PU.1’s other job, which is to ensure the production of a wide variety of blood cells.

“Inflammation is a major component of Alzheimer’s disease pathology that has been especially hard to treat,” says study senior author Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT and director of The Picower Institute and MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative. “This preclinical study demonstrates that A11 reduces inflammation in human microglia-like cells, as well as in multiple mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease, and significantly improves cognition in the mice. We believe A11 therefore merits further development and testing.”

During the month of September, Baylor College of Medicine will be partnering with the Blue Cure Foundation for its annual prostate cancer awareness campaign, Light It Blue. The Blue Cure Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing information on integrative approaches to prostate cancer prevention and treatment. During the campaign, the foundation works with local organizations to light up their buildings in blue lights in support of prostate cancer.

To help spread awareness and education, Dr. Jennifer Taylor, assistant professor of urology at Baylor, shares prostate cancer risk factors, symptoms and prevention guidelines.

Q: How important is it for an institution like Baylor to help generate awareness for prostate cancer? A: Prostate cancer touches lives every day, and it’s likely that everyone knows somebody who has survived or is suffering from it. It’s so highly prevalent, but there is a very wide spectrum of disease, so it’s important to spread accurate and informative facts about it.

Sedentary time at young ages may lead to heart attacks and strokes later in life. | Cardiology.

We talked to Keith Thomas, the first paralysis patient to receive a movement and feeling-restoring double neural bypass surgery.

A recent Science Immunology Review suggests combining inhibitory strategies, such as ICI, alongside radiotherapy may counteract the creation of immunosuppressive adenosine during Cancer immunotherapy.

Learn more on.

Adenosine generation is a rheostat of DNA damage-induced immune signaling in the tumor microenvironment.

How reliable is your memory? Can you remember what you were doing on this day ten years ago? Or do you struggle to remember what you ate for lunch yesterday? Regardless of how well you think you remember things, all of our brains are full of memories of events that never happened – so-called false memories. And that, according to science, isn’t necessarily something to worry about.

To explain this strange phenomenon and much more, we talked to Dr Julia Shaw, a research associate at University College London and expert on criminal psychology.

Memories are essentially networks of neurons. And autobiographical memories – memories of our lives – involve connecting different parts of the brain. These memories don’t just live in one little piece.

Current Biology. They trained Caribbean box jellyfish (Tripedalia cystophora) to learn to spot and dodge obstacles. The study challenges previous notions that advanced learning requires a centralized brain and sheds light on the evolutionary roots of learning and memory.

No bigger than a fingernail, these seemingly simple jellies have a complex visual system with 24 eyes embedded in their bell-like body. Living in mangrove swamps, the animal uses its vision to steer through murky waters and swerve around underwater tree roots to snare prey. Scientists demonstrated that the jellies could acquire the ability to avoid obstacles through associative learning, a process through which organisms form mental connections between sensory stimulations and behaviors.