This week’s cover shows Nature’s publication record over 150 years. Explore the growing web of collaboration and science in an interactive graphic here: https://go.nature.com/32wf2SB

Neuroscientists at the Bernstein Center Freiburg (BCF) of the University of Freiburg and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm have decoded a significant process in the brain that in part contributes to the behavior of living beings. “One of the basic requirements for meaningful behavior is that networks in the brain produce precisely defined sequences of neuronal activity,” says Prof. Dr. Ad Aertsen of the University of Freiburg. The researchers have published the results of the cooperation with Professor Dr. Arvind Kumar of the KTH and Sebastian Spreizer, a doctoral candidate at the BCF, in the scientific journal PLoS Computational Biology.

Experiments in recent years have shown that the behavior of animals is accompanied by sequential activity of neurons in different areas of the brain. In the context of that finding, researchers world-wide have developed several models of possible mechanisms to explain how these ordered sequences come into existence. They are based primarily upon methods of supervised learning, in which the desired sequential activity is generated by means of a learning rule. Within this process, it turned out that neuronal networks can be trained to produce sequences of activity. “At the same time, we know that not every behavior is learned. Innate behavior suggests that the brain generates certain sequences without learning or training,” says Arvind Kumar, who directed the study.

Based on that, the researchers addressed the question of how an untrained brain can generate well-ordered sequences of activity. They found this requires two conditions to be met: First, a small portion of the neurons’ projected output – their connections to downstream neurons – have to prefer a specific direction. Second, neighboring neurons need to share that preferred direction. “That means that the connections of nerve cells depend on directional preferences and are spatially linked to each other. This is the key to the generation of sequential activity in neuronal networks,” explains Sebastian Spreizer. If the network is wired according to these rules, it creates a type of activity landscape similar to geographic hills and valleys. In the context of this metaphor, the sequences of neuronal activity are like the rivers in a landscape. Small changes in the spatial fabric of the nerve cells generate certain temporal and spatial sequences of neuronal activity.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25301715

What happens in the brain and body in the moments after cardiac arrest?

‘Pain does not occur only in the skin’s nerve fibres, but also in this pain-sensitive organ’

These smart lenses will zoom if you blink twice.

It’s called cognitive reserve, and it’s the phenomenon of the mind’s resistance to damage of the brain. It’s also the subject of not only an upcoming new data and biomedical sample resource, but also a related request for information (RFI) from the NIA and a first-of-its-kind workshop in September.

The push to study cognitive reserve in more depth across the scientific disciplines was born out of recommendations from  the Cognitive Aging Summit III. Some 300 researchers attended the summit in Bethesda, Maryland in 2017. Coordinated by the NIA of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and supported by the McKnight Brain Research Foundation, the summit centered on age-related brain and cognitive changes, with a particular focus on issues related to cognitive resilience and reserve. According to the NIA, investigators from around the world delivered presentations and engaged in discussion “about some of the most important scientific questions relating to the biological, physiological, social and behavioral aspects of reserve and resilience in aging individuals. Attendees also discussed strategies to preserve and bolster cognitive function during aging.”

Pure, verifiable randomness is hard to come by. Two proposals show how to make quantum computers into randomness factories.

To the scientists here, could humans live for 300 years?

Those portions of the modern longevity community interested in bringing an end to aging and extending healthy human life span indefinitely tend to be the older portions, people who have been a part of the broader movement for quite some time. Newcomers tend to be more moderate, aiming at lesser goals. Perhaps this is a result of the successful projects, such as the SENS Research Foundation and Methuselah Foundation, tending to moderate their rhetoric as they attract a broader and larger base of support. I think that this road to moderation might be a problem, and that there is thus a continued role for those who loudly declaim that the goal is to control aging absolutely, via new medical technology, and that the natural consequence of that control is healthy, active, youthful life that extends for centuries or more.

If the goals that our movement works towards are broadly watered down from radical life extension of centuries to just adding a few more years, then marginal projects that can do no more than add a few more years will come to dominate the field to the exclusion of everything else. We are already more or less in this situation, in that the vast majority of funding goes towards discovery and development of small molecules that tinker with the operation of an aged metabolism to make it a little more resilient to the underlying causes of aging. If that is all that is done, then we’ll all age and die on basically the same schedule as our parents and grandparents. It will be a grand waste of opportunity, given that we have the knowledge and the means to do far better, such as by following the SENS agenda for rejuvenation biotechnologies based on repairing the root causes of aging.

This popular media article looks at a few of the people who do make no bones about aiming at radical life extension. It isn’t terrible, thankfully, though it doesn’t quite manage to escape the straitjacket of conformity, the author suggesting that it is somehow strange to want to live for a long time in good health, or strange to want to avoid a slow, crumbling, painful death. There is no present status quo so terrible that it will not have its defenders, and for whatever reason the status quo of aging and suffering and omnipresent death and loss are aggressively defended. But setting that aside, the article manages to capture the present state of development and the viewpoints of its subjects quite well, which is a change over past years of media attention.

A team of researchers at Stanford University has found synapse-boosting factors in the blood of young mice. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their study of the rejuvenating impact of blood from young mice when transfused into older mice, and what they learned about it.

Scientists have figured out how to use a laser to transmit audio, ranging from music to speech, to a person across a room without any receiver equipment — a potential breakthrough for the future of audio and communication.

“Our system can be used from some distance away to beam information directly to someone’s ear,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology research Charles M. Wynn said in a press release. “It is the first system that uses lasers that are fully safe for the eyes and skin to localize an audible signal to a particular person in any setting.”