Most of us consider nightmares pretty harmless, but apparently, they can be a bad sign. According to research at the University of Birmingham, people who experience frequent bad dreams in middle age are more likely to be diagnosed with dementia later in life.

New research suggests nightmares may become common several years or even decades before the characteristic memory and thinking problems of dementia set in. The study will be published today (September 21, 2022) in The Lancet.

Founded in 1,823 by Thomas Wakley, The Lancet is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal. It is one of the world’s oldest, most prestigious, and best known general medical journals. The journal publishes original research articles, review articles (“seminars” and “reviews”), editorials, book reviews, correspondence, as well as news features and case reports. The Lancet has editorial offices in London, New York, and Beijing.

Summary: The Allen Institute is launching a new global collaboration to map approximately 200 billion cells in the human brain by type and function.

Source: Allen Institute.

Scientists at the Allen Institute are launching the brain equivalent of the Human Genome Project, leading a new global collaboration to map the approximately 200 billion cells in the human brain by their type and function.

Summary: Researchers successfully turned skin cells from Parkinson’s patients into dopaminergic neurons by introducing a combination of neural-inducing genes into the skin cells.

Source: international society for stem cell research.

The possibility to make virtually all cell types of the human body from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which are embryonic-like cells generated from a patient’s skin, in a process called reprogramming, has opened new avenues for disease modeling in the lab.