United Neuroscience’s Alzheimer’s vaccine candidate UB-311 was found safe and well-tolerated, triggering an antibody response against beta-amyloid in most of the patients, according to Phase 2a trial results.
https://alzheimersnewstoday.com/…/ub-311-safe-effective-ph…/
Researchers have found bees can do basic mathematics, in a discovery that expands our understanding of the relationship between brain size and brain power.
Building on their finding that honeybees can understand the concept of zero, Australian and French researchers set out to test whether bees could perform arithmetic operations like addition and subtraction.
Solving maths problems requires a sophisticated level of cognition, involving the complex mental management of numbers, long-term rules and short term working memory.
Researchers have launched an ultra-large virtual docking library expected to grow to more than 1 billion molecules by next year. It will expand by 1000-fold the number of such “make-on-demand” compounds readily available to scientists for chemical biology and drug discovery. The larger the library, the better its odds of weeding out inactive “decoy” molecules that could otherwise lead researchers down blind alleys. The project is funded by the National Institutes of Health.
“To improve medications for mental illnesses, we need to screen huge numbers of potentially therapeutic molecules,” explained Joshua A. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., director of NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which co-funded the research. “Unbiased computational modeling allows us to do this in a computer, vastly expediting the process of discovering new treatments. It enables researchers to virtually “see” a molecule docking with its receptor protein—like a ship in its harbor berth or a key in its lock—and predict its pharmacological properties, based on how the molecular structures are predicted to interact. Only those relatively few candidate molecules that best match the target profile on the computer need to be physically made and tested in a wet lab.”
Bryan Roth, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill, Brian Shoichet, Ph.D., and John Irwin, Ph.D., of the University of California San Francisco, and colleagues, report on their findings Feb. 6, 2019 in the journal Nature. The study was supported, in part, by grants from NIMH, National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), the NIH Common Fund, and National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).
A biomedical tool that tricks aggressive brain tumors such as glioblastoma into migrating into an external container rather than throughout the brain has been designated a “Breakthrough Device” by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Dubbed the Tumor Monorail, the device mimics the physical properties of the brain’s white matter to entice aggressive tumors to migrate toward the exterior of the brain, where the migrating cells can be collected and removed. The purpose of the device is not to destroy the tumor, but to halt its lethal spread, making the disease more of a condition to manage than a death sentence.
Breakthrough designations from the FDA aim to expedite the development and review of drugs, diagnostics and devices aimed at life-threatening or irreversibly debilitating conditions. While the designation does not mean that the device has been approved for clinical use, it does provide a partnership with the FDA that can speed development, assessment and review.
Perfectionism often develops in childhood, is impacted by parenting and can lead to mental health struggles in later life. Credit: Shutterstock We recently conducted one of the largest-ever studies on perfectionism. We learned that perfectionism has increased substantially over the past 25 years and that it affects men and women equally.
We also learned that perfectionists become more neurotic and less conscientious as time passes.
Perfectionism involves striving for flawlessness and requiring perfection of oneself and others. Extremely negative reactions to mistakes, harsh self-criticism, nagging doubt about performance abilities and a strong sense that others are critical and demanding also define the trait.
The researchers found that people have a moral preference for supporting good causes and not wanting to support harmful or bad causes. However, depending on the strength of the monetary incentive, people will at one point switch to selfish behavior. When the authors reduced the excitability of the rTPJ using electromagnetic stimulation, the participants’ moral behavior remained more stable.
“If we don’t let the brain deliberate on conflicting moral and monetary values, people are more likely to stick to their moral convictions and aren’t swayed, even by high financial incentives,” explains Christian Ruff. According to the neuroeconomist, this is a remarkable finding, since: “In principle, it’s also conceivable that people are intuitively guided by financial interests and only take the altruistic path as a result of their deliberations.”
Our actions are guided by moral values. However, monetary incentives can get in the way of our good intentions. Neuroeconomists at the University of Zurich have now investigated in which area of the brain conflicts between moral and material motives are resolved. Their findings reveal that our actions are more social when these deliberations are inhibited.
When donating money to a charity or doing volunteer work, we put someone else’s needs before our own and forgo our own material interests in favor of moral values. Studies have described this behavior as reflecting either a personal predisposition for altruism, an instrument for personal reputation management, or a mental trade-off of the pros and cons associated with different actions.
Impact of electromagnetic stimulation on donating behavior
A research team led by UZH professor Christian Ruff from the Zurich Center for Neuroeconomics has now investigated the neurobiological origins of unselfish behavior. The researchers focused on the right Temporal Parietal Junction (rTPJ) — an area of the brain that is believed to play a crucial role in social decision-making processes. To understand the exact function of the rTPJ, they engineered an experimental set-up in which participants had to decide whether and how much they wanted to donate to various organizations. Through electromagnetic stimulation of the rTPJ, the researchers were then able to determine which of the three types of considerations — predisposed altruism, reputation management, or trading off moral and material values — are processed in this area of the brain.
“Ruth is a shining example of one of the qualities I most admire in a scientist: dogged perseverance in pursuit of one’s thesis, in spite of near-universal rejection of it by the mainstream community, until one finally wins them round.
It’s only an admirable quality if you’re likely to be right, of course, so you’d better be a really good scientist in other ways too — and she sure is. Ruth spoke at a couple of my Cambridge conferences and I was always dismayed that such solid data and logic concerning the involvement of herpes simplex virus in Alzheimer’s disease was so widely ignored or dismissed for what seemed to be totally flimsy reasons. That’s not happening any more!”, says Aubrey de Grey.
https://www.undoing-aging.org/news/dr-ruth-itzhaki-to-speak-…aging-2019
A single transistor process that can create connections, and encode short and long term memories. The transistor is based on organic versus inorganic technology. The project relies on a form of transistor that uses ion injection from an electrolyte solution, which changes the storage and connectivity of the transistor.
The end result, a simple learning circuit to replicate neuronal action.
News Article: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190205102537.htm
Diagnosed cases of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in California rose by 600 percent from 1990 to 2003. Irva Hertz-Picciotto, Ph.D., director of the Environmental Health Sciences Core Center at the University of California-Davis, published this statistic in the journal Epidemiology a decade ago.
The esteemed epidemiologist told the audience during the Jan. 8 NIEHS Distinguished Lecture that she and her colleagues have only been able to explain a third of the increase.
“No single factor accounts for all autism cases, nor is there one event or exposure that can be responsible for the rapid increase in diagnoses,” said Hertz-Picciotto. “Each child’s path to altered brain development may be different.” Her talk was hosted by NIEHS and National Toxicology Program (NTP) Director Linda Birnbaum, Ph.D.