Menu

Blog

Archive for the ‘neuroscience’ category: Page 277

May 18, 2023

40 Hz vibrations reduce Alzheimer’s pathology, symptoms in mouse models

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension, neuroscience

Evidence that non-invasive sensory stimulation of 40 Hz gamma frequency brain rhythms can reduce Alzheimer’s disease pathology and symptoms, already shown with light and sound by multiple research groups in mice and humans, now extends to tactile stimulation. A new study by MIT scientists shows that Alzheimer’s model mice exposed to 40 Hz vibration an hour a day for several weeks showed improved brain health and motor function compared to untreated controls.

The MIT group is not the first to show that gamma frequency can affect and improve , but they are the first to show that the can also reduce levels of the hallmark Alzheimer’s protein phosphorylated tau, keep neurons from dying or losing their synapse circuit connections, and reduce neural DNA damage.

“This work demonstrates a third sensory modality that we can use to increase gamma power in the brain,” said Li-Huei Tsai, corresponding author of the study, director of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Aging Brain Initiative at MIT, and Picower Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS).

May 18, 2023

Scientists create super-intelligent mice, discover they’re also very laid-back

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, neuroscience

Year 2015 face_with_colon_three


The genetically modified super-smart mice also proved to suffer less from anxiety, the scientists found.

For all that science has decoded the human genome, we don’t actually know what most of our DNA does, or even what a great many of our genes do. One way to elucidate what a gene does is to change it (mutate it) and see what happens.

Continue reading “Scientists create super-intelligent mice, discover they’re also very laid-back” »

May 18, 2023

Our Universe Exists Inside Of A Black Hole Of Higher Dimensional Universe

Posted by in categories: cosmology, neuroscience, quantum physics, singularity

This may sound like a science fiction scenario, but some physicists have proposed that this could be the case. In this article, we will explore the idea that our universe may be inside of a black hole, and what implications this would have for our understanding of cosmology and physics.

A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, black holes are formed when massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. The resulting singularity is a point of infinite density and zero volume, where the laws of physics break down.

Scientists discover possible connection between human brain and cosmos on a quantum scale.

May 18, 2023

Man Creates Edible Water “Jelly Drops” to Help Dementia Patients Stay Hydrated

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, neuroscience

When London-based student Lewis Hornby noticed that his dementia-afflicted grandmother was having trouble staying hydrated, he came up with Jelly Drops, bite-sized pods of edible water made with gelling agents and electrolytes.

May 18, 2023

Ancient gene linkages support ctenophores as sister to other animals

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, evolution, genetics, neuroscience

As sponges and ctenophores are such disparate animals13, the nature of the first diverging animal lineage has implications for the evolution of fundamental animal characteristics. Adult sponges are generally sessile filter-feeding organisms with body plans organized into reticulated water-filtration channels, structures built out of silica or calcium carbonate, and specialized cell types and tissues used for feeding, reproduction and self-defence, but they lack neuronal and muscle cells15. By contrast, ctenophores are gelatinous marine predators that move using eight longitudinal ‘comb rows’ of ciliary bundles16,17; they are superficially similar but unrelated to cnidarian medusae13,18 and possess multiple nerve nets19. Thus, whereas the sponge-sister scenario suggests a single origin of neurons on the ctenophore–parahoxozoan stem, the ctenophore-sister scenario implies either that either ancestral metazoan neurons were lost in the sponge lineage, or that there was convergent evolution of neurons in the ctenophore and parahoxozoan lineages3,6. Similar considerations apply to other metazoan cell types18, gene regulatory networks, animal development13,18 and other uniquely metazoan features.

Despite its importance for understanding animal evolution, the relative branching order of sponges, ctenophores and other animals has proven to be difficult to resolve2. The fossil record is largely silent on this issue as verified Precambrian sponge fossils are extremely rare20 and putative fossils of the soft-bodied ctenophores are difficult to interpret21. Morphological characters of living groups (for example, choanocytes of sponges) are not sufficient to resolve the question because true homology is difficult to assign, and such characters are easily lost or can arise convergently13,22. The ctenophore-sister hypothesis is supported by a pair of gene duplications shared by sponges, bilaterians, placozoans and cnidarians but not ctenophores23. Although sophisticated methods for sequence-based phylogenomics have been developed and applied to increasingly large molecular datasets, there is still considerable debate about the relative position of sponges and ctenophores as results are sensitive to how sequence evolution is modelled11, which taxa or sites are included24,25, and the effects of long-branch artifacts and nucleotide compositional variation26. New approaches are needed.

We reasoned that patterns of synteny, classically defined as chromosomal gene linkage without regard to gene order27, could provide a powerful tool for resolving the ctenophore-sister versus sponge-sister debate. Chromosomal patterns of gene linkage evolve slowly in many lineages12,28,29,30, probably because it is improbable for interchromosomal translocations to be fixed in populations with large effective population sizes28,31,32. Notably, some changes in synteny are effectively irreversible. For example, when two distinct ancestral synteny groups are combined onto a single chromosome by translocation, and subsequent intrachromosomal rearrangements mix these two groups of genes, it is very unlikely that the ancestral separated pattern will be restored by further rearrangement and fission, in the same sense that spontaneous reduction in entropy is improbable12. Such rare and irreversible changes are particularly useful for resolving challenging phylogenetic questions as they give rise to shared derived features that unambiguously unite all descendant lineages33,34,35. Deeply conserved syntenies observed between animals and their closest unicellular relatives12 suggest that outgroup comparisons could be used to infer ancestral metazoan states and polarize changes within animals to address the sponge-sister versus ctenophore-sister debate. Yet, chromosome-scale genome sequences of the unicellular or colonial eukaryotic outgroups closest to animals (choanoflagellates, filastereans and ichthyosporeans) have not been reported.

May 18, 2023

Working on a work-around to repair some of the memory damage from Alzheimer’s

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

The Tracy lab focuses on the KIBRA protein.

May 16, 2023

Insight into brain’s waste clearing system may shed light on brain diseases

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, engineering, neuroscience

Like the lymphatic system in the body, the glymphatic system in the brain clears metabolic waste and distributes nutrients and other important compounds. Impairments in this system may contribute to brain diseases, such as neurodegenerative diseases and stroke.

A team of researchers in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis has found a non-invasive and non-pharmaceutical method to influence glymphatic transport using , opening the opportunity to use the method to further study diseases and . Results of the work are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 15.

Hong Chen, associate professor of biomedical engineering in McKelvey Engineering and of in the School of Medicine, and her team, including Dezhuang (Summer) Ye, a postdoctoral research associate, and Si (Stacie) Chen, a former postdoctoral research associate, found the first direct evidence that focused , combined with circulating microbubbles—a technique they call FUSMB—could mechanically enhance glymphatic transport in the mouse brain.

May 16, 2023

Mushrooms magnify memory

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, neuroscience

Lions mane the mushroom can actually stop alzheimers and dementia by boosting nerve growth 😗😁


Researchers from The University of Queensland have discovered the active compound from an edible mushroom that boosts nerve growth and enhances memory.

Professor Frederic Meunier from the Queensland Brain Institute said the team had identified new active compounds from the mushroom, Hericium erinaceus.

Continue reading “Mushrooms magnify memory” »

May 16, 2023

First Complete Map of a Fly Brain Has Uncanny Similarities to AI Neural Networks

Posted by in categories: neuroscience, robotics/AI

Over 12 years, researchers mapped all of a larval fruit fly’s brain, charting 3,016 neurons and 548,000 connections. It’s big news for neuroscience.

May 16, 2023

Unique Microglia Subset Crucial for Cognitive Functioning

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Summary: A new study discovered not all microglia are the same, challenging existing beliefs. A unique subset of these cells, the ARG1+microglia, important for proper cognitive functions, were identified in mice, with evidence suggesting a similar subset exists in humans.

Microglia lacking the protein ARG1 led to less exploratory behavior in mice, indicating cognitive deficits. These discoveries open exciting new possibilities for understanding brain diseases and developing novel therapies.

Page 277 of 1,002First274275276277278279280281Last