Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: neuroscience – Page 337

The human body relies heavily on electrical charges. Lightning-like pulses of energy fly through the brain and nerves and most biological processes depend on electrical ions traveling across the membranes of each cell in our body.

These are possible, in part, because of an imbalance in electrical charges that exists on either side of a cellular membrane. Until recently, researchers believed the membrane was an essential component to creating this imbalance. But that thought was turned on its head when researchers at Stanford University discovered that similar imbalanced electrical charges can exist between microdroplets of water and air.

Now, researchers at Duke University have discovered that these types of electric fields also exist within and around another type of cellular structure called biological condensates. Like oil droplets floating in water, these structures exist because of differences in density. They form compartments inside the cell without needing the physical boundary of a membrane.

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People typically think of food as calories, energy and sustenance. However, the latest evidence suggests that food also “talks” to our genome, which is the genetic blueprint that directs the way the body functions down to the cellular level.

This communication between food and genes may affect your health, physiology and longevity. The idea that food delivers important messages to an animal’s genome is the focus of a field known as nutrigenomics. This is a discipline still in its infancy, and many questions remain cloaked in mystery. Yet already, we researchers have learned a great deal about how food components affect the genome.

I am a molecular biologist who researches the interactions among food, genes and brains in the effort to better understand how food messages affect our biology. The efforts of scientists to decipher this transmission of information could one day result in healthier and happier lives for all of us. But until then, has unmasked at least one important fact: Our relationship with food is far more intimate than we ever imagined.

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Researchers identified DNA methylation markers that may indicate the risk of developing schizophrenia later in life in newborns. This breakthrough discovery could allow for early detection and intervention to reduce the impact of the disease. By studying blood samples collected at birth, the team was able to identify unique methylation differences in cell types that could become potential clinical biomarkers for future early detection of schizophrenia.

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An international research team led by investigators at Virginia Commonwealth University has identified for the first time markers that may indicate early in life if a person has susceptibility to schizophrenia.

The ability to predict the risk of developing later in life may allow early detection and intervention, which the researchers hope can reduce the impact of the disease on individuals, families and communities. Their results have been published in Molecular Psychiatry.

Schizophrenia is a serious psychiatric disorder that is most often detected in young adulthood. It affects as much as 1% of the and can cause debilitating effects such as a sense of losing touch with reality. People with the disorder are up to three times more likely to die early and often face discrimination, social isolation and debilitating physical illness, according to the World Health Organization.

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Note that this is very far away from a return to an anthropocentric worldview, to pre-Copernican times when the Earth was the center of Creation. (I call it biocentric to make the distinction clear.) Biocentrism is necessarily post-Copernican. I am saying that we are unique and important — but not for having been created by a god, or for being the result of a purposeful cosmic directive.

We are unique and important for being self-aware living entities capable of asking questions about their origin and future. We may not be the measure of all things as Protagoras of Abdera proclaimed long ago, but we are the things that can measure. We experience the world, we measure it, and we tell stories about what we see and what we feel. And what we are finding out is that we may very well be the only ones asking such questions — or, at the very least, the only ones we know of, which effectively amounts to the same thing. Even if “they” exist and tell stories, their stories will not be ours. There is only one human voice in the cosmos. And if we ruin our project of civilization, the Universe will once again become silent.

The acceptance of our cosmic loneliness and the rarity of our planet is a wakeup call, ringing to awaken a new collective consciousness. I believe it to be the new unifying myth of our generation, with the power to go beyond tribal divides and bigotry, to lead us into a new era of human flourishing. But for this to happen, we need to change how we relate to life and to the planet that allows us to exist. We are not above nature, and we don’t own it. We are a part of it and depend on it for our existence.

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Researchers have found that for much of human evolutionary history our brains kept growing. In fact, if you count from our last shared ancestors with chimpanzees six million years ago, the human brain size almost quadrupled. This happened thanks in part to the improving diet and nutrition of early humans. Cro Magnons, the Homo sapiens that had the largest brains in history were alive from 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. But as the recent study from scientists at Dartmouth and Boston Universities points out, around 3,000 years ago, during the current Holocene geological epoch, our brains began to diminish.

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