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Category: neuroscience – Page 476

Breakthroughs don’t often happen in neuroscience, but we just had one. In a tour-de-force, an international team released the full brain connectivity map of the young fruit fly, described in a paper published last week in Science. Containing 3,016 neurons and 548,000 synapses, the map—called a connectome—is the most complex whole-brain wiring diagram to date.

“It’s a ‘wow,’” said Dr. Shinya Yamamoto at Baylor College of Medicine, who was not involved in the work.

Why care about a fruit fly? Far from uninvited guests at the dinner table, Drosophila melanogaster is a neuroscience darling. Although its brain is smaller than a poppy seed—a far cry from the 100 billion neurons that power human brains—the fly’s neural system shares similar principles to those that underlie our own brains.

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Two new effects on TikTok can give users sculpted cheekbones, plumped lips, or a younger look with the push of a button. But this hyper-realistic image-altering tech also spurs backlash. WSJ reporter Sara Ashley O’Brien joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss how these filters work and why some experts say they could damage users’ mental health. Photo: Storyblocks.

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This video explores what attention really is, what role it plays in learning and why people can’t multitask — the issue of attention residue.

OUTLINE:
0:00 — Sneak peek.
0:20 — Introduction.
0:57 — Why we need attention.
1:46 — Thalamus as attentional filter.
3:06 — Higher attentional systems.
3:40 — Role of attention in learning.
4:42 — Attention residue.
6:00 — Conclusions and references.

Socials:
VK: https://vk.com/atpsynthase

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There’s a tiny, slow-burning ‘fuse’ attached to the ends of all our chromosomes, and as we naturally age, each of our cells loses more and more of that life-giving line.

Researchers in South Korea have now shown this fuse, known as the telomere, is unusually short in the cells of elderly people who are relatively healthy but have noticed early signs of depressive symptoms and cognitive decline, such as memory loss.

The randomized controlled trial presents more evidence for the telomere hypothesis of aging, which posits that all cells hit a point where they can no longer divide and replicate.

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You can easily picture yourself riding a bicycle across the sky even though that’s not something that can actually happen. You can envision yourself doing something you’ve never done before—like water skiing—and maybe even imagine a better way to do it than anyone else.

Imagination involves creating a mental image of something that is not present for your senses to detect, or even something that isn’t out there in reality somewhere. Imagination is one of the key abilities that make us human. But where did it come from?

I’m a neuroscientist who studies how children acquire . I’m especially interested in the neurological mechanisms of imagination. Once we identify what brain structures and connections are necessary to mentally construct new objects and scenes, scientists like me can look back over the course of evolution to see when these emerged—and potentially gave birth to the first kinds of imagination.

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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.

“Extracts from these so-called ‘lion’s mane’ mushrooms have been used in in Asian countries for centuries, but we wanted to scientifically determine their on ,” Professor Meunier said.

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Summary: Researchers have developed a more powerful and energy-efficient memristor, based on the structure of the human brain, that combines data storage and processing. The new technology, made from nanocrystals of halogenated perovskite, is not yet ready for use as it is difficult to integrate with existing computer chips, but it has the potential for parallel processing of large amounts of data.

Source: Politecnico di Milano.

Inspired by the brain’s energy efficiency, copying its structure to create more powerful computers, a team of researchers from Politecnico di Milano, Empa and ETH Zurich has developed a memristor that is more powerful and easier to produce than its predecessors: the results have been published in Science Advances.

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