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Objectives This study sought to assess the association between long working hours, psychosocial safety climate (PSC), work engagement (WE) and new major depression symptoms emerging over the next 12 months. PSC is the work climate supporting workplace psychological health.

Setting Australian prospective cohort population data from the states of New South Wales, Western Australia and South Australia.

Participants At Time 1, there were 3921 respondents in the sample. Self-employed, casual temporary, unclassified, those with working hours 35 (37% of 2850) and participants with major depression symptoms at Time 1 (6.7% of 1782) were removed. The final sample was a population-based cohort of 1084 full-time Australian employees.

Neuromorphic nanowire networks are found to exhibit neural-like dynamics, including phase transitions and avalanche criticality. Hochstetter and Kuncic et al. show that the dynamical state at the edge-of-chaos is optimal for learning and favours computationally complex information processing tasks.

Fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) is one of the most common chronic pain conditions out there, yet we still know shockingly little about it.

For decades, the debilitating condition — marked by widespread pain and fatigue — has been vastly understudied, and while it’s commonly thought to originate in the brain, no one really knows how fibromyalgia starts or what can be done to treat it. Some physicians maintain it doesn’t even exist, and many patients report feeling gaslit by the medical community.

New research on mice has now found further evidence that fibromyalgia is not only real, but may involve an autoimmune response as a driver for the illness.

Of the 88 neurosurgical patients, 30 showed a decrease in self-reported spiritual belief before and after neurosurgical brain tumor resection, 29 showed an increase, and 29 showed no change. Using lesion network mapping, the team found that self-reported spirituality mapped to a specific brain circuit centered on the PAG. The circuit included positive nodes and negative nodes — lesions that disrupted these respective nodes either decreased or increased self-reported spiritual beliefs.

Summary: A new study has identified a specific brain circuit centered in the periaqueductal gray that is linked to spiritual acceptance and religiosity.

Source: Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Continue reading “Brain Circuit for Spirituality Identified” »

The human body contains hundreds of different types of cells, with stem cells working like blank canvases that can be adapted and reproduced to help our tissues grow and repair themselves. However, once hijacked, the same kind of cell proliferation can be damaging, as happens in cancer tumors.

Scientists have now discovered a new resting phase for neuroepithelial cells — the stem cells of the central nervous system — which appears to put them in a kind of dormancy. If we can work out how to apply this to cancer cells too, we could get to the stage of being able to put brain tumors to ‘sleep’.

“The primary feature of any cancer is that the cells are proliferating,” says biomedical engineer Christopher Plaisier, from Arizona State University. “If we could get in there and figure out what the mechanisms are, that might be a place to slow them down.”

A team of neuroscientists at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, led by Baher Ibrahim and Dr. Daniel Llano, has published a study in eLife that furthers our understanding of how the brain perceives everyday sensory inputs.

“There is a traditional idea that the way that we experience the world is sort of like a movie being played on a projector. All the sensory information that is coming in is being played on our cerebral cortex and that’s how we see things and hear things,” said Llano, a Beckman researcher and associate professor in the Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

However, quite a few studies over the years have challenged this traditional view of how we perceive the world. These studies present a new model: Rather than projecting information onto the cortex, the thalamus might be selecting information that is already present in the cortex, based on our learned experiences.

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital have engineered yeast used in baking, wine-making and brewing to treat inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The bacteria has been modified to secrete an anti-inflammatory molecule in response to signs of gut inflammation and has proven effective in preclinical tests.

Our gut microbiome is increasingly implicated in everything from cancer to neurodegenerative disease but it is still unclear exactly how we can translate these novel findings into clinical treatments. Fecal transplants are probably the most primitive microbiome-modifying treatment we have developed, while probiotics simply rely on upping specific levels of naturally occurring bacteria.

Perhaps the most futurist microbiome therapy under investigation is the idea of genetically engineered probiotics. Here researchers modify bacteria to either eat up molecules we don’t want in our body or secrete molecules we know have positive therapeutic effects.

Summary: Study finds amyloid-beta plaques may not be the cause of memory loss associated with Alzheimer’s disease, but instead a consequence of the disease. Regardless of the levels of amyloid plaques, researchers found individuals with high levels of amyloid peptide were cognitively normal. Higher levels of soluble amyloid beta peptide were also linked to people having a larger hippocampus.

Source: University of Cincinnati.

Experts estimate more than 6 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s dementia. But a recent study, led by the University of Cincinnati, sheds new light on the disease and a highly debated new drug therapy.

Scientists develop the first CRISPR-Cas9-based gene drive in plants which may breed crops better able to withstand drought and disease.

Scientists have discovered a unique form of cell messaging occurring in the human brain that’s not been seen before. Excitingly, the discovery hints that our brains might be even more powerful units of computation than we realized.

Early last year, researchers from institutes in Germany and Greece reported a mechanism in the brain’s outer cortical cells that produces a novel ‘graded’ signal all on its own, one that could provide individual neurons with another way to carry out their logical functions.

Continue reading “A Never-Before-Seen Type of Signal Has Been Detected in The Human Brain” »