Summary: Dampening retromer activity slows down the trafficking of tau in neurodegenerative disorders, a new study reports.
Source: EPFL
Neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease are associated with atypical proteins that form tangles in the brain, killing neurons. Neurobiologists at EPFL have now identified some key mechanisms underlying the formation of these tangles.
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Dr. Max More is a philosopher, writer, speaker and expert in Cryonics — the process of cryopreserving a body at the time of legal death in the hopes of reviving them in the future.
Theo talks with Dr. More about what actually happens when we die, the future of mankind, and if Theo would preserve his brain for science.
Dr. More is the Ambassador for Alcor Life Extension, a non-profit in Scottsdale, Arizona practicing cryonics. Max received a Doctorate in Philosophy in 1995 from the University of Southern California after completing a degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford University.
Dr. Max More: https://www.maxmore.com/
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Summary: Study reveals how the element of surprise helps facilitate learning and memory retrieval.
Source: University of Manchester.
A study by University of Manchester neuroscientists into the effect of surprise on our memory has inadvertently discovered a method which might help us to perform better in exams.
Summary: Researchers have identified human-specific cell types in the prefrontal cortex. These unique cells may explain why humans are more susceptible to neuropsychiatric diseases than other primate species.
Source: Yale.
What makes the human brain distinct from that of all other animals—including even our closest primate relatives?
Due to a rare genetic mutation, Aliria Rosa Piedrahita de Villegas should have had Alzheimer’s.
Alzheimer’s disease is a disease that attacks the brain, causing a decline in mental ability that worsens over time. It is the most common form of dementia and accounts for 60 to 80 percent of dementia cases. There is no current cure for Alzheimer’s disease, but there are medications that can help ease the symptoms.
The flow of time from the past to the future is a central feature of how we experience the world. But precisely how this phenomenon, known as the arrow of time, arises from the microscopic interactions among particles and cells is a mystery—one that researchers at the CUNY Graduate Center Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences (ITS) are helping to unravel with the publication of a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters. The findings could have important implications in a variety of disciplines, including physics, neuroscience, and biology.
Fundamentally, the arrow of time arises from the second law of thermodynamics: the principle that microscopic arrangements of physical systems tend to increase in randomness, moving from order to disorder. The more disordered a system becomes, the more difficult it is for it to find its way back to an ordered state, and the stronger the arrow of time. In short, the universe’s tendency toward disorder is the fundamental reason why we experience time flowing in one direction.
“The two questions our team had were, if we looked at a particular system, would we be able to quantify the strength of its arrow of time, and would we be able to sort out how it emerges from the micro scale, where cells and neurons interact, to the whole system?” said Christopher Lynn, the paper’s first author and a postdoctoral fellow with the ITS program. “Our findings provide the first step toward understanding how the arrow of time that we experience in daily life emerges from these more microscopic details.”
Someone taps your shoulder. The organized touch receptors in your skin send a message to your brain, which processes the information and directs you to look left, in the direction of the tap. Now, Penn State and U.S. Air Force researchers have harnessed this processing of mechanical information and integrated it into engineered materials that ‘think.’
In a report this week from the science journal SciTechDaily, we learn of a scientific breakthrough that it clearly intended to be exciting and startling, but potentially worrisome as well. Scientists at the University of Cambridge have created a series of “model embryos” that include a functioning brain, a beating heart, and the foundation for all of the other bodily organs you would expect.
We have arrived at Aldous Huxleys Brave new world.
Scientists from the University of Cambridge have created model embryos from mouse stem cells that form a brain, a beating heart, and the foundations of all the other organs of the body. It represents a new avenue for recreating the first stages of life.
The team of researchers, led by Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, developed the embryo model without eggs or sperm. Instead, they used stem cells – the body’s master cells, which can develop into almost any cell type in the body.
“It’s just unbelievable that we’ve got this far. This has been the dream of our community for years, and major focus of our work for a decade and finally we’ve done it.” —