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Category: neuroscience – Page 676

Summary: Glial cells not only control the speed of nerve conduction, but they also influence the precision of signal transduction.

Source: University of Münster

For the brain to work efficiently, it is important that a nerve impulse arrives at its destination as quickly and as precisely as possible. It has been long been known that the nerve fibres — also known as axons — pass on these impulses. In the course of evolution, an insulating sheath — myelin — developed around the axons which increases the speed of conduction. This insulating sheath is formed by the second type of cell in the nervous system — the glial cells, which are one of the main components of the brain. If, as a result of disease, myelin is depleted, this leads to neurological disorders such as Multiple Sclerosis or Morbus Charcot-Marie-Tooth.

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Cutting calories significantly may not be an easy task for most, but it’s tied to a host of health benefits ranging from longer lifespan to a much lower chance of developing cancer, heart disease, diabetes and neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s.

A new study from teams led by Scripps Research Professors Bruno Conti, Ph.D., and Gary Siuzdak, Ph.D., illuminates the critical role that temperature plays in realizing these diet-induced health benefits. Through their findings, the scientists pave the way toward creating a medicinal compound that imitates the valuable effects of reduced body temperature.

The research appears in Science Signaling.

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Magnetism offers new ways to create more powerful and energy-efficient computers, but the realization of magnetic computing on the nanoscale is a challenging task. A critical advancement in the field of ultralow power computation using magnetic waves is reported by a joint team from Kaiserslautern, Jena and Vienna in the journal Nano Letters.

A local disturbance in the magnetic order of a magnet can propagate across a material in the form of a wave. These waves are known as spin waves and their associated quasi-particles are called magnons. Scientists from the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Innovent e. V. Jena and the University of Vienna are known for their expertise in the called ‘magnonics,’ which utilizes magnons for the development of novel types of computers, potentially complementing the conventional electron-based processors used nowadays.

“A new generation of computers using magnons could be more powerful and, above all, consume less energy. One major prerequisite is that we are able to fabricate, so-called single-mode waveguides, which enable us to use advanced wave-based signal processing schemes,” says Junior Professor Philipp Pirro, one of the leading scientists of the project. “This requires pushing the sizes of our structures into the nanometer range. The development of such conduits opens, for example, an access to the development of neuromorphic computing systems inspired by the functionalities of the human brain.”

Continue reading “Magnonic nano-fibers opens the way towards new type of computers” | >

For college students studying science, doing labwork as part of their classes is a vital way to learn research skills and better understand concepts from lectures.

That presents a challenge for schools that are operating remotely during the coronavirus pandemic — so some biology programs are mailing brains, eyeballs, and even entire fetal pigs to their students so they can dissect them at home.

At Lafayette College, neuroscience students enrolled in a physiology course recently received packages in the mail that contained preserved sheep brains, which are commonly chosen by schools due to their close resemblance to human brains. Then, neuroscientist and psychologist Luis Schettino — who, in the interest of transparency, was one of my professors when I attended Lafayette — guided his students over a video call as they dissected the brains.

Special delivery!

Continue reading “Colleges Are Mailing Brains to Students to Dissect at Home” | >

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Dental fillings may soon be left in the ash heap of history, thanks to a recent discovery about a drug called Tideglusib.

Developed for and trialled to treat Alzheimer’s disease, last year scientists found the drug also happens to promote the natural tooth regrowth mechanism in mice, allowing the tooth to repair cavities.

Tideglusib works by stimulating stem cells in the pulp of teeth, the source of new dentine. Dentine is the mineralised substance beneath tooth enamel that gets eaten away by tooth decay.

Continue reading “An Alzheimer’s Drug Has Been Shown to Help Teeth Repair Cavities Naturally” | >

People who were children when their parents were divorced showed lower levels of oxytocin — the so-called “love hormone” — when they were adults than those whose parents remained married, according to a study led by Baylor University. That lower level may play a role in having trouble forming attachments when they are grown.

Oxytocin — secreted in the brain and released during bonding experiences such as delivery of a baby or sexual interaction or nursing, even being hugged by a romantic partner — has been shown in previous research to be important for social behavior and emotional attachments in early life. The oxytocin system also has been linked to parenting, attachment and anxiety.

The new study, published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, delves into an area that has not been well researched — a link between oxytocin, early experience and adult outcomes.

“Since the rates of divorce in our society began to increase, there has been concern about the effects of divorce on the children,” said lead author Maria Boccia, Ph.D., professor of child and family studies at Baylor University in the Robbins College of Health and Human Sciences. “Most research has focused on short-term effects, like academic performance, or longer-term outcomes like the impact on relationships. How divorce causes these effects, however, is unknown.

“Oxytocin is a neurohormone that is important in regulating these behaviors and is also sensitive to the impact of stressful life events in early life,” she said. “This is a first step towards understanding what mechanisms might be involved.”

Previous studies of children whose parents were divorced have found that the experience was associated with mood disorders and substance abuse — behaviors found to be related to oxytocin, Boccia said. Additionally, such childhood experiences as divorce or death of a parent are associated with depression and anxiety in adolescents and adults, as well as with poorer parenting in adulthood, less parental sensitivity and warmth, overreaction and increased use of punishment.

Continue reading “People who were children when their parents divorced have less ‘love hormone’” | >

Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and Stanford University have pinpointed the circuit in the brain that is responsible for sleepless nights in times of stress—and it turns out that circuit does more than make you toss and turn. Their study, done in mice, ties the same neuronal connections that trigger insomnia to stress-induced changes in the immune system, which weaken the body’s defenses against a host of threats.

The study, reported September 9, 2020, in the journal Science Advances, connects and explains two familiar problems, says CSHL Assistant Professor Jeremy Borniger. “This sort of stress-induced insomnia is well known among anybody that’s tried to get to sleep with a looming deadline or something the next day,” he says. “And in the clinical world, it’s been known for a long time that chronically stressed patients typically do worse on a variety of different treatments and across a variety of different diseases.”

Like many aspects of the body’s stress response, these effects are thought to be driven by the stress hormone cortisol. Working in the Stanford lab of Luis de Lecea, where Borniger completed a postdoctoral fellowship prior to joining CSHL, the research team found a direct connection between stress-sensitive neurons in the brain that trigger cortisol’s release and nearby neurons that promote insomnia.

… The same connection, they found, also has a potent effect on the immune system. Stress significantly disrupts the abundance of certain immune cells in the blood, as well signaling pathways inside them, and the team was able to recreate these changes simply by stimulating the same neurons that link stress to insomnia.

Understanding this circuitry opens the door to a deeper understanding of the consequences of stress, not just in healthy individuals but also in disease, Borniger says:

Continue reading “The neurons that connect stress, insomnia, and the immune system” | >

Summary: Researchers demonstrate how a single injection of fibroblast growth factor 1 (FGF1) can restore blood sugar levels to normal for extended periods in rodent models of type 2 diabetes. Studies show how FGF1 affects specific neurons and perineuronal nets to help restore blood sugar levels to normal, thus sending diabetes into remission.

Source: UW Health

In rodents with type 2 diabetes, a single surgical injection of a protein called fibroblast growth factor 1 can restore blood sugar levels to normal for weeks or months. Yet how this growth factor acts in the brain to generate this lasting benefit has been poorly understood.

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Research carried out by a University academic has shed new light on the fundamentals of how, and why, we make the decisions we do.

In two separate studies, UKRI Future Leader Fellow and Lecturer in Psychology, Dr. Elsa Fouragnan has used her expertise in imaging (fMRI) and to discover exactly what happens in the brains of human and non-human primates when certain kinds of decisions are made in different contexts. Both pieces of work were carried out in collaboration with researchers at the University of Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology.

The first, published in Nature Communications, explores how and where the encodes a memory of the general rate in an environment, what the team describes as the ‘richness’ of the context in which decisions are made.

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