Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: neuroscience – Page 679

Now THAT mechanism could be a game changer for functional, fully reversible cryonic suspension…

Indian jumping ants can shrink their brains by 20 per cent and then expand them back again to allow energy to be temporarily diverted towards egg production, according to a new study.

The inch-long arthropods were already known to be able to catch and kill prey twice their size, jump four inches in the air and compete in 40-day royal rumble death matches to decide the next queen of the colony.

Now new research shows that females prepare their bodies to lay eggs by releasing hormones that make their brains shrink by around 20 percent and cause their ovaries to balloon to five times their normal size.

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In 2003, Lyon was just finishing school and working as a hired hacker. Companies tasked him with rooting out vulnerabilities in their systems, and he’d developed mapping tools for the job. His electronic sniffers would trace a network’s lines and nodes and report back what they found. Why not set them loose on the mother of all networks, he thought? So he did.

The resulting visualization recalled grand natural patterns, like networks of neurons or the large-scale structure of the universe. But it was at once more mundane and mind-boggling—representing, as it did, both a collection of mostly standard laptop and desktop computers connected to servers in run-of-the-mill office parks and an emerging technological force that was far more than the sum of it parts.

In 2010, Lyon updated his map using a new method. Instead of the traceroutes he used in 2003, which aren’t always accurate, he turned to a more precise mapping tool using route tables generated by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the internet’s main system for efficiently routing information. And now, he’s back with a new map based on BGP routes from the University of Oregon’s Route Views project. Only this time the map moves: It’s a roughly 25-year time-lapse of the internet’s explosive growth.

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The reality is Benny and Josh both have Canavan disease, a fatal inherited brain disorder. They are buckled into wheelchairs, don’t speak, and can’t control their limbs.

On Thursday, April 8, in Dayton, Ohio, Landsman and his family rolled the older boy, Benny, into a hospital where over several hours, neurosurgeons drilled bore holes into his skull and injected trillions of viral particles carrying the correct version of a gene his body is missing.

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Controversy has shrouded the once-common plasticizer BPA since studies started to highlight its links to a whole range of adverse health effects in humans, but recent research has also shown that its substitutes mightn’t be all that safe either. A new study has investigated how these compounds impact nerve cells in the adult brain, with the authors finding that they likely permanently disrupt signal transmission, and also interfere with neural circuits involved in perception.

BPA, or bisphenol A, is a chemical that has been commonly used in food, beverage and other types of packaging for decades, but experts have grown increasingly concerned that it can leech into these consumables and impact human health in ways ranging from endocrine dysfunction to cancer. This came on the back of scientific studies revealing such links dating back to the 1990s, which in turn saw the rise of “BPA-free” plastics as a safer alternative.

One of those alternatives is bisphenol S (BPS), and while it allows plastic manufacturers to slap a BPA-free label on their packaging, more and more research is demonstrating that it mightn’t be much better for us. As just one example, a study last year showed through experiments on mice that just like BPA, BPS can alter the expression of genes in the placenta and likely fundamentally disrupt fetal brain development.

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A recent study explored whether working memory training can reduce anxiety associated with a particular stressor — exam time. While working memory training did not appear to reduce test anxiety among students, perceived success during the training tasks did. The findings were published in the Journal of Cognitive Enhancement.

People who suffer from anxiety show deficits in working memory function. Working memory is a brain system that allows us to hold on to certain information and use it to guide our decisions and behavior. Scholars have found evidence to suggest that interventions that improve working memory also improve anxiety symptoms.

Little is known about how motivation might affect the success of working memory training on anxiety reduction. The authors of the new study elected to explore this topic among a sample of college students experiencing a particularly stressful season of the academic year — exam time.

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In a new study published in Cell Stem Cell, a team led by USC Stem Cell scientist Michael Bonaguidi, Ph.D., demonstrates that neural stem cells—the stem cells of the nervous system—age rapidly.

“There is chronological aging, and there is , and they are not the same thing,” said Bonaguidi, an Assistant Professor of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Gerontology and Biomedical Engineering at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. “We’re interested in the biological aging of neural stem cells, which are particularly vulnerable to the ravages of time. This has implications for the normal cognitive decline that most of us experience as we grow older, as well as for dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy and .”

In the study, first author Albina Ibrayeva, a Ph.D. candidate in the Bonaguidi Lab in the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC, joined her colleagues in looking at the brains of young, middle-aged and .

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