An unconscious person’s response to odors after a serious brain injury may be a simple yet powerful signal of how aware they are and how likely they are to survive and recover, a new study suggests, relying on responses to the scent of shampoo and the stench of rotting fish.

Patients who survive brain damage from trauma, stroke, or heart attack are plunged into forms of unconsciousness that vary from minimal consciousness to unresponsive wakefulness, sometimes called a vegetative state. Specialists trying to tell who is in which state have fared only a little better than a coin flip: About 4 in 10 people thought to be unconscious are actually aware.

That uncertainty makes decisions for families and clinicians supremely difficult, from weighing how to treat pain to whether to withdraw life support. Sophisticated imaging of unconscious patients’ brain activity can reveal hints of awareness that go beyond behavioral assessments, sometimes only to deepen the mystery of who will get better. Now Israeli scientists have turned to the sense of smell, evolutionarily speaking our most ancient sensory system, as a window into our brain. Their paper appears Wednesday in Nature.

Rudolph Heider who survived the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, and World War Two has beaten Coronavirus on his 107th birthday.

A great-great-grandfather who lived through the Spanish Flu, Great Depression and World War II has now conquered coronavirus — just in time for his 107th birthday.

Rudolph ‘Rudi’ Heider battled the deadly virus for weeks while quarantined at a nursing home in Chesterfield, Missouri.

On Tuesday his family finally received the joyous news that he’d been cleared to come out of isolation after reaching the two-week mark without any symptoms.

“Everybody here’s been vaccinated anyway”

“It’s a hoax”

Given that I can’t see the man talking’s mouth due to his face mask I have trouble blindly assuming this video is true. Is that my own cognitive dissonance though? Was awfully weird to see Pence walking around the Mayo Clinic face mask less. Almost seemed to me like he felt like he had protection against the virus. Was it just his religious faith that inspired him to act with such little caution or is there something big here that we aren’t being told?

Fox News’ John Roberts Caught on Hot Mic Discussing COVID-19 as a Hoax.
& said “everyone here has been vaccinated anyway!”

Video became Viral after it captured an informal exchange between Roberts and New York Times photographer Doug Mills.

“Like you often have to do in science, we first hit the problem with a hammer to see how the system breaks, then backtrack from there,” Simpson said.

By that she means that in order to determine if the gut microbiome influenced drug addiction, they first needed to compare an organism with a normal gut microbiome to one without. To do that, the researchers gave some rats antibiotics that depleted 80 percent of their gut microbes. All of the rats — those with and without gut microbes — were dependent on the prescription opioid pain reliever oxycodone. Then some of the rats from each group went into withdrawal.

“To me, the most surprising thing was that the rats all seemed the same on the surface,” George said. “There weren’t any major changes in the pain-relieving effect of opioids, or symptoms of withdrawal or other behavior between the rats with and without gut microbes.”

It wasn’t until the team looked at the rats’ brains that they saw a significant difference. The typical pattern of neuron recruitment to different parts of the brain during intoxication and withdrawal was disrupted in rats that had been treated with antibiotics, and thus lacked most of their gut microbes. Most notably, during intoxication, rats with depleted gut microbes had more activated neurons in the regions of the brain that regulate stress and pain (periaqueductal gray, locus coeruleus) and regions involved in opioid intoxication and withdrawal (central amygdala, basolateral amygdala). During withdrawal, microbe-depleted rats had fewer activated neurons in the central amygdala, as compared to rats with normal gut microbiomes.

“It was many months of counting black dots,” Simpson said. “But in the end it became clear that, at least in rats, gut microbes alter the way the brain responds to drugs.”

That shift could affect behavior, she explained, because a decrease in neurons recruited in the central amygdala could result in fewer withdrawal symptoms, which can in turn lead to a higher risk of drug abuse.

As a now-healthy graduate student, Simpson first worked on techniques to visualize molecules in the brain. But she couldn’t shake her interest in the gut microbiome and its connections to the brain.