An intriguing new study from researchers at Stockholm University and Karolinska Institutet has described a mechanism by which virus particles can interact with proteins in biological fluids and become more infectious, while also accelerating the formation of plaques often associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Some research topics, says conventional wisdom, a physics PhD student shouldn’t touch with an iron-tipped medieval lance: sinkholes in the foundations of quantum theory. Problems so hard, you’d have a snowball’s chance of achieving progress. Problems so obscure, you’d have a snowball’s chance of convincing anyone to care about progress. Whether quantum physics could influence cognition much.
Quantum physics influences cognition insofar as (i) quantum physics prevents atoms from imploding and (ii) implosion inhabits atoms from contributing to cognition. But most physicists believe that useful entanglement can’t survive in brains. Entanglement consists of correlations shareable by quantum systems and stronger than any achievable by classical systems. Useful entanglement dies quickly in hot, wet, random environments.
Brains form such environments. Imagine injecting entangled molecules A and B into someone’s brain. Water, ions, and other particles would bombard the molecules. The higher the temperature, the heavier the bombardment. The bombardiers would entangle with the molecules via electric and magnetic fields. Each molecule can share only so much entanglement. The more A entangled with the environment, the less A could remain entangled with B. A would come to share a tiny amount of entanglement with each of many particles. Such tiny amounts couldn’t accomplish much. So quantum physics seems unlikely to affect cognition significantly.
Geologists first noticed something unusual in the Indian Ocean in November last year, when they detected a massive seismic event originating from a spot near to the French island of Mayotte. Now further research has revealed that the source of the seismic activity is an enormous underwater volcano.
The people living on Mayotte, located between Madagascar and Mozambique off the coast of Africa, had been worried by seismic tremors for months. They were experiencing small earthquakes daily, Laure Fallou, a sociologist with the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre in Bruyères-le-Ch tel, France, told Science. People “needed information,” she said. “They were getting very stressed, and were losing sleep.”
Maps of the seafloor showed a dramatic and recent change: a structure 800 meters high and 5 kilometers (3 miles) across had appeared on the ocean floor where there had been nothing before. A research team from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) were dispatched to investigate and placed six seismometers near the area of activity on the ocean floor, 3.5 kilometers (2 miles) beneath the surface.
A new study has affirmed the anesthetic drug xenon can help prevent long-term damage associated with traumatic brain injury (TBI). The researchers, from Imperial College London and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, have effectively demonstrated in mice that if xenon is administered within a few hours of a TBI it can prevent brain tissue damage that would result in long-term cognitive problems.
One day soon you may be filling your lungs with crisp ocean air, your arms bathed in warm light as the sun sets over softly lapping waters and you may wonder, is this real? Or are scientists projecting holograms into my brain to create a vivid sensory experience that isn’t actually happening? A group of researchers at University of California, Berkeley are in the early stages of testing their ability to create, edit and scrub sensory experiences from your brain, both real-time and stored experiences: memories.
Using light to make us see what isn’t there.
Different sensory experiences show up in brain imaging as patterns of neurons firing in sequence. Neuroscientists are trying to reverse-engineer experiences by stimulating the neurons to excite the same neural patterns. At present, the steps to accomplish this are a little invasive. Scientists genetically modify neurons with photosensitive proteins so they can gingerly manipulate neurons using light. The process is known as optogenetics. Also, a metal head plate gets surgically implanted over the targeted area.
Researchers have developed a brain-computer interface the size of a baby aspirin that can restore mobility to people with paralysis or amputated limbs.
How does it work? It rewires neural messages from the brain’s motor cortex to a robotic arm, or reroutes it to the person’s own muscles. In this video, Big Think contributor Susan Hockfield, president emerita of MIT, explains further.
