Just one hour of brain–computer interface use led to clear changes in neuronal patterns, raising hopes of a potential new therapy for stroke victims.
Category: neuroscience – Page 873
Brain receptor that regulates body heat may also help accelerate weight loss
Obesity is an important issue.
The brain mechanism that enables us to maintain a constant body temperature may also be the key to rapid weight loss, a new study finds. In experiments involving mice that were given a calorie-restricted diet, scientists at Scripps Research discovered that blocking a brain receptor that normally regulates body heat resulted in significant weight reductions.
The findings will be further explored as a potential treatment approach for obesity, which the World Health Organization has called a global epidemic. Obesity affects virtually all age and socioeconomic groups—increasing risk for heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer and many other serious health conditions.
The new study, led by Scripps Research Professor Bruno Conti, Ph.D., appears in Current Biology.
How to Start at The Finish Line: Cancer Survivor
Hollie Fraser, founder of Books On The Move, worldwide book sharing movement, creative director and ideaXme literature, reading and writing ambassador interviews Matthew Newman, 2019 best Kindle book author.
Matthew S. Newman, is a 39 year old cancer survivor and best-selling author of Starting At The Finish Line. He is a fitness aficionado, and a financial services industry speaker. His mission is help the wider public and to encourage financial preparedness. He does this by telling his story of brain cancer survival and the financial lessons and wisdom he learnt as a result.
Matthew’s book was named a Best Kindle Unlimited Books for 2019. To this day, fitness is still a big part of his life. You can see him here working out shortly after brain surgery! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2G-Sq7iOuM
He is a TedX Talk participant and currently traveling the country giving talks to financial services organizations, such as Transamerica, Primerica, Raymond James and more. https://matthewsnewman.com/speaking
For the text version of this interview please visit www.radioideaxme.com from week commencing 2 December 2019.
Neuroscientists Develop First Implantable Magnet Resonance Detector Brain Probe
A team of neuroscientists and electrical engineers from Germany and Switzerland developed a highly sensitive implant that enables to probe brain physiology with unparalleled spatial and temporal resolution. They introduce an ultra-fine needle with an integrated chip that is capable of detecting and transmitting nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) data from nanoliter volumes of brain oxygen metabolism. The breakthrough design will allow entirely new applications in the life sciences.
PhDs: the tortuous truth
The results of Nature’s fifth survey of PhD students bear out Kovacevic’s experience, telling a story of personal reward and resilience against a backdrop of stress, uncertainty and struggles with depression and anxiety. The survey drew self-selecting responses from more than 6,300 early-career researchers — the most in the survey’s ten-year history. The respondents hail from every part of the globe and represent the full spectrum of scientific fields.
Nature’s survey of more than 6,000 graduate students reveals the turbulent nature of doctoral research.
What If Technology Causes Some People to Live Forever?
This sounds like a roundabout way of saying that the uploaded minds might be seen as superhuman, even though, as Minerva and Rorheim observe, “it’s not clear whether you would survive in any meaningful sense if you were copied several times over.” If you didn’t, something that used to be you might exist and be cognitively superior to the common run of humanity but the “you-ness” is gone.
The authors also warn, “We can be pretty certain, for instance, that rejuvenation would widen the gap between the rich and poor, and would eventually force us to make decisive calls about resource use, whether to limit the rate of growth of the population, and so forth.”
Such considerations as limiting the “rate of growth” of the population may relate to a controversy in 2012 involving a paper written by Dr. Minerva and Dr. Alberto Giubilini:
Epilepsy drug inhibits brain tumor development
Medication prescribed for a certain type of epilepsy may offer a new method for treating malignant infantile brain tumors. A specific mTOR inhibitor has the ability to cross the blood-brain barrier to both reach and attack the tumor at source. This has been demonstrated by researchers from Uppsala University, in collaboration with US and UK colleagues, whose research has now been published in the scientific journal Cell Stem Cell.
Approximately 100 children suffer infantile brain tumors in Sweden each year. The most common type of malignant brain tumor in infants and children is medulloblastoma. Radiation therapy is part of the standard treatment for medulloblastomas and modern radiation therapy has saved the lives of many children suffering from these often aggressive cancers; however, as it often comes with serious side effects for healthy brain tissue, it is seldom prescribed for infants. Although a presumably better solution would be to give more targeted treatment, in order to establish such a therapy it would naturally need to be proven to be both more effective and come with fewer side effects than current treatments.
Many infantile medulloblastomas are amplified by MYCN, an oncogene that drives tumor growth and metastasis to the spinal column, leading to a very poor prognosis. In the study in question, the researchers cultivated a particular type of neural stem cell and were able to demonstrate that MYCN was quickly able to turn these into cancer cells. This suggests that these cells are likely to be the origin of infantile medulloblastomas.
New Studies Show What Sleep Loss Does To The Brain And Cognition
Sleep loss is no longer considered an emblem of productivity or success—research has shown over and over that it’s one of the worst things we can do for ourselves. The body may not need sleep so much, but the brain sure does: a huge amount of housekeeping is done while we’re sleeping, and losing sleep, especially chronically, prevents this essential work. Two new studies illustrate what sleep loss does to our thinking skills the next day and to the brain’s ability to clear out potentially dangerous “gunk.”
The first study, from Michigan State University, had 77 people stay awake all night in the lab and 63 go home and sleep normally. All the participants were rested before the study began, and then separated into their respective groups for one night of sleep deprivation or normal rest. The researchers gave them tests of attention (the Psychomotor Vigilance Task) and cognition (the UNRAVEL method, which involves having to keep track of a series of steps in the face of period interruptions) in the evening and again the following morning.
The sleep-deprived participants did conspicuously worse on the tests than the rested ones: The evening before, there was about a 15% error rate after interruptions on the UNRAVEL test, which the next morning rose to 30%. In contrast, the rested group performed about the same in the evening before and the morning after. The sleep-deprived also had significantly more lapses in attention the morning after, compared to the rested group.