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Previous research has implicated fungi in chronic neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, but there is limited understanding of how these common microbes could be involved in the development of these conditions.

Working with animal models, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions discovered how the fungus Candida albicans enters the brain, activates two separate mechanisms in brain cells that promote its clearance, and, important for the understanding of Alzheimer’s disease development, generates amyloid beta (Ab)-like peptides, toxic protein fragments from the amyloid precursor protein that are considered to be at the center of the development of Alzheimer’s disease. The study appears in the journal Cell Reports.

“Our lab has years of experience studying fungi, so we embarked on the study of the connection between C. albicans and Alzheimer’s disease in animal models,” said corresponding author Dr. David Corry, Fulbright Endowed Chair in Pathology and professor of pathology and immunology and medicine at Baylor. He also is a member of Baylor’s Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center. “In 2019, we reported that C. albicans does get into the brain where it produces changes that are very similar to what is seen in Alzheimer’s disease. The current study extends that work to understand the molecular mechanisms.”

Light is critical for transmitting visual information to the brain; but light also impacts non-visual processes in the body, such as circadian rhythms, hormone secretion, pupil size and sleep cycles, for example. Exposure to blue light is known to stimulate alertness and enhance cognitive performance, but the neural processes underlying this effect are not well understood. Now, researchers at the University of Liège in Belgium have used ultrahigh-field MRI to find out more about how light stimulates our brains, reporting their findings in Communications Biology.

Non-visual responses to light are mainly mediated by photosensitive retinal ganglion cells that express melanopsin, a photopigment that’s most sensitive to blue light at around 480 nm. These retinal neurons transfer light information to several areas of the brain associated with light-mediated behaviour. In particular, the pulvinar (a region of the posterior thalamus involved in attention control) is consistently activated in response to light, suggesting that the thalamus, a subcortical region, may play a key role in relaying non-visual light information to the cortex.

To investigate this hypothesis, first author Ilenia Paparella and colleagues in the GIGA-CRC laboratory used 7T functional MRI to record the brain activity of 19 healthy young participants while they completed an auditory oddball task known to elicit response in the posterior thalamus. During the task, in which random rare deviant tones were sounded amongst frequent standard tones, the volunteers were either in darkness or exposed to 30 s blocks of blue-enriched polychromatic or control orange light.

Rumors of Agi 2025 runnin wild.

Screen Cap It!

Late last year, around the time ChatGPT became a global sensation, the engineers at OpenAI began working on a new artificial intelligence model, codenamed Arrakis.

Continue reading “OpenAI Dropped Work on New ‘Arrakis’ AI Model in Rare Setback” »

Summary: Scientists have successfully determined the genomic composition of octopuses, unveiling a whopping 2.8 billion base pairs across 30 chromosomes. This was a result of comprehensive, computer-assisted genome studies and comparisons with other cephalopod species.

This high-quality reference sequence paves the way for understanding octopus biology and tracing its evolutionary trajectory.

The findings, which shine a light on the dynamic evolutionary history of the octopus genome, will enrich research in neurobiology, behavior, and development.

Eventually, maybe by the early 2040s, would like to see every large body in solar system, from the Sun out to Pluto to have a probe like the Cassini probe in a permanent orbit around it. So we have 24/7 live feed / study of all of them. And, ASI could run all of it by that point.

Launch and mission info for NASA’s mission exploring Saturn and its system of moons.

See how Stretch is tackling one of the toughest jobs in the warehouse.

University of Otago physicists have used a small glass bulb containing an atomic vapor to demonstrate a new form of antenna for radio waves. The bulb was “wired up” with laser beams and could therefore be placed far from any receiver electronics.

Dr. Susi Otto, from the Dodd-Walls Center for Photonic and Quantum Technologies, led the field testing of the portable atomic radio frequency sensor. A paper on the creation was published in Applied Physics Letters.

Such sensors, that are enabled by atoms in a so-called Rydberg state, can provide superior performance over current antenna technologies as they are highly sensitive, have broad tunability, and small physical size, making them attractive for use in defense and communications.

Astronomers are one step closer to understanding one of the most enduring solar mysteries, having captured unprecedented data from the sun’s magnetic field.

The groundbreaking data collected from the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) in Hawaii—the most powerful solar telescope in the world—has provided the most detailed representations to date of the magnetic field of the so-called ‘quiet’ surface of the sun.

An international team of scientists, including researchers from the University of Sheffield, believe the data has implications for how we model energy transfer between the layers of the sun. The research has been published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.