Lifeboat Foundation

New research shows that rhythmic brain activity is key to temporarily maintaining important information in memory. Researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester published these findings today in Current Biology that found brain rhythms—or patterns of neuronal activity—organize the bursts of activity in the brain that maintain short-term connections.

“The thought has been that the temporary storage of important information is linked to neurons in the brain that just fire away, retaining that information until it is no longer needed. Recent research has shown that it might not be such persistent brain activity that matters most for the temporary storage of information, but rather a short-term strengthening of the connections between neurons that are representing the information. Our research shows that brain rhythms are organizing these transient bursts over time,” said Ian Fiebelkorn, Ph.D., assistant professor of Neuroscience and senior author of the study.

“The rhythmic coordination of brain activity over time is important because it allows overlapping populations of neurons to store different pieces of information at the same time.”

All land animals have an Arc gene in their brain. This gene serves as the “master regulator” that determines how neuronal synapses (i.e., neuronal connections) form in the brain.

Two independent research groups [1, 2] have published their findings in the prestigious academic journal, Cell, in 2018 — showing that Arc behaves like viruses and has ancestral roots in retroviruses.

In a sense, the Arc gene moulds and sculpts the brain connections — forming the mind — making amphibians think like amphibians, birds like birds, reptiles like reptiles, monkeys like monkeys, and humans like humans.

These results could mean longer stays on the Moon.

Listen to an audio version of a recent Nature feature.

A team of researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has developed a new approach to next-generation sequencing that detects genetic mutations within single molecules of DNA.

The method, called Concatenating Original Duplex for Error Correction (CODEC), makes next-generation sequencing about 1,000 times more accurate and opens up the possibility of a range of applications including detecting tiny numbers of cancer mutations in blood samples, monitoring cancer during and after treatment, and identifying mutations underlying rare diseases, all at relatively low cost. The study appears today in Nature Genetics.

“The beauty of this approach is that it’s not an overhaul of how sequencing is done,” said Viktor Adalsteinsson, senior author on the study and director of the Gerstner Center for Cancer Diagnostics and leader of the Blood Biopsy Team at the Broad. “It’s not something that requires new instrumentation or capital investment —it’s a simple set of steps added into existing sample preparation workflows to improve the accuracy of DNA sequencing.”

A Seattle medical tech company’s revolutionary surgical imaging instrument has become the first light-enabled navigation tool for spine surgery to receive Food and Drug Administration clearance.

Why it matters: Officials with Proprio believe the tool, which allows surgeons to essentially “see” the spine being operated on in real time, could dramatically improve clinical outcomes.

Driving the news: This month, the Paradigm device received the FDA 510(k) clearance that’s required for new medical implements before they are taken to market, Proprio said in an emailed announcement.

A recent study demonstrated that non-invasive stimulation of the right cerebellum led to improvements in episodic memory performance in healthy elderly individuals, at the end of a 12-day neurostimulation program, and also at the point of a 4-month follow-up.

The steady increase in average life expectancy poses significant challenges to individuals, families, and societies across multiple dimensions. Estimating that by 2050 one in every six individuals will be over the age of 65, the study of aging and its association with cognitive decline, neurodegenerative diseases and overall frailty is becoming increasingly important.

Therefore, it has been an important goals of neurosciences research to understand the relationship between the aging brain and episodic memory deficits and to develop interventions to mitigate the age-related decline in our ability to remember personal past events (episodic memory).

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~“May you live in interesting times”~

Having the blessing and the curse of working in the field of cybersecurity, I often get asked about my thoughts on how that intersects with another popular topic — artificial intelligence (AI). Given the latest headline-grabbing developments in generative AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Sydney, and image generation tools like Dall-E and Midjourney, it is no surprise that AI has catapulted into the public’s awareness.

Doug Millay, Ph.D., a scientist with the Division of Molecular Cardiovascular Biology at Cincinnati Children’s has dedicated his career to revealing the most fundamental mechanisms of skeletal muscle development. He has been a leader in characterizing how two “fusogens” called Myomaker and Myomerger mediate the entry of stem cells into mature muscle cells to build the tissue that humans depend upon for movement, breathing, and survival.

Now, some of the basic discoveries made by Millay and colleagues are translating into a potential treatment for people living with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Their latest research, published April 12, 2023, in the journal Cell, reveals that in mice, modified viruses, engineered with Myomaker and Myomerger, result in specific fusion with muscle cells. These viruses can therefore be used as a vector to deliver a vital gene needed for muscle function that is mutated in people with DMD.

A key unknown prior to this work was whether proteins like Myomaker and Myomerger, which mainly function on cells, could even work on viruses. First author Sajedah Hindi, Ph.D., also with the Division of Molecular Cardiovascular Biology at Cincinnati Children’s and a leading member of the research team, took on the challenge to test this idea.