Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 34

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

Neuron discovery could explain why some people don’t get Alzheimer’s

Some brains seem to defy Alzheimer’s. Even when the disease’s telltale plaques and tangles are present, certain individuals remain mentally sharp well into old age. This phenomenon, known as cognitive resilience, is one of the most intriguing puzzles in neuroscience today.

At the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, researchers led by neuroscientist Evgenia Salta have uncovered new clues. Their work suggests that resilience may depend not on the sheer number of brain cells, but on how a special class of cells, called immature neurons, respond to damage.

For decades, neuroscientists have debated whether the adult human brain retains any meaningful population of “immature” neurons, youthful-looking cells tucked inside the hippocampus.

Mechanisms Underlying an Enhanced NavigationBased Intervention to Improve Timely Adjuvant Therapy

This secondary analysis of a randomized clinical trial examines the mechanisms by which Navigation for Disparities and Untimely Radiation Therapy (NDURE) improved timely postoperative radiation therapy relative to usual care navigation among patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.

JCI: Address correspondence to: Moshe Arditi, 8,700 Beverly Blvd., Davis Building, Rooms D4024, D4025, D4027, Los Angeles, California 90,048, USA

Phone: 310.423.4471; Email: [email protected]. BK’s present address is: Department of Basic Oncology, Hacettepe University Cancer Institute, Ankara, Turkey. RAP’s present address is: NCI-designated Cancer Center; Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, La Jolla, California, USA.

Forgotten memories can leave silent traces in the brain

Memory is not a perfect record. Some memories fade, while others remain hidden and can be brought back by reminders. But reminders can also distort what is remembered, and scientists still know little about how the brain accurately recovers memories or forms false ones.

In a new study published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers in the group of Johannes Felsenberg trained fruit flies to associate one odor with mild electric shocks. Soon after training, the flies avoided that odor, but 24 hours later the learned avoidance had faded. When the researchers later exposed the flies to the same odor as a reminder, the aversive memory was recovered, and the flies avoided the odor again.

The reminder only worked when key parts of the original setting, such as the chamber’s texture and lighting, were unchanged, suggesting that the fly brain used both the odor and its context to bring the memory back.

New 3D thermal cloak hides heat from infrared cameras

True thermal invisibility would require a barrier that would split the heat flow, guide it around an object, and reunite it on the other side. The object inside would be protected from the external temperature gradient, while an observer outside would see the pattern expected from an uninterrupted material. In thermal terms, there would be no obvious object-shaped disturbance to detect. This is the trick the UIUC-led team says its new structure, detailed in the journal Nature Communications, can perform.

This mechanism could also prove useful for heat management applications, especially in modern electronics, where processors, power components, batteries, optical devices, and temperature-sensitive sensors are often cramped into compact spaces.

Now, thermal cloaking itself is not new. Researchers have previously demonstrated flat, or effectively two-dimensional thermal cloaks, bilayer devices, and even an ultrathin “stealth sheet” that can hide and fake heat signatures. However, most earlier experimental devices worked with circular, spherical, or extruded shapes, or performed properly only when heat arrived along a prescribed axis.

/* */