Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 4671

Glia, a non-excitable cell type once considered merely as the connective tissue between neurons, is nowadays acknowledged for its essential contribution to multiple physiological processes including learning, memory formation, excitability, synaptic plasticity, ion homeostasis, and energy metabolism. Moreover, as glia are key players in the brain immune system and provide structural and nutritional support for neurons, they are intimately involved in multiple neurological disorders. Recent advances have demonstrated that glial cells, specifically microglia and astroglia, are involved in several neurodegenerative diseases including Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease (PD), Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). While there is compelling evidence for glial modulation of synaptic formation and regulation that affect neuronal signal processing and activity, in this manuscript we will review recent findings on neuronal activity that affect glial function, specifically during neurodegenerative disorders. We will discuss the nature of each glial malfunction, its specificity to each disorder, overall contribution to the disease progression and assess its potential as a future therapeutic target.

Glia are non-neuronal cells of the nervous system which do not generate electrical impulses yet communicate via other means such as calcium signals. Due to their lack of electrical activity, it was previously assumed that glial cells primarily functioned as “nerve-glue” (Virchow, 1860) and performed house-keeping functions for neurons; however, this concept has shifted due to recent findings showing glia are key components in many neuronal functions that go far beyond housekeeping (Araque et al., 1999; Buskila et al., 2019a).

Glial cells are categorized into two main groups; macroglia, which includes astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, NG2-glia and ependymal cells, and microglia which are the resident phagocytes of the central nervous system (CNS). Each population of glial cells is specialized for a particular function in the central or peripheral nervous system (García-Cabezas et al., 2016), and normal brain function depends on the interplay between neurons and the various types of glial cells. In this review, we will focus on astrocytes and microglia.

Read more | >

This technique involves having participants place their finger over the camera and flash of a smartphone, which uses a deep-learning algorithm to decipher the blood oxygen levels from the blood flow patterns in the resulting video.

Conditions like asthma or COVID-19 make it harder for bodies to absorb oxygen from the lungs. This leads to oxygen saturation percentages dropping to 90% or below, indicating that medical attention is needed.

In a clinic, doctors monitor oxygen saturation using pulse oximeters — those clips you put over your fingertip or ear. But monitoring oxygen saturation at home multiple times a day could help patients keep an eye on COVID symptoms, for example.

Read more | >

However, in 1973, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology predicted the end of our civilization with the help of one of the most powerful supercomputers of that time.

In 1973, experts developed a computer program at MIT to model global sustainability. Instead, it predicted that by 2040 our civilization would end.

Recently, that prediction re-appeared in Australian Media, making its way to the rest of the world.

Read more | >

The National research center for Cybersecurity ATHENE has found a way to break one of the basic mechanisms used to secure internet traffic. The mechanism, called RPKI, is actually designed to prevent cybercriminals or government attackers from diverting traffic on the internet.

Such redirections are surprisingly common on the internet, for example, for espionage or through misconfigurations. The ATHENE scientist team of Prof. Dr. Haya Shulman showed that attackers can completely bypass the security mechanism without the affected network operators being able to detect this. According to analyses by the ATHENE team, popular implementations of RPKI worldwide were vulnerable by early 2021.

The team informed the manufacturers, and now presented the findings to the international expert public.

Read more | >

About a quarter of the world’s internet users live in countries that are more susceptible than previously thought to targeted attacks on their internet infrastructure. Many of the at-risk countries are located in the Global South.

That’s the conclusion of a sweeping, large-scale study conducted by computer scientists at the University of California San Diego. The researchers surveyed 75 .

“We wanted to study the topology of the internet to find weak links that, if compromised, would expose an entire nation’s traffic,” said Alexander Gamero-Garrido, the paper’s first author, who earned his Ph.D. in computer science at UC San Diego.

Read more | >