Alzheimer’s disease is driven by a buildup of a toxic protein called Tau that kills neurons. As toxic Tau spreads to new regions of the brain, symptoms worsen and ultimately become fatal.
Now, researchers have discovered that, in mice, a brain protein called Arc helps spread Tau from sick brain cells to healthy ones.
If therapies could be designed to target the spread, they could be a powerful tool to stop Alzheimer’s disease from getting worse.
The cells lining skin capillaries are constantly sending each other messages—tiny pulses of calcium that help regulate blood flow, sense physical forces and keep vessel walls intact. Scientists have known about this signaling for decades. What they didn’t know, until now, is that it follows a remarkably organized pattern, one that persists across days and weeks, governed by a network of cells that have, in a sense, assigned themselves permanent roles.
A new study from Yale School of Medicine (YSM) and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals not only that this network exists, but also what happens when it breaks down—and how it might be restored.
The study was done in the lab of Valentina Greco, Ph.D., Carolyn Walch Slayman Professor of Genetics at YSM and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, in close collaboration with the labs of Julia Mack, Ph.D., and Chen Yuan Kam, Ph.D., both at UCLA.
Lockheed Martin has unveiled a next-generation hypersonic glide body designed to provide a more affordable and rapidly producible long-range strike capability.
The new system, called NXGB, is intended to combine advanced speed, survivability, and scalability to meet evolving national security requirements while supporting faster production and deployment.
According to the company, the hypersonic glide body is aimed at expanding strike options for defense forces by delivering high-performance capabilities in a cost-effective and adaptable platform.
How does a single cell build a brain with billions of precisely organized neurons? Researchers suggest that brain cells use their lineage—their cellular family tree—as a kind of positional map. Cells that come from the same ancestor stay near one another, helping the brain organize itself without relying solely on chemical signals.
Researchers led by Jiawei Yang, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, have designed a modular system that could potentially improve hydrogel implants in the body by customizing the materials for stiffness and functionality.
The system, described in the journal Science Advances, uses coatings to treat the surface of hydrogels, which are flexible, water-loaded polymers. The researchers reported that by customizing different types of hydrogels with unique coatings, they were able to create two distinct hydrogel implants that maintained adhesion in living tissue and resisted an immune system response.
“It is difficult for a material with a single chemical composition to play two distinct roles in an implant,” Yang said. “We addressed that by developing a way to customize hydrogel implants with two sets of chemical compositions that can be tailored to address specific needs and achieve better results.”
Physicist Carlo Rovelli recently proclaimed that consciousness is just another physical thing, while materialist philosophers argue that consciousness is simply one brain state observing another. What such views miss, argues Manfred Frank, a leading figure in contemporary German philosophy, is that consciousness comes with a built-in awareness of itself—an awareness that exists prior to any introspection or observation. Consciousness does not observe itself in the way we observe objects; rather, it dissolves the distinction between observer and observed altogether. This is why consciousness cannot be simply another object in the world, but instead exists in an entirely different dimension.
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If we had no consciousness our lives would be devoid of meaning. We have been immersed in this medium since before we were born and remain in it even in our dreams. And we do so without any effort on our part. Apart from when it is interrupted by deep sleep or we are unconscious after fainting or during anaesthesia, we remain in this state or are enveloped in it throughout our entire lives. Nothing is more familiar to us than consciousness; it is so familiar that we rarely notice it or attend to it.