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Category: biotech/medical – Page 136

Chinese scientists find genetics shapes brain’s balance linked to mental ability

There is extensive evidence that brain criticality – the balance between neural excitation and inhibition – enhances its information processing capabilities.

But despite the significance of brain criticality and its potential influence on neurological and psychiatric disorders, the genetic basis of this state had been “largely unexplored”, according to researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ biophysics and automation institutes. “We demonstrate that genetic factors significantly influence brain criticality across various scales, from specific brain regions to large-scale networks,” the team said in their paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month.

They also established a link between criticality and cognitive functions, suggesting a shared genetic foundation.

“These findings position brain criticality as a biological phenotype, opening broad avenues for exploring its implications in brain function and potential dysfunctions,” the team wrote.

Brain criticality is characterised by neuronal avalanches, or cascading bursts of neuron activity in brain networks.

“At the critical state, the brain exhibits scale-free dynamics, with avalanches observed across various scales ranging from local networks of individual neurons to the global network of interacting brain areas,” the paper said.

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Surprise Discovery About Sugar in The Brain Could Help Fight Alzheimer’s

Stores of glucose in the brain could play a much more significant role in the pathological degeneration of neurons than scientists realized, opening the way to new treatments for conditions like Alzheimer’s disease.

Alzheimer’s is a tauopathy; a condition characterized by harmful build-ups of tau proteins inside neurons. It’s not clear, however, if these build-ups are a cause or a consequence of the disease. A new study now adds important detail by revealing significant interactions between tau and glucose in its stored form of glycogen.

Led by a team from the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in the US, the research sheds new light on the functions of glycogen in the brain. Before now, it’s only been regarded as an energy backup for the liver and the muscles.

Massive study detects AI fingerprints in millions of scientific papers

Chances are that you have unknowingly encountered compelling online content that was created, either wholly or in part, by some version of a Large Language Model (LLM). As these AI resources, like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, become more proficient at generating near-human-quality writing, it has become more difficult to distinguish between purely human writing from content that was either modified or entirely generated by LLMs.

This spike in questionable authorship has raised concerns in the that AI-generated content has been quietly creeping into peer-reviewed publications.

To shed light on just how widespread LLM content is in , a team of U.S. and German researchers analyzed more than 15 million biomedical abstracts on PubMed to determine if LLMs have had a detectable impact on specific word choices in journal articles.

First-Line Therapy For Advanced Non–Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

This systematic review with meta-analysis synthesizes available data from recent studies evaluating the effectiveness of immunotherapy and targeted therapy combinations in patients with non–clear cell renal cell carcinomas.

First large-scale stem cell bank enables worldwide studies on genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a common, debilitating neurodegenerative disease affecting about 10% of people over the age of 65 and one third of people aged 85 and above. Besides environmental factors, the genes have a strong influence on whether or not a person develops AD during their lifetime.

Through genome sequencing of DNA from large groups of healthy people and people with AD, some naturally occurring small changes in the DNA, known as genetic variants, were found to be more frequent in AD patients than in healthy people.

As more and more of these AD-associated genetic “risk” variants are discovered, it is now possible to calculate a person’s individual polygenic risk score (PRS), meaning the likelihood of the person developing AD, with high accuracy.

Neuroscientist: Brain Surgery Can Create “Two Conscious Entities”

Christof’s idea that split brain patients have split consciousness doesn’t really make sense and doesn’t correspond to the evidence. Consciousness is metaphysically simple — that is, my thoughts and sense of self can’t be split with a knife like the brain or a material thing can be split. What would it mean to say that I have “split” consciousness? Instead of Mike, there would be Mike and Joe, which wouldn’t be “split,” it would just be two people.

A category error

‘Split consciousness’ is an oxymoron, a category error. Consciousness is not the kind of thing that can be split, and there’s no evidence that one person can ever become two people. It’s science fiction, not science.

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