A new study identifies biliverdin reductase A (BVRA) as a crucial enzyme defending neurons from oxidative stress, acting independently of its traditional role in bilirubin production.
Category: neuroscience – Page 14
Women better protected against early neurodegeneration in Parkinson’s disease
A large international study involving nearly 700 participants reveals that women with a precursor condition to Parkinson’s disease show significantly less brain atrophy—decreased cortical thickness in the brain—than men, despite similar clinical severity. This discovery, published in the journal Nature Communications, could lead scientists to explore the role that hormones might play in treating the disease.
Isolated REM sleep behavior disorder is characterized by violent movements during sleep, where people literally “act out” their dreams. Far from being harmless, this disorder is the most reliable early warning sign of neurodegenerative diseases caused by the accumulation of a toxic protein in the brain: more than 70% of affected individuals will eventually develop Parkinson’s disease, Lewy body dementia, or, more rarely, multiple system atrophy (a disease affecting multiple body systems).
“This sleep disorder offers a unique window of opportunity to study the mechanisms of neurodegeneration before major motor or cognitive symptoms appear,” explains the leader of this study.
H. P. Lovecraft
What if H.P. Lovecraft didn’t just imagine the Old Ones… what if he documented them?
In this speculative science analysis of SCP-4315: S.C.P. Lovecraft, we explore a Foundation case that blurs the line between fiction and physics — where imagination itself becomes a containment hazard. Discover how stories can bend probability, how consciousness shapes reality, and why Providence might be the thinnest spot between worlds.
We’ll unpack the Quantum Fictionalization Hypothesis, the Dreamlands as a collective cognitive field, and the terrifying idea that the human mind might be the real breach site.
If you love the SCP Foundation, cosmic horror, or mind-bending science philosophy, this is your next rabbit hole.
🔬 Topics Covered:
Lovecraft as Vector Zero.
Neural implant smaller than a grain of salt can wirelessly track brain
Cornell University researchers and collaborators have developed a neural implant so small that it can rest on a grain of salt, yet it can wirelessly transmit brain activity data in a living animal for more than a year.
The breakthrough, detailed Nov. 3 in Nature Electronics, demonstrates that microelectronic systems can function at an unprecedentedly small scale, opening new possibilities for neural monitoring, bio-integrated sensing and other applications.
Development of the device, called a microscale optoelectronic tetherless electrode, or MOTE, was co-led by Alyosha Molnar, professor in the school of electrical and computer engineering, and Sunwoo Lee, an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University who first began working on the technology as a postdoctoral associate in Molnar’s lab.
Brains and stock markets follow the same rules in crisis, study finds
What do brains and the stock market have in common? While this might sound like a set-up for a joke, new research from U-M researchers reveals that the behaviors of brains and economies during crises can be explained using observations common in the realm of physics. Their work is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
UnCheol Lee, Ph.D. of the U-M Department of Anesthesiology and his collaborative team came up with the idea upon observing that some patients under anesthesia recover faster than others.
“Anesthetic drugs can be considered as introducing a controlled crisis in the brain, interrupting the brain’s network to induce unconsciousness,” explained Lee.
Small brain region linked to schizophrenia risk through unique gene changes
New research published in the American Journal of Psychiatry provides new molecular insights into the role of the habenula, a pea-sized brain region that helps regulate motivation and mood, in contributing to the risk of schizophrenia. A team of researchers at Lieber Institute for Brain Development and Johns Hopkins found that many schizophrenia-related molecular changes appear to be specific to this region, suggesting the habenula could be a potential target for future treatments.
Schizophrenia is a heritable disorder, and a combination of multiple genetic variants contributes to it. This study sought to understand how molecular changes in the habenula region of the brain contribute to the development of schizophrenia. The authors note that they focused on the habenula because of its “emerging role in psychiatric disorders and functional influence on neurotransmitter systems impacted in schizophrenia.”
The study team, led by Ege A. Yalcinbas, Ph.D., used cutting-edge molecular techniques to analyze postmortem human brains, resulting in the creation of the first cell-by-cell and within-cell gene expression map of the human habenula (Hb). They then compared brain tissue from 35 individuals with schizophrenia and 33 nonpsychiatric donors.
Functional ultrasound neuroimaging reveals mesoscopic organization of saccades in the lateral intraparietal area
An amazing paper (link:) where functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI) is used to explore how brain activity in the lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP) can predict visual saccades (eye movements) in two monkeys. An impressive array of computational analyses are used to extract insights from the imaged regions. Indeed, predictive models developed by the authors remained fairly stable over the course of up to 900 days! I happen to know two of the authors (Sumner L Norman and Mikhail Shapiro): congratulations to them and their colleagues on this excellent publication!
Our results demonstrate that PPC contains subregions tuned to different directions. These tuned voxels were predominately within LIP and grouped into contiguous mesoscopic subpopulations. Multiple subpopulations existed within a given coronal plane, i.e., there were multiple preferred directions in each plane. A rough topography exists where anterior LIP had more voxels tuned to contralateral downwards saccades and posterior LIP had more voxels tuned to contralateral upwards saccades. These populations remained stable across more than 100–900 days.
We observed large effect sizes with changes in CBV on the order of 10–30% from baseline activity (Fig. 3). This is much larger than observed with BOLD fMRI where the effect size was ~0.4–2% on similar saccade-based event-related tasks27,32. Our results support a growing evidence base that establishes fUSI as a sensitive neuroimaging technique for detecting mesoscopic functional activity in a diversity of model organisms, including pigeons, rats, mice, nonhuman primates, ferrets, and infant and adult humans23,24,25,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40.
Several studies have reported a patchiness in direction selectivity with many neighboring neurons tuned to approximately the same direction followed by an abruption to a patch of a different preferred direction13,14,41. These results match very closely with the results observed in this study where we found clusters within LIP tightly tuned to one direction with differently tuned clusters in close proximity within a given plane. These results further emphasize the high spatial resolution of fUSI for functional mapping of neuronal activity. These results also closely match a previous study that used fUSI to identify the tonotopic mapping of the auditory cortex and inferior colliculus in awake ferrets where the authors found a functional resolution of 100 µm for voxel responsiveness and 300 µm for voxel frequency tuning34.
The right dose for the brain: Selenomethionine’s role in protecting dopaminergic neurons
Dopamine is often called the brain’s “motivation molecule,” but for me, it represents something deeper, a window into how fragile our neurons can be. The cells that produce dopamine, known as dopaminergic neurons, are among the first to die in Parkinson’s disease, leading to the motor symptoms that gradually rob patients of movement and independence.
To understand what makes these neurons so vulnerable, I used an in-vitro model where I exposed N27 dopaminergic cells to 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA), a toxin that triggers oxidative stress, like what occurs in the Parkinsonian brain. Then, I introduced Selenomethionine (SeMet), an organic form of selenium, to test whether this compound could counteract the damage and help the neurons survive.
Selenium has long intrigued scientists for its paradoxical nature. It is a trace element essential for antioxidant defense, yet in excess it can become toxic. I wanted to see whether a specific range of SeMet concentrations could offer meaningful protection without tipping that balance. My study, carried out at Charles University and the National Institute of Mental Health (NUDZ) in the Czech Republic, set out to define that “safe and effective window.” It is published in the journal In vitro models.