(Credit: Anne Marthe Widvey/Flickr)
The finding may potentially make it easier to monitor people with sleep disorders, as well as unconscious coma patients or those under anesthesia.
The answer is in their genes—especially those that encode for basic life functions, such as metabolism. Thanks to the lowly C. elegans worm, we’ve uncovered genes and molecular pathways, such as insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) signaling that extends healthy longevity in yeast, flies, and mice (and maybe us). Too nerdy? Those pathways also inspired massive scientific and popular interest in metformin, hormones, intermittent fasting, and even the ketogenic diet. To restate: worms have inspired the search for our own fountain of youth.
Still, that’s just one success story. How relevant, exactly, are those genes for humans? We’re rather a freak of nature. Our aging process extends for years, during which we experience a slew of age-related disorders. Diabetes. Heart disease. Dementia. Surprisingly, many of these don’t ever occur in worms and other animals. Something is obviously amiss.
In this month’s Nature Metabolism, a global team of scientists argued that it’s high time we turn from worm to human. The key to human longevity, they say, lies in the genes of centenarians. These individuals not only live over 100 years, they also rarely suffer from common age-related diseases. That is, they’re healthy up to their last minute. If evolution was a scientist, then centenarians, and the rest of us, are two experimental groups in action.
Continue reading “The Secret to a Long, Healthy Life Is in the Genes of the Oldest Humans Alive” »
Brain death can be a tricky concept. Clarity from an international group of doctors may help identify when the brain has stopped working for good.
But have you ever wondered: how well do those maps represent my brain? After all, no two brains are alike. And if we’re ever going to reverse-engineer the brain as a computer simulation—as Europe’s Human Brain Project is trying to do—shouldn’t we ask whose brain they’re hoping to simulate?
Enter a new kind of map: the Julich-Brain, a probabilistic map of human brains that accounts for individual differences using a computational framework. Rather than generating a static PDF of a brain map, the Julich-Brain atlas is also dynamic, in that it continuously changes to incorporate more recent brain mapping results. So far, the map has data from over 24,000 thinly sliced sections from 23 postmortem brains covering most years of adulthood at the cellular level. But the atlas can also continuously adapt to progress in mapping technologies to aid brain modeling and simulation, and link to other atlases and alternatives.
In other words, rather than “just another” human brain map, the Julich-Brain atlas is its own neuromapping API—one that could unite previous brain-mapping efforts with more modern methods.
Continue reading “These Scientists Just Completed a 3D ‘Google Earth’ for the Brain” »
Last year information was released concerning rejuvenation of the thymus which resulted in a reversal of the epigenetic clock an average of 2.5 years in a small trial of 9 people costing $10,000 per person. You can get this done too. A company has formed called Intervene Immune which will take on volunteers for the process. It is not funded so you would have to pay out pf pocket though eventually the cost may come down and they can provide financing. You do not have to travel to California to get this done. Cost prohibits me, and I may or may not be eligible as I have IBS though that is not on the exclusion list. I emailed them concerning all this which is how I got the information.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TRIIMX
Continue reading “Thymus Regeneration, Immunorestoration, and Insulin Mitigation Extension Trial” »
A supersensitive dopamine detector can help in the early diagnosis of several disorders that result in too much or too little dopamine, according to a group led by Penn State and including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and universities in China and Japan.
Dopamine is an important neurotransmitter that can be used to diagnose disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia.
“If you can develop a very sensitive, yet simple-to-use and portable, detector that can identify a wide range of dopamine concentration, for instance in sweat, that could help in non-invasive monitoring of an individual’s health,” said Aida Ebrahimi, assistant professor of electrical engineering, Penn State, and a corresponding author on a paper published Aug. 7 in Science Advances.
Just like a nostalgic grandparent flipping through old photo albums, our brains constantly replay memories from past events in our lives as we sleep.
It may seem overly sentimental at first, but our minds aren’t just looking to reminisce and remember the good times. All of that brain activity while dreaming serves to strengthen and preserve existing memories, all while simultaneously finding some room for any new memories we may have made over the previous day.
Those are the main findings from a fascinating new study just released by the University of California, San Diego that investigated neural activity during sleep. The research team at UCSD says that no memory is set in stone within our minds; any memory can be lost, and sleep is when our minds rejuvenate old memories via replay and refine/make room for new memories.
Continue reading “Scientists discover this activity is the key to having a stronger memory” »
An intriguing new study, from a team of Swiss researchers, has revealed neural activity during REM sleep in a particular region of the brain known to affect appetite and feeding behaviors significantly influences waking eating patterns.
Despite a hefty volume of robust study, REM sleep is still a mysterious and unique sleep phase. Named after the rapid eye movements that occur in all mammals during this sleep phase, it has also been referred to as paradoxical sleep, due to the strange similarity in brain activity between waking states and REM sleep.
The new research homed in on a brain region called the lateral hypothalamus. This tiny brain region, found in all mammals, is known to play a fundamental role in food intake, compulsive behavior, and a number of other physiological processes.
It’s also worth noting that some water already naturally contains low amounts of lithium. And in research published last week in The British Journal of Psychiatry, scientists from a cohort of U.K. universities identified a link that naturally-present lithium and lower suicide rates.
Therefore, they suggest, more lives could be saved by putting the drug in high-risk communities’ water supplies.
“In these unprecedented times of COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent increase in the incidence of mental health conditions, accessing ways to improve community mental health and reduce the incidence of anxiety, depression and suicide is ever more important,” Anjum Memon, lead author and epidemiology chair at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, said in a press release.
“We are impressed with the early results demonstrated as we scale Loihi to create more powerful neuromorphic systems. Pohoiki Beach will now be available to more than 60 ecosystem partners, who will use this specialized system to solve complex, compute-intensive problems.” –Rich Uhlig, managing director of Intel Labs
Why It’s Important: With the introduction of Pohoiki Beach, researchers can now efficiently scale up novel neural-inspired algorithms — such as sparse coding, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and path planning — that can learn and adapt based on data inputs. Pohoiki Beach represents a major milestone in Intel’s neuromorphic research, laying the foundation for Intel Labs to scale the architecture to 100 million neurons later this year.
