Scienceblogtwo

There wasn't much you could do as an adult to enhance brain health and cognitive function, according to early studies of the brain. Most people held the view that brain growth occurred in early childhood and that after a certain age, one had to make do with what they were given. Now, we are aware that this is untrue. The brain never stops trying to produce new pathways, connections, and brain cells, even though the early years are when it is most malleable and ripe for learning and development. 1. Eat the Right Food for Your Brain to Improve Brain Health Starting Today A healthy, balanced diet is best for both a healthy body and brain, but certain particular nutrients have a bigger cognitive impact than others. Sardines, herring, and other fatty seafood are excellent. Also healthy are leafy green vegetables, blueberries, almonds, and seeds. Both coffee and green tea are effective neuroprotectants. Equally crucial are avoiding excessive sugar intake and highly processed foods. Too m...

The axolotl Ambystoma mexicanum is a well-liked pet due to its unique and endearing appearance. Neoteny is the ability of axolotls (pronounced ACK-suh-LAH-tuhl) to never outgrow their larval, juvenile stage. This distinguishes them from other metamorphosing salamanders. It is also known for its capacity to regenerate tissues such as the retina, cornea, and lens in the eye, as well as the brain, spinal cord, tail, skin, limbs, liver, skeletal muscle, heart, upper and lower jaw. After a brain injury, mammals, including humans, almost never recover the destroyed tissue. On the other hand, some species, including fish and axolotls, may repopulate damaged brain regions with new neurons. The types of tissue the axolotl can regenerate are depicted in red. Done in 2016 by Debuque and Godwin The coordination of intricate actions in a manner that is time- and region-specific is required for brain regeneration. BGI and its research partners employed Stereo-seq technology to reconstruct the axolot...

The location of consciousness in the brain may be something that science is getting closer to understanding. Recent studies have shown the importance of specific brain connections in defining consciousness. The study, which was released in the journal Cerebral Cortex, was carried out by Jun Kitazono, a project researcher at the Department of General Systems Studies at the University of Tokyo and a corresponding author of the study. The study's corresponding author and head of the lab that conducted the research, Associate Professor Masafumi Oizumi, stated that "where in the brain consciousness lives has been one of the largest puzzles in science." Even if we haven't come to a definitive conclusion, there is a lot of empirical data that has been gathered in the process of looking for the brain correlates of consciousness or the bare minimum mechanisms required for conscious experience. It has been proposed that because conscious experience requires both feed-forward an...

People frequently underestimate how much they would prefer to spend time alone with their thoughts and nothing to divert them, according to study from the American Psychological Association. According to research main author Aya Hatano, Ph.D., of Kyoto University in Japan, "humans have a surprising ability to immerse themselves in their own thinking." "Our research indicates that people have trouble understanding how entertaining thinking can be. That may help to explain why individuals would rather use gadgets and other forms of entertainment to keep themselves occupied than pause for thought and creativity on a regular basis. In a series of six studies involving a total of 259 people, the researchers compared people's estimates of how much they would enjoy simply sitting and thinking with their actual experiences of doing so. In the first experiment, participants were asked to evaluate how much they would enjoy having 20 uninterrupted minutes to themselves, free fr...

According to the latest study, Type 1 diabetes-related brain damage in teenagers may be treatable. In a study recently published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers found that teens with Type 1 diabetes who closely monitor their blood sugar levels may be able to decrease the disease's negative effects on the brain, effects that have been observed even in younger children. According to the findings, better glucose control may potentially improve the structure and function of the brain in children with Type 1 diabetes, bringing them closer to their non-diabetic peers. This proof-of-concept pilot trial, the most extensive study on the subject to date, was directed by researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine and Nemours Children's Health in Jacksonville. Pediatric endocrinologist Nelly Mauras, MD, of Nemours Children's Health Jacksonville and professor of pediatrics at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, is the paper's senior author and co-principa...

Antibody proteins are used by the immune system to identify and combat invasive invaders. Researchers are looking into nanobodies, which are little antibodies found in the blood of animals like llamas and sharks, to treat cancer and autoimmune illnesses. Now, researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine have contributed to the development of a nanobody that can pierce the protective layer that surrounds brain cells and separate misshaped proteins that are the root of conditions like Parkinson's disease, Lewy body dementia, and other neurocognitive issues. The study, which was just published in the journal Nature Communications, was a collaboration between researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine, working under the guidance of Xiaobo Mao, Ph.D., and researchers from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. They sought a new therapeutic approach that might focus on the abnormal proteins known as alpha-synuclein, which have a propensity to aggregate and obstruct the function of brain cells. A...

Scientists have discovered that the deadly fungus Cryptococcus neoformans actually changes in size once it enters a body, boosting its probability of infection. It sounds a little bit like the plot of a horror movie. The fungus can be discovered in the wild in a range of settings, including rotting wood and bird droppings. Once inhaled, it exhibits the same adaptability inside the body, moving from the lungs through the bloodstream to various organs. Once established inside the human body, the infection can cause a variety of illnesses, including the uncommon but potentially fatal condition known as fungal meningitis, which causes swelling in the brain. We may someday be able to treat it more successfully thanks to recent discoveries based on a mouse study. According to University of Utah pathologist Jessica Brown, "Cryptococcus cells in the lungs are quite diverse with different sizes and distinct looks." I was so startled when my graduate student showed me images of the hom...

Imagine constantly having to choose between enjoyable activities and the possibility for harm—either bodily or emotional. Those who live with diseases like depression, anxiety, or chronic pain are generally used to making these difficult decisions on a daily or weekly basis. Surprisingly little is known, however, about the brain regions involved in these decisions. Researchers from McGill University report in a recent study that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the ventral striatum is crucial in deciding whether to choose future pain over future gain. It's interesting to note that while pain has previously not been linked to this region of the brain, motivation and rewards have. This discovery might help treat a number of ailments marked by excessive avoidance with better therapies. Participants in a recent study were asked to make snap decisions that involved a specific level of pain in exchange for a particular amount of profit, or vice ve...

On the warmest summer days, you could find yourself nodding off in the midst of the day. In several regions of the world, it's usual to schedule "siestas" and close businesses at the warmest times of the day. In actuality, biology rather than just society might be to blame for this. Temperature has an overall impact on human behavior, including eating, activity levels, and sleep-wake cycles. We can have problems going asleep in the summer, and we might take longer to wake up in the winter. However, little is known about the connection between sensory neurons and the neurons that regulate this cycle. Northwestern University neurobiologists have found some clues as to what is occurring. Fruit flies are physically predisposed to taking naps in the middle of the day, according to a recent study that was just published in Current Biology. A comparable "thermometer" circuit for hot temperatures is investigated in the current work, which is a follow-up to their 2020 Bi...

With the help of machine learning, scientists have been able to better understand how the brain creates complex human traits by identifying patterns of brain activity linked to traits like impulsivity, attributes like working memory, and diseases like depression. These techniques allow scientists to create models of these linkages, which can then be applied to forecast human behavior and health. It only functions, though, if models are inclusive, which prior research has demonstrated is not the case. There are those people that simply do not fit any model. In a study that was just published in the journal Nature, researchers from Yale University examined who these models tend to fail in, why that happens, and what can be done to correct it. The study's principal investigator, an M.D.-Ph.D. Abigail Greene, a Yale School of Medicine student, says that in order to be most useful, models must be applicable to any particular person. She explained that the model must be applicable to the...

What distinguishes the modern human being? Researchers have long been motivated by this question. Comparing us to our nearest cousins, the Neanderthals, so reveals fascinating insights. It is believed that the fundamental causes of the enhanced cognitive capacities that happened during human evolution were a rise in brain size and an increase in neuron creation during brain growth. Although the brains of contemporary humans and Neanderthals grow to be around the same size, nothing is known about whether the creation of neurons in the two species' respective brains varied during development. A basal radial glial cell, a type of progenitor cell that produces neurons during brain development, is shown in a microscopy image as it is dividing. The abundance of basal radial glia and neurons is increased by modern human TKTL1, but not by Neanderthal TKTL1. Science 2022/MPI-CBG/Pinson et al. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresd...

An artificial intelligence (AI) program has been developed by international academics working under the guidance of University College London that can detect minute brain irregularities that lead to epileptic seizures. The Multicentre Epilepsy Lesion Detection project (MELD) examined more than 1,000 patient MRI images from 22 international epilepsy centers in order to develop the algorithm that identifies the locations of abnormalities in cases of drug-resistant focal cortical dysplasia (FCD), a major cause of epilepsy. Brain areas known as FCDs have evolved improperly and frequently lead to drug-resistant epilepsy. Surgery is usually used to treat it, but doctors frequently struggle to spot the lesions on an MRI since FCDs can cause scans to look normal.                                                                  ...

Parkinson's disease does not yet have any disease-modifying medicines that can change how the disease develops. A team of professionals from all around the world are working to change that under the direction of researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. They just released a new study in the journal Brain that advances understanding of the key protein known as -synuclein (Syn), which they discovered links Parkinson's disease and inflammation.                                                                     Neurodegenerative illnesses like Parkinson's disease and Lewy body dementia have been connected to the protein Syn, which is mostly produced in neurons. In this new study, a novel mechanism involving interferon activation and neuronal Syn function is identified as a potential initiator ...

The idea of the mammalian "lizard brain" may be definitively disproved, according to a recent study. Based on a study that looked at the giant lizards from the Australian desert known as bearded dragons (Pogona vitticeps), scientists have demonstrated that mammal and reptile brains evolved independently from a common ancestor. The idea of the so-called triune brain has still another fatal flaw.                                      Based on comparative anatomical research, the theory of the lizard brain first appeared and gained favor in the 1960s and 1970s. Neuroscientist Paul MacLean discovered that the mammalian brain shares many similarities with the brains of reptiles. He came to the conclusion as a result that once life moved to the land, the brain evolved gradually. According to MacLean's concept, the basal ganglia, which represent the reptilian brain, came first. The limbic sy...