Lifeboat Foundation

Humans have the innate ability to store important information in their mind for short periods of time, a capability known as short-term memory. Over the past few decades, numerous neuroscientists have tried to understand how neural circuits store short-term memories, as this could lead to approaches to assist individuals whose memory is failing and help to devise memory enhancing interventions.

Researchers at Stanford and the Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute have recently identified neural circuit motifs involved in how humans store short-term memories. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that memory-related neural circuits contain recurrently connected modules that independently maintain selective and continuous activity.

“Short-term memories are of approximately 10 seconds or so, for example, if you needed to remember a phone number while you looked for a pen to write the number,” Kayvon Daie, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Medical Xpress. “Individual neurons, however, are very forgetful, as they can only remember their inputs for about 10 milliseconds. It has been hypothesized that if two forgetful neurons were connected to each other, they could continuously remind each other of what they were supposed to remember so that the circuit can now hold information for many seconds.”

For decades, people undergoing radiotherapy, which is used to treat cancer, have reported a bizarre phenomenon: Seeing flashes of light in their eyes, even when their eyes are closed.

Patients documented in the medical literature have described a ‘‘ray of blue light” and ‘‘seeing a blue neon light”, sometimes accompanied by a “white smell” during the delivery of radiation, lasting for a fraction of a second. There have been several theories for why this could be happening, including retinal pigments inside patients’ eyes being stimulated during the therapy, or that Cherenkov light or Cherenkov radiation – the same effect that makes nuclear reactors glow blue when they’re underwater – is produced inside the eyeball itself.

Now scientists have captured this strange light for the first time, producing the first photographic evidence that the phenomenon is in fact Cherenkov light.

“Previously reported detection of plant biomagnetism, which established the existence of measurable magnetic activity in the plant kingdom, was carried out using superconducting-quantum-interference-device (SQUID) magnetometers1, 5, 16. Atomic magnetometers are arguably more attractive for biological applications, since, unlike SQUIDs34, 35, they are non-cryogenic and can be miniaturized to optimize spatial resolution of measured biological features14, 15, 36. In the future, the SNR of magnetic measurements in plants will benefit from optimizing the low-frequency stability and sensitivity of atomic magnetometers. Just as noninvasive magnetic techniques have become essential tools for medical diagnostics of the human brain and body, this noninvasive technique could also be useful in the future for crop-plant diagnostics—by measuring the electromagnetic response of plants facing such challenges as sudden temperature change, herbivore attack, and chemical exposure.”

Upon stimulation, plants elicit electrical signals that can travel within a cellular network analogous to the animal nervous system. It is well-known that in the human brain, voltage changes in certain regions result from concerted electrical activity which, in the form of action potentials (APs), travels within nerve-cell arrays. Electro-and magnetophysiological techniques like electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, and magnetic resonance imaging are used to record this activity and to diagnose disorders. Here we demonstrate that APs in a multicellular plant system produce measurable magnetic fields. Using atomic optically pumped magnetometers, biomagnetism associated with electrical activity in the carnivorous Venus flytrap, Dionaea muscipula, was recorded. Action potentials were induced by heat stimulation and detected both electrically and magnetically.

Imagine not a white, but a green Arctic, with woody shrubs as far north as the Canadian coast of the Arctic Ocean. This is what the northernmost region of North America looked like about 125000 years ago, during the last interglacial period, finds new research from CU Boulder.

Researchers analyzed plant DNA more than 100000 years old retrieved from lake sediment in the Arctic (the oldest DNA in lake sediment analyzed in a publication to date) and found evidence of a shrub native to northern Canadian ecosystems 250 miles (400 km) farther north than its current range.

As the Arctic warms much faster than everywhere else on the planet in response to climate change, the findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may not only be a glimpse of the past but a snapshot of our potential future.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lQXaylnGXLM

An oral vaccine could potentially allow for people to self vaccinate at home.

Summary: Using a range of tools from machine learning to graphical models, researchers have discovered a new way to identify cells and explore the mechanisms behind neurodegenerative diseases.

Source: Georgia Institute of Technology

In researching the causes and potential treatments for degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, neuroscientists frequently struggle to accurately identify cells needed to understand brain activity that gives rise to behavior changes such as declining memory or impaired balance and tremors.

The remains reveal that Waal was between 35 and 50 years old when he died. Researchers used techniques including radiocarbon dating, stratigraphy and ceramic typology to determine that people buried him in around 726 A.D., the same year workers built the hieroglyphic staircase, notes Notimerica.

Prior to his death, Waal suffered from a variety of medical ailments. His skull was mildly flattened, and he was malnourished as a child, as evidenced by the “slightly porous, spongy areas known as porotic hyperostosis, caused by childhood nutritional deficiencies or illnesses” on the sides of his head, per the statement.

Scientists also found that infections, trauma, scurvy or rickets had triggered periostitis —chronic swelling and pain—to form in Waal’s arm bones.

Long but annotated! Most important here is human data for specific treatments due out starting in May or June. And apparently they had a mouse study where they expected a paper due out already but other groups chimed in to help with more testing so there is a delay.

Liz Parrish, CEO of BioViva Science and patient zero of biological rejuvenation with gene therapies, is interviewed by Zora Benhamou on her fresh podcast “HackMyAge”.

Continue reading “Liz Parrish goes deep into gene therapies at the HackMyAge Podcast by Zora (March 2021)” »

Kent Taylor, the co-founder and CEO of Texas Roadhouse Inc., has died from suicide, his family said, after suffering “unbearable” COVID-19-related symptoms.

Taylor’s family and the restaurant chain said in a statement to The Hill on Sunday that the business executive “took his own life this week” after “a battle with post-Covid related symptoms, including severe tinnitus.”

“Kent battled and fought hard like the former track champion that he was, but the suffering that greatly intensified in recent days became unbearable,” the statement read.