Scheidemantel et al. address the complexity of Alzheimer’s disease by integrating comprehensive multi-omics data from over 1,300 aged individuals, revealing coordinated molecular mechanisms across brain systems. The findings provide crucial insights into age-related traits and disease pathways, paving the way for potential therapeutic strategies.
He compares our working minds to a flying kite, where the kite is the brain and the wind is consciousness as a fundamental part of reality. “The kite has to be built from the right materials in the right configuration with the right tether, but its flight depends entirely on the wind,” Reggente says.
A radio makes another good analogy, Reggente explains.
“[The radio] doesn’t produce the broadcast, it receives and transduces a signal that’s already present,” he says. “But unlike a radio, the brain isn’t merely reproducing that signal with high fidelity—it’s interacting with it. And that interaction is what gives rise to our particular subjective experience.”
An insightful perspective on what biological factors may have been the cause of a patient’s death after receiving a blood-brain-barrier crossing AAV treatment. It’s crucial for the field to think about this carefully as we move forward.
Brief disclosure: I am a named inventor on patents and author on publications related to AAV capsid engineering and CNS gene delivery, developed during my time at the Broad Institute. I now operate independently. This post does not represent any prior employer, current advisory client, or collaborator. The mechanistic analysis presented here is my own scientific interpretation of publicly available data. Full disclosures at the bottom.
Mesocorticostriatal dopamine projections are crucial for value learning, motivational control, and cognitive functions. However, while dopamine’s role in value learning as reward-prediction-error (RPE) has been much understood, precise roles in motivational control and cognitive functions remain more elusive. Computationally, this corresponds to that while the operation of mesostriatal dopamine could be minimally described by simple reinforcement learning (RL) models with one-dimensional reward/RPE and fixed state representation, how reward-specific motivational control can be achieved through heterogeneous dopamine responses, and how sophisticated cortical state representation can be formed through mesocortical dopamine, cannot be captured by such simple models.
The overconsumption of sodium contributes to a wide range of detrimental health conditions. Thus, it is imperative to gain a better understanding of the neural mechanisms driving sodium appetite. Here, we combined neuroanatomic, transgenic, behavioral, and chemogenetic approaches to investigate the role of bed nucleus of stria terminalis (BNST) enkephalin neurons (BNSTENK) in sodium appetite in male and female pENK-Cre mice. Our results demonstrate that Gi-mediated signaling onto BNSTENK neurons regulates salt consumption following sodium depletion but does not impact upon taste preference when replete. Further, Gi-mediated signaling onto BNSTENK neurons had no effect on deprivation-induced food or water intake or anxiety-like behavior.
Aubrey de Grey believes aging isn’t inevitable — it’s a solvable engineering problem. In this conversation, we explore why society treats aging as untouchable, how “longevity escape velocity” could allow us to live indefinitely, and why reversing damage—not slowing it—is the future of medicine. He breaks down how our medical system profits from sickness, and how progress is slowed by fear and outdated norms. The end of aging as we know it is coming and it’s happening faster than you think. #preventativehealth #preventativecare #aging #health #medicine.
Connect With Me: / tim.doy1e.
Timestamps:
00:00 How We Understand Aging.
06:01 How Aubrey Found His Work.
10:42 Longevity Escape Velocity.
12:45 Not Being Controlled.
15:11 Investor-Humanitarian Structure.
16:51 Balancing Work With Publicity.
17:26 Aubrey’s Current Work.
27:36 Getting Pushback & The Medical System.
33:11 Shifting To Preventative Care.
36:14 What Has & Hasn’t Changed.
41:52 Consciousness & Aging.
46:00 How To Popularize Ideas.
48:10 The Future Of Aubrey’s Work.
50:58 Connect With Aubrey de Grey.
Dr. Fahy is the Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer at 21st Century Medicine, Inc, and has co-founded Intervene Immune, a company developing clinical methods to reverse immune system aging. He was the 2022–2023 president of the Society for Cryobiology. Dr. Fahy is the lead author of a recent paper, “Ultrastructural and Histological Cryopreservation of Mammalian Brains by Vitrification” – the main topic of our conversation.
In December of 2014, I worked with Dr. Fahy to cryopreserve Dr. Stephen Coles under special conditions, with his permission to extract brain samples and test them for preservation quality. We did not know what the results would be. If bad, that would be discouraging for cryonics. In fact, the results were excellent, as Dr. Fahy details.
We discuss the Coles case and the results of the cerebral cortical biopsy. The paper includes results from rabbit brains. We also discuss the relative resilience of the brain compared to other organs when it comes to fracturing; how cryoprotectants prevent ice formation even when the blood-brain barrier remains closed; whether biostasis organizations should be using blood-brain barrier opening agents; Dr. Fahy’s thoughts about chemical preservation and the role of a combination of cryo an chemo, known as aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC), and more.
C Decaf even improved learning and memory, while caffeine boosted focus and reduced anxiety. Together, they show coffee works through multiple pathways beyond just caffeine.
Researchers at APC Microbiome Ireland, a leading research center at University College Cork, have taken a major step toward understanding how coffee benefits the body. For the first time, scientists have closely examined how coffee interacts with the gut-brain axis, the communication network that links the digestive system and the brain.
The findings, published in Nature Communications and supported by the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee (ISIC), show that regularly drinking both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee can shape the gut microbiome and influence mood and stress.