Lifeboat Foundation

Restricting calories is known to improve health and increase lifespan, but much of how it does so remains a mystery, especially in regard to how it protects the brain. Buck Institute for Research on Aging scientists have uncovered a role for a gene called OXR1 that is necessary for the lifespan extension seen with dietary restriction and is essential for healthy brain aging.

“When people restrict the amount of food that they eat, they typically think it might affect their digestive tract or fat buildup, but not necessarily about how it affects the brain,” said Kenneth Wilson, Ph.D., Buck postdoc and first author of the study, published in Nature Communications. “As it turns out, this is a gene that is important in the brain.”

The team additionally demonstrated a detailed cellular mechanism of how dietary restriction can delay aging and slow the progression of neurodegenerative diseases. The work, done in fruit flies and human cells, also identifies potential therapeutic targets to slow aging and age-related neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr. Avshalom Cyrus Elitzur (Hebrew: אבשלום כורש אליצור; born 30 May 1957) is an Israeli physicist, philosopher and professor at Chapman University. He is also the founder of the Israeli Institute for Advanced Physics. He obtained his PhD under Yakir Aharanov. Elitzur became a household name among physicists for his collaboration with Lev Vaidman in formulating the “bomb-testing problem” in quantum mechanics, which has been validaded by two Nobel-prize-winning physicists. Elitzur’s work has sparked extensive discussions about the foundations of quantum mechanics and its interpretations, including the Copenhagen interpretation, many-worlds interpretation, and objective collapse models. His contributions have had a profound impact on both physics and philosophy, influencing debates about measurement, the role of observers, and the ontology of quantum states. Elitzur has also engaged in discussions about consciousness, the arrow of time, and other foundational topics, including a recent breakthrough in bio-thermodynamics and the “ski-lift” pathway.

Elitzur’s Google Scholar page: https://tinyurl.com/5n7a8hd6
Elitzur’s Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avshalo…
IAI Article: https://iai.tv/articles/a-radical-new…

Continue reading “Avshalom Elitzur on Biology, Thermodynamics, and Information: A Tutorial” »

A study finds that microglia with mutant TREM2 protein reduce brain circuit connections, promote inflammation, and contribute to Alzheimer’s.

Rapid-acting antidepressants, including ketamine, scopolamine and psilocybin, have been found to have immediate and lasting positive effects on mood in patients with major depressive disorder but how these effects arise is unknown. New research led by the University of Bristol explored their neuropsychological effects and found that all three of these drugs can modulate affective biases associated with learning and memory.

The paper, published in Science Translational Medicine was carried out in collaboration with researchers at Compass Pathways, Boehringer Ingelheim, and the University of Cambridge.

Negative affective biases are a core feature of major depressive disorder. Affective biases occur when emotions alter how the brain processes information and negative affective biases are thought to contribute to the development and continuation of depressed mood.

Jan 11 (Reuters) — The University of Oxford said on Thursday it had begun human testing of an experimental vaccine against the brain-swelling Nipah virus that led to outbreaks in India’s Kerala state and other parts of Asia.

There is no vaccine yet for the deadly virus. Nipah was first identified about 25 years ago in Malaysia and has led to outbreaks in Bangladesh, India and Singapore.

The first participants in the Oxford trial received doses of the vaccine over the last week. The shot is based on the same technology as the one used in AstraZeneca (AZN.L) and Serum Institute of India’s COVID-19 shots.

Ancient DNA helps explain why northern Europeans have a higher risk of multiple sclerosis than other ancestries: It’s a genetic legacy of horseback-riding cattle herders who swept into the region about 5,000 years ago.

The findings come from a huge project to compare modern DNA with that culled from ancient humans’ teeth and bones — allowing scientists to trace both prehistoric migration and disease-linked genes that tagged along.

When a Bronze Age people called the Yamnaya moved from the steppes of what are now Ukraine and Russia into northwestern Europe, they carried gene variants that today are known to increase people’s risk of multiple sclerosis, researchers reported Wednesday.

In my paper, “A Case for Physicalism about the Human Mind,” I didn’t attempt to defend physicalism about human mentality (henceforth, just physicalism) against the many objections that philosophers, and others, have made to it. Instead, I tried to assemble positive evidence that physicalism is true, while insisting that no aspect of human behavior, including human linguistic behavior, makes it necessary to adopt any kind of dualism about human mentality. In their reply to my paper, Professors Taliaferro and Goetz (henceforth, TG) don’t engage in any detail with my positive case for physicalism[1], and they offer no examples of human behavior that can’t be explained unless some kind of dualism is assumed. Their main objection to my paper is, rather, that, because it only takes account of evidence “from the third-person point of view,” it entirely overlooks “the first-person point of view,” which, they hold, shows us that human mentality has certain features incompatible with physicalism. Examples of such features would be that “a choice is an uncaused mental event,” and that “a reason is a purpose that provides an ultimate and irreducible teleological explanation of that choice.” In my reply to TG, I’ll respond to this objection only; I won’t take up every disagreement I have with TG’s reply.

Before I can respond to TG’s main objection, however, I must clarify it. Since “the first-person point of view” is presumably just the point of view provided by introspection, TG’s main objection must be that introspection of one’s mental states somehow shows one that human mentality has certain features incompatible with physicalism. However, it’s important to distinguish between the following two claims:

(TG1) By introspecting one’s own (say) choices, one acquires some reason to think that they are uncaused mental events.

Cutting-edge research paves way for cancer treatment.

Scientists have developed 3D mini-organs from human fetal brain tissue that self-organize in vitro. These lab-grown organoids open up a brand-new way of studying how the brain develops.

“We included 151 adults ages 21 to 70 years old with chronic back pain. We found that 66% of participants reported being pain-free or nearly pain-free after pain reprocessing therapy, compared with 20% of people who received a placebo.⁠”

Understanding that chronic back pain originates from within the brain could lead to quicker recovery, a new study finds.