Lifeboat Foundation

A recent study published in Open Biology reports that exposure to intense light almost instantly provokes courtship behavior in male fruit flies (Drosophila). Surprisingly, the researchers observed both male-male and male-female courtship behavior under these conditions. While male-male courtship behavior among fruit flies is not a new discovery, the findings of this study suggest that intense light exposure specifically precipitates it.

A research team including members from the Department of Biology and the Iowa Neuroscience Institute at the University of Iowa and from the Department of Biological Sciences at University of Alabama made this discovery while observing the general behavior of male fruit flies in intensely-lit test arenas.

Earlier studies have found that internal drive, previous experiences, and sensory input from external sources—including gustatory, olfactory, visual, and mechanosensory signals—all factor into male courtship behavior toward receptive females in Drosophila melanogaster. Male flies typically make a show of chasing, licking, extending their wings, and using them to produce courtship “songs” before ultimately mounting the targeted females.

HBP researchers from Forschungszentrum Jülich and the University of Cologne (Germany) have uncovered how neuron densities are distributed across and within cortical areas in the mammalian brain. They have unveiled a fundamental organisational principle of cortical cytoarchitecture: the ubiquitous lognormal distribution of neuron densities.

Numbers of neurons and their spatial arrangement play a crucial role in shaping the brain’s structure and function. Yet, despite the wealth of available cytoarchitectonic data, the statistical distributions of neuron densities remain largely undescribed. The new HBP study, published in Cerebral Cortex, advances our understanding of the organisation of mammalian brains.

The team based their investigations on nine publicly available datasets of seven species: mouse, marmoset, macaque, galago, owl monkey, baboon and human. After analysing the cortical areas of each, they found that neuron densities within these areas follow a consistent pattern – a lognormal distribution. This suggests a fundamental organisational principle underlying the densities of neurons in the mammalian brain.

A recent study in mice adds to the evidence suggesting that Parkinson’s disease may actually start in the gut rather than the brain.

I’m excited to share my new opinion article for Newsweek. It advocates for transforming America from a military-industrial complex into a science-industrial complex! Give it a read!

America spends 45 percent of its discretionary federal spending on defense and wars, while around us, the world burns in ways that have nothing to do with fighting or the military. Global warming has escalated into an enormous crisis. A fifth of everyone we know will die from heart disease. And an opioid crisis is reducing the average lifespans of Americans for the first time in decades. There’s plenty of tragedy, fear, and hardship all around us, but it has nothing to do with the need to make more bombs. It does, however, have to do with science.

It seems obvious America should do something different than spend so much of its tax dollars on defense. We should consider halving that money, and directing it to science, transforming America from a military-industrial complex into a science-industrial complex. Despite science and technological progress being broadly responsible for raising the standard of living around the world over the last 50 years, America spends only 3 percent of its GDP ($205 billion) on science and medical research across the federal government. Notably, this is dramatically less than the $877 billion the U.S. will spend on defense this year.

Continue reading “Could We Transform America Into a Science-Industrial Complex?” »

Renewing the aging gut microbiome holds promise for preventing inflammatory brain and eye degeneration.

A Scanner Darkly.
by Philip K. Dick.
Read by Gary Telles.
Originally issued by NLS on cassette in 1994
I guess I’ll come back on Thursday.
This is a pretty good alternative to Paul Giamatti’s narration.
“In a near-future, drug-ridden America, narcotics agent Bob Arctor goes undercover to catch a drug dealer. In the junkie culture in which he operates (even his girlfriend is a dealer), he takes large doses of a drug that splits his brain into two separate personalities. The agent has no knowledge of his other self, who, as it turns out, is the drug dealer he is after.“
00:00:00 — (i) Book info.
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Like these books? Want to help?
These books come from the National Library Services.
I encourage you to donate:
https://www.loc.gov/nls/about/donate/

Neuroscientists decode song from brain recordings, revealing areas dealing with rhythm and vocals.

By Robert Sanders

The bioactivity of most near-infrared II (NIRII) fluorophores are limited, thereby conflicting the achievement of strong fluorescence and high catalytic activities, due to a lack of free electrons in the method.

To overcome this challenge, Huizhen Ma and a research team in translational medicine, neural engineering, physics, and materials at the Tianjin University China developed atomically precise gold clusters with strong near-infrared II fluorescence to show potent enzyme-mimetic activities by using atomic engineering, to form active copper single-atom sites.

These gold-copper clusters (Au₂₁ Cu₁) showed higher antioxidant nature with a 90-fold catalase-like and 3-fold higher superoxide dismutase-like activity compared to gold clusters alone. These clusters can be cleared through the kidney to monitor cisplatin-induced renal injury within a 20–120-minute window to visualize the process in 3D via near-infrared light-sheet microscopy.

Short-lived proteins control gene expression in cells and execute critical roles ranging from assisting brain connectivity to fortifying the body’s immune response. Originating in the nucleus, these proteins are swiftly degraded after fulfilling their purpose.

For decades, the mechanism behind the degradation and removal of these essential proteins from cells remained a mystery to researchers — until now.

In a cross-departmental collaboration, researchers from Harvard Medical School identified a protein called midnolin that plays a key role in degrading many short-lived nuclear proteins. The study shows that midnolin does so by directly grabbing the proteins and pulling them into the cellular waste-disposal system, called the proteasome, where they are destroyed.