Lifeboat Foundation

Interesting write up by Stanford on Astrocytes and neurodegenerative diseases. One area that I will be interested in finding research is any ties to Dystonia as Astrocytes own impact to the central nervous system.

Judging from the very terms used to designate brain research — neuroscience, neuro logy, neuro biology — you might figure nerve cells (or neurons, as brain scientists like to call them) are the only cells in the brain worth knowing about or, indeed, the only cells resident in that organ.

Not true. In fact, neurons account for a measly 10 percent of the cells in a healthy human brain. And over the past 25 years Stanford brain scientist Ben Barres, MD, PhD, has arguably done as much as any human on earth to advance the status of the 90 percent of cells in the brain that aren’t neurons. Among those are a particularly interesting group called astrocytes because of their star-shaped appearance, and they were the focus of a just-published study by Barres’ group.

Continue reading “Jekyll & Hyde Tale Unfolding Within The Human Brain May Explain Neurodegenerative Disease” »

Nice; ReRam with multi-state processing and reliable storage.

Short of full blown molecular computers or universal quantum computers or optical computers memristors have the most potential for a hardware change to dramatically boost the power and capabilities of computers. The boost to computer power could be nearly a million times by fully leveraging memristors. It would likely be more like a thousand times with more near to mid term usage of memristors.

Memristors (aka ReRAM) could become computer memory that is over 10 times denser than Flash or DRAM in two dimensions. Memristors like flash would be nonvolatile memory that would not need power for retain memory. Memristors are created from nanowire lattices which could be stacked in three dimensions. Memristors have also previously been shown to behave like brain synapses which could be used for computer architectures that emulate the human brain for neuromorphic computing. Now there is work on multistate memristors that perform computation. This means that eventually processing and memory could be tightly integrated.

Continue reading “Memristor can do multistate processing as well as nonvolatile memory” »

Nice.

Rugby teams and ambulance staff are the target for portable brain scanner.

MINNEAPOLIS — Scanning a premature infant’s brain shortly after birth to map the location and volume of lesions, small areas of injury in the brain’s white matter, may help doctors better predict whether the baby will have disabilities later, according to a new study published in the January 18, 2017, online issue of Neurology ®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 10 babies is born prematurely in the United States.

Lack of oxygen to the brain is the most common form of brain injury in premature infants, resulting in damage to the white matter. White matter contains nerve fibers that maintain contact between various parts of the brain. Damage to white matter can interfere with communication in the brain and the signals it sends to other parts of the body.

Biological engineers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have invented a microchip that can be lined with living human cells in order to revolutionise medicine, particularly relating to drug testing, disease modelling and personalised medicine.

The ‘human organs-on-chip’ is a microchip made from a clear flexible polymer that contains hollow microfluidic channels that are lined with living human cells, together with an interface that lines the interior surface of blood vessels and lymphatic vessels, known as an endothelium.

The idea is that the microchip can emulate the microarchitecture and functions of multiple human organs such as the lungs, kidneys, skin, bone marrow, intestines and blood-brain barrier. And if you were able to do this, you could then test out drugs and study how diseases affect the body without having to endanger human patients, or waste precious organs needed for transplants.

Continue reading “Human organs-on-chips: Harvard develops microchips lined with living cells to revolutionise medicine” »

Summary: Researchers report an anti malaria drug has helped improve length and quality of life for a 26 year old brain cancer patient.

Source: University of Colorado.

Continue reading “Malaria Drug Successfully Treats 26 Year Old Brain Cancer Patient” »

Pretty wild.

Researchers of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) have found that “alpha-synuclein,” a protein involved in a series of neurological disorders including Parkinson’s disease, is capable of travelling from brain to stomach and that it does so following a specific pathway. Donato Di Monte and co-workers report on this in the journal Acta Neuropathologica. Their study, carried out in rats, sheds new light on pathological processes that could underlie disease progression in humans.

Alpha-synuclein occurs naturally in the nervous system, where it plays an important role in synaptic function. However, in Parkinson’s disease, dementia with Lewy bodies and other neurodegenerative diseases termed “synucleinopathies,” this protein is accumulated within neurons, forming pathological aggregates. Distinct areas of the brain become progressively affected by this condition. The specific mechanisms and pathways involved in this widespread distribution of alpha-synuclein pathology remain to be fully elucidated. Clinical and experimental evidence suggests however that alpha-synuclein — or abnormal forms of it — could “jump” from one neuron to another and thus spread between anatomically interconnected regions.

Continue reading “Protein Associated With Parkinson’s Travels From Brain To Gut” »

Hmmm; you have a 2nd brain inside your stomach. At least this new research is pointing to that.

Gut feelings influence your mood and well-being.

Continue reading “The Pit In Your Stomach is Actually Your Second Brain” »

Nice.

In research that could one day lead to advances against neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, University of Michigan engineering researchers have demonstrated a technique for precisely measuring the properties of individual protein molecules floating in a liquid.

Proteins are essential to the function of every cell. Measuring their properties in blood and other body fluids could unlock valuable information, as the molecules are a vital building block in the body. The body manufactures them in a variety of complex shapes that can transmit messages between cells, carry oxygen and perform other important functions.

Continue reading “‘5-D protein fingerprinting’ with nanopores could give insights into Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s” »