yup,thisisme

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neurosciencestuff:

Use It or Lose It

“Use it or lose it.” The saying could apply especially to the brain when it comes to protecting against Alzheimer’s disease. Previous studies have shown that keeping the mind active, exercising and social interactions may help delay the onset of dementia in Alzheimer’s disease.

Now, a new study led by Dennis Selkoe, MD, co-director of the Center for Neurologic Diseases in the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) Department of Neurology, provides specific pre-clinical scientific evidence supporting the concept that prolonged and intensive stimulation by an enriched environment, especially regular exposure to new activities, may have beneficial effects in delaying one of the key negative factors in Alzheimer’s disease.

The study will be published online on March 6, 2013 in Neuron.

Alzheimer’s disease occurs when a protein called amyloid beta accumulates and forms “senile plaques” in the brain. This protein accumulation can block nerve cells in the brain from properly communicating with one another. This may gradually lead to an erosion of a person’s mental processes, such as memory, attention, and the ability to learn, understand and process information.

The BWH researchers used a wild-type mouse model when evaluating how the environment might affect Alzheimer’s disease. Unlike other pre-clinical models used in Alzheimer’s disease research, wild-type mice tend to more closely mimic the scenario of average humans developing the disease under normal environmental conditions, rather than being strongly genetically pre-disposed to the disease.

Selkoe and his team found that prolonged exposure to an enriched environment activated certain adrenalin-related brain receptors which triggered a signaling pathway that prevented amyloid beta protein from weakening the communication between nerve cells in the brain’s “memory center,” the hippocampus. The hippocampus plays an important role in both short- and long-term memory.

The ability of an enriched, novel environment to prevent amyloid beta protein from affecting the signaling strength and communication between nerve cells was seen in both young and middle-aged wild-type mice.

“This part of our work suggests that prolonged exposure to a richer, more novel environment beginning even in middle age might help protect the hippocampus from the bad effects of amyloid beta, which builds up to toxic levels in one hundred percent of Alzheimer patients,” said Selkoe.

Moreover, the scientists found that exposing the brain to novel activities in particular provided greater protection against Alzheimer’s disease than did just aerobic exercise. According to the researchers, this observation may be due to stimulation that occurred not only physically, but also mentally, when the mice moved quickly from one novel object to another.

“This work helps provide a molecular mechanism for why a richer environment can help lessen the memory-eroding effects of the build-up of amyloid beta protein with age,” said Selkoe. “They point to basic scientific reasons for the apparent lessening of AD risk in people with cognitively richer and more complex experiences during life.”

neurosciencestuff:

Alzheimer’s risk gene discovered using imaging method that screens brain’s connections

Scientists at UCLA have discovered a new genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease by screening people’s DNA and then using an advanced type of scan to visualize their brains’ connections.

Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of dementia in the elderly, erodes these connections, which we rely on to support thinking, emotion and memory. With no known cure for the disease, the 20 million Alzheimer’s sufferers worldwide lack an effective treatment. And we are all at risk: Our chance of developing Alzheimer’s doubles every five years after age 65.

The UCLA researchers discovered a common abnormality in our genetic code that increases the risk of Alzheimer’s. To find the gene, they used a new imaging method that screens the brain’s connections — the wiring, or circuitry, that communicates information. Switching off such Alzheimer’s risk genes (nine of them have been implicated over the last 20 years) could stop the disorder in its tracks or delay its onset by many years.

The research is published in the March 4 online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We found a change in our genetic code that boosts our risk for Alzheimer’s disease,” said the study’s senior author, Paul Thompson, a UCLA professor of neurology and a member of the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging. “If you have this variant in your DNA, your brain connections are weaker. As you get older, faulty brain connections increase your risk of dementia.”

The researchers, Thompson said, screened more than a thousand people’s DNA to find the common “spelling errors” in the genetic code that might heighten their risk for the disease later in life. The new study was the first of its kind to also give each person a “connectome scan,” a special type of scan that measures water diffusion in the brain, allowing scientists to map the strength of the brain’s connections.

The new scan reveals the brain’s circuitry and how information is routed around the brain, in order to discover risk factors for disease. The researchers then combined these connectivity scans with the extensive genomic screening to pinpoint what causes faulty wiring in the brain.

Hundreds of computers, calculating for months, sifted through more than 4,000 brain connections and the entire genetic code, comparing connection patterns in people with different genetic variations. In people whose genetic code differed in one specific gene called SPON1, weaker connections were found between brain centers controlling reasoning and emotion. The rogue gene also affects how senile plaques build up in the brain — one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease.

“Much of your risk for disease is written in your DNA, so the genome is a good place to look for new drug targets,” said Thompson, who in 2009 founded a research network known as Project ENIGMA to pool brain scans and DNA from 26,000 people worldwide. “If we scan your brain and DNA today, we can discover dangerous genes that will undermine your ability to think and plan and will make you ill in the future. If we find these genes now, there is a better chance of new drugs that can switch them off before you or your family get ill.”

Developing new therapeutics for Alzheimer’s is a hot area for pharmaceutical research, Thompson said.

It has also been found that the SPON1 gene can be manipulated to develop new treatments for the devastating disease, Thompson noted. When the rogue gene was altered in mice, it led to cognitive improvements and fewer plaques building up in the brain. Alzheimer’s patients show an accumulation of these senile plaques, which are made of a sticky substance called amyloid and are thought to kill brain cells, causing irreversible memory loss and personality changes.

Screening genomes has led to many new drug targets in the treatment of cancer, heart disease, arthritis and brain disorders such as epilepsy. But the UCLA team’s approach — screening genomes and performing brain scans of the same people — promises a faster and more efficient search.

“With a brain scan that takes half an hour and a DNA scan from a saliva sample, we can search your genes for factors that help or harm your brain’s connections,” Thompson said. “This opens up a new landscape of discovery in medical science.”

sciencesoup:

Megatherium: The Great Beast

Imagine a sloth as tall an elephant and as heavy as one too, and you’re imagining the Megatherium—a genus of enormous ground sloths. They roamed Central and South America from the late Pliocene period (1.9 million years ago, after the decline of the dinosaurs) to as recently as the Holocene period (8,000 years ago, at the dawn of human civilisation). Fossils have been found from as far north as Texas to as far south as Argentina, and reconstructions show that the Megatherium were built extremely robustly: they had enormous claws, weighed almost 4 tonnes, and stood up to 6 metres tall (three times as high as a tall human!). In size, they were exceeded by only a few other land mammals such as mammoths, so they were undoubtedly one of the most impressive animals to walk the Earth. Their huge claws prevented them from putting their feet flat on the ground, so they must have walked like an anteater—on the sides of their feet. It’s believed that they were primarily herbivores, using their huge claws to reach up into the trees and drag down branches to crush in their powerful jaws, but evidence also suggests they supplemented their diet with meat too, feeding out of opportunity rather than hunting themselves—scavenging carcasses, perhaps by using their brawn to drive predators away from their kills. Their closest living relatives are tree sloths.

(Image Credit: 1, 2)

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loveyourchaos:

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Olafur Eliasson - The Weather Project (2003)

“Representations of the sun and sky dominate the expanse of Turbine Hall. A fine mist permeates the space, as if creeping in from the environment outside. Throughout the day, the mist accumulates into faint, cloud-like formations, before dissipating across the space. 

At the far end of the hall is a giant semi-circular form made of hundreds of mono-frequency lamps. 

Generally used in street lighting, mono-frequency lamps emit light at such a narrow frequency that colors other than yellow and black are invisible, thus transforming the visual field around the sun into a vast duotone landscape.”

(Source: likeafieldmouse, via psilocymian)

neurosciencestuff:

Some brain cells are better virus fighters

Viruses often spread through the brain in patchwork patterns, infecting some cells but missing others. New research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis helps explain why. The scientists showed that natural immune defenses that resist viral infection are turned on in some brain cells but switched off in others.

“The cells that a pathogen infects can be a major determinant of the seriousness of brain infections,” says senior author Michael Diamond, MD, PhD, professor of medicine. “To understand the basis of disease, it is important to understand which brain regions are more susceptible and why.”

While some brain infections are caused by bacteria, fungi or parasites, often the cause is a virus, such as West Nile virus, herpesvirus or enteroviruses.

For their study, now available online in Nature Medicine, the researchers focused on granule cell neurons, a cell type that rarely becomes infected. They compared gene profiles in granule cells from the cerebellum with the activity in cortical neurons in the cerebral cortex, which are more vulnerable to infection.

The comparison revealed many differences, including a number of genes in cortical neurons that were less well-expressed—meaning that for those specific genes there were fewer copies of mRNA, the molecules that relay genetic information from DNA to the cell’s protein-making mechanisms.

Next, the researchers transferred individually 40 of those genes into cortical neurons and screened the cells for susceptibility to viral infection. The test highlighted three antiviral genes that are induced by interferon, an important immune system protein. When the expression level of these genes increased in cortical neurons, the cells’ susceptibility to viral infection decreased.

The researchers also identified mechanisms that make some of these changes in genetic programming happen: regulatory factors known as microRNA, and differences in the way DNA is modified in the cell nucleus, both of which can affect gene expression levels.

Some of the genetic changes are only helpful against specific viral families, while others are effective against a broader spectrum of viruses and bacteria. The scientists can’t say yet if the differences in infection susceptibility are driven by the need to prevent infection or if they are a byproduct of changes that help neurons in particular brain regions perform essential functions.

To learn more about how these innate immune genes help cells resist infection, Diamond and his colleagues are disabling them in the brains of mice.

teachingliteracy:

A version for tumblr that can be read without opening a new tab, since plenty of people would scroll past this story otherwise.

The bravest woman on Earth.

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thehippiedouche:

everythingyoulovetohate:

pulmonaire:

Students Make Photos by Eating 35mm Film

Kingston University photography students Luke Evans and Josh Lake decided to turn themselves into human cameras by eating 35mm film squares and letting their bodies do the rest. The single film segments were first ingested, excreted (in a dark room) then washed.

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damnthatswhack:

[Octopuns]

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