Mice that have a genetic version of mitochondrial disease can easily be mistaken for much older animals by the time they are nine months old: they have thinning gray hair, osteoporosis, poor hearing, infertility and heart problems.

Despite having this disease at birth, these mice have a “secret weapon” in their youth that staves off signs of aging for a time - a longevity hormone helps these mice, born with thousands of mutations in their energy-generating mitochondria, maintain metabolic homeostasis at a young age. 

When rats rest, their brains simulate journeys to a desired future such as a tasty treat, finds new UCL research funded by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society.

The researchers monitored brain activity in rats, first as the animals viewed food in a location they could not reach, then as they rested in a separate chamber, and finally as they were allowed to walk to the food. The activity of specialised brain cells involved in navigation suggested that during the rest the rats simulated walking to and from food that they had been unable to reach.

The study, published in the open access journal eLife, could help to explain why some people with damage to a part of the brain called the hippocampus are unable to imagine the future.

A vegan diet remains controversial because it is in defiance of our evolutionary mandate - it is unnatural in humans to only eat meat the same way it is in cats.

But diets are popular for lots of reasons that defy scientific explanation and regardless of the evidence basis, they work. People who eat all meat, for example, lose weight, and people who eat only animal products lose weight. In most cases, it is because people who go on any diet tend to live healthier in multiple ways but a new review of 12 studies determined that people on a vegan diet lose around two kilograms more in the short term than dieters on a normal plan.

Sleep seems simple enough to define, it is a state of rest and restoration that almost every vertebrate creature must enter regularly in order to survive.

Yet the brain responds differently to stimuli when asleep than when awake, and it is not clear what brain changes happen during sleep.

A key question is why - it is the same brain, same neurons and similar requirements for oxygen so what is the difference between these two states?

In a recent paper, Rodolfo Llinás, a professor of neuroscience at New York University School of Medicine , and colleagues announced that a specific calcium channel plays a crucial role in healthy sleep, a key step toward understanding both normal and abnormal waking brain functions.

Males and females process pain using different cells, a new study with mice suggests.
The findings could help researchers develop the next generation of medications for chronic pain—the most prevalent health condition humans face.

“Research has demonstrated that men and women have different sensitivity to pain and that more women suffer from chronic pain than men, but the assumption has always been that the wiring of how pain is processed is the same in both sexes,” says co-senior author Jeffrey Mogil, professor of pain studies at McGill University and director of the Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain.

A new species of ‘super-armored’ worm, named Collinsium ciliosum, or Hairy Collins’ Monster after the palaeontologist Desmond Collins, who discovered and first illustrated a similar Canadian fossil in the 1980s, was a bizarre, spike-covered creature which ate by filtering nutrients out of seawater with its feather-like front legs, has been identified by palaeontologists.

The creature, which lived about half a billion years ago, was one of the first animals on Earth to develop armor to protect itself from predators and to use such a specialised mode of feeding.