More men than women develop Parkinson’s disease and new work presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies says that it is do to sex differences in how brain cells change. Parkinson’s disease affects about 9 million people and becomes increasingly prevalent with age.
Social problems are key characteristics in psychiatric disorders and are insufficiently targeted by current treatment approaches. By applying brain imaging methods, researchers at the University of Zurich now show that a small amount of psilocybin changes the processing of social conflicts in the brain. As a result, participants experienced social exclusion and social pain as less stressful. This could help to improve therapy of social problems.
HOUSTON - (April 18, 2016) - Thank the little "muscles" in your neurons for allowing you to remember where you live, what your friends and family look like and a lot more.
New research at Rice University suggests actin filaments that control the shape of neuron cells may also be the key to the molecular machinery that forms and stores long-term memories.
The Rice lab of theoretical biological physicist Peter Wolynes reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a theory about how long-term memories are made; the theory is based on simulations that analyze the energy landscapes of the proteins involved.
Using unique demographic records on 140,600 reproducing individuals from the Utah Population Database, a research team led from Uppsala University has come to the conclusion that lowered birth rates are one reason why women outlive men in today's societies. The study is published in Scientific Reports.
The causes underpinning sex differences in lifespan are hotly debated. While women commonly outlive men, this is generally less pronounced in societies before the demographic transition to low mortality and fertility rates.
You can never predict what treasure might be hiding in your own basement - a year ago, a 1917 image on an astronomical glass plate from the Carnegie Observatories' collection shows the first-ever evidence of a planetary system beyond our own Sun.
Here's what happened: about a year ago, the review's author, Jay Farihi of University College London, contacted our Observatories' Director, John Mulchaey. He was looking for a plate in the Carnegie archive that contained a spectrum of van Maanen's star, a white dwarf discovered by Dutch-American astronomer Adriaan van Maanen in the very year our own plate was made.
During their life, plants constantly renew themselves. They sprout new leaves in the spring and shed them in the fall. No longer needed, damaged or dead organs such as blossoms and leaves are also cast off by a process known as abscission. By doing so, plants conserve energy and prepare for the next step in their life cycle.
But how does a plant know when it is the right time to get rid of unnecessary organs? It is regulated by receptor proteins located at the surface of specific cells that form a layer around the future break point. When it is time to shed an organ, a small hormone binds to this membrane receptor and, together with a helper protein, the abscission process is initiated. Their findings are now published in the journal eLife.
Methane, the abundant and inexpensive natural gas, is often burnt off around the world at oil fields and refineries but it's a great energy source and base material for the chemical industry, if only there was a viable way to put it in liquid form, which is easier to transport and more reactive.
A 20 percent tax on sugar-sweetened drinks would result in widespread, long-lasting public health benefits and significant health cost savings, an estimated $400 million a year and reduce annual health expenditure by up to $29 million, according to a computer model.
A phase I study of the drug LOXO-101 appears to significantly reduce tumors in patients with varied types of genetically defined cancer, according to a study led by The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
The results of the study, which followed patients with unique proteins called tropomyosin receptor kinase fusions (TRKs), were presented at the American Association for Cancer Research's annual meeting held April 16-20 in New Orleans.
"We saw efficacy with significant tumor regression in all six TRK fusion patients enrolled in the study," said David Hong, M.D., associate professor of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics. "We were surprised by the fact that the study demonstrated efficacy in every one of the TRK fusion-positive patients."
Encountering information suggesting that it may be tough to find a romantic partner shifts people's decision making toward riskier options, according to new findings from a series of studies published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
"Environmental cues indicating that one will have a relatively difficult time finding a mate can drive people to concentrate their investment choices into a few high-risk, high-return options," says psychological scientist Joshua Ackerman of the University of Michigan, lead author on the research. "This is true even when the decisions people are making are not explicitly relevant to romantic outcomes."
Researchers have characterized the prevalence and risk factors of fatty liver disease in patients who undergo liver transplantation. The findings, which are published in Liver Transplantation, a journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, could have important implications for safeguarding transplant recipients' health.
A computer can probably beat you at chess and no one goes anywhere without a GPS. Transhumanist prophet Ray Kurzweil says we will ascend into being computers in a few years (though he also claims solar power will out-produce fossil fuels in a decade, so use caution when he is selling books) but some think it's the other way around, and that humans will instead be the ultimate supercomputers.
When people take the psychedelic drug LSD, they sometimes feel as though the boundary that separates them from the rest of the world has dissolved. Now, the first functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI) of people's brains while on LSD help to explain this phenomenon known as "ego dissolution."
As researchers report in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on April 13, these images suggest that ego dissolution occurs as regions of the brain involved in higher cognition become heavily over-connected. The findings suggest that studies of LSD and other psychedelic drugs can produce important insights into the brain. They can also provide intriguing biological insight into philosophical questions about the very nature of reality, the researchers say.
