Intermittent fasting, and fasting in general, has been a popular fad health gimmick, but the science isn't on its side. Instead, proponents believe mice are little people so if mice weaned on starvation diets lived longer, people would also.
Naturally occurring changes in brain wiring can help patients at high genetic risk of developing bipolar disorder avert the onset of the illness, according to a new study in Translational Psychiatry.
Bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depressive illness, is a brain disorder that causes fluctuations in patients' mood, energy, activity levels and the ability to carry out day-to-day tasks. Bipolar disorder is highly heritable, meaning that people with a parent or sibling with bipolar disorder have a much greater risk of developing the illness, compared with individuals with no family history.
Females don't always think bigger is better when it comes to males. Instead, it is just the opposite, in some instances. Females may be more attracted to small partners because they are less likely to get into fights.
In many species large males have more mating success than small males, either because females find them more attractive or because they can use their brawn to intimidate small rivals. They are also more likely to have more sexual partners and be less committed fathers.
Understanding the cellular building blocks of the brain, including the number and diversity of cell types, is a fundamental step toward understanding brain function. Researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science have created a detailed taxonomy of cells in the mouse visual cortex based on single-cell gene expression, identifying 49 distinct cell types in the largest collection of individual adult cortical neurons characterized by gene expression published to date. The work appears this month online in Nature Neuroscience.
Pasadena, CA -- New work from a team of astronomers led by Carnegie's Jennifer van Saders indicates that one recently developed method for determining a star's age needs to be recalibrated for stars that are older than our Sun. This is due to new information about the way older stars spin, as spin rate is one of the few windows into stellar ages. Their findings, published in Nature, have implications for our own Solar System, as they indicate that our own Sun might be on the cusp of a transition in its magnetic field.
Exposure to small amounts of lead may contribute to ADHD symptoms in children who have a particular gene mutation, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
"This research is valuable to the scientific community as it bridges genetic and environmental factors and helps to illustrate one possible route to ADHD. Further, it demonstrates the potential to ultimately prevent conditions like ADHD by understanding how genes and environmental exposures combine," says lead researcher Joel Nigg, professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the OHSU School of Medicine.
Fire use for brush control is nature's way of keeping the ecosystem thriving but as the 20th century progressed, natural methods gave way to environmental lobbying and legal bullying. California, which led the nation in environmental activism, has seen fire hazards run out of control.
This was no surprise to experts in land management. Dr. Bill Rogers, a Texas A&M AgriLife Research professor in the department of ecosystem science and management in College Station, notes that fire has historically played an important role in achieving land management objectives and further eliminating its use could have detrimental effects.
We age because the cells in our bodies begin to malfunction over the years. This is the general view that scientists hold of the ageing process. For example, in older people the cells' internal quality control breaks down. This control function usually eliminates proteins that have become unstable and lost their normal three-dimensional structure. These deformed proteins accumulate in the cells in a number of diseases, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
BETHESDA, Md., Jan. 8, 2016 -- Thyroid disease affects about 12 percent of the U.S. population. While many people with thyroid disease don't even know they have it, an overactive or underactive thyroid can cause a slew of problems, including weight gain or loss, mood changes and infertility. In children, an underactive thyroid can be fatal, which is why they are tested for a deficiency at birth.
Extreme rain events fueled by the current strong El Nino have started to affect California. NASA estimated rainfall over a period of 7 days while NASA/NOAA's GOES Project created a satellite animation showing the storms affecting the region over the past three days.
An animation NOAA's GOES-West satellite imagery from Jan. 5 through Jan 7 shows the progression of storm systems in the Eastern Pacific Ocean that hit southern California and generated flooding and mudslides. The animation was created at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The mass of the Higgs boson reported at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012, 125 GeV, looked lighter than the expected energy scale, about 1 TeV, say researchers at Aalto University in Finland, who now propose that there is more than one Higgs boson, and they are much heavier than the consensus. New CERN experiments at 0.75 TeV suggested evidence of a second Higgs in that region and some scrambled to embrace it. Dr. Tommaso Dorigo of Science 2.0 dismissed it as a spurious 750 GeV signal observed by ATLAS and CMS in their mass spectra of photon pairs, no different than other spurious signals that ATLAS and CMS have seen in the past.
There are certain universal patterns in nature that hold true, regardless of objects' size, species, or surroundings. Take, for instance, the branching fractals seen in both tree limbs and blood vessels, or the surprisingly similar spirals in mollusks and cabbage.
Now scientists at MIT and Cambridge University have identified an unexpected shared pattern in the collective movement of bacteria and electrons: As billions of bacteria stream through a microfluidic lattice, they synchronize and swim in patterns similar to those of electrons orbiting around atomic nuclei in a magnetic material.
While there is general consensus that the ability to imagine a never-before-seen object or concept is a unique and distinctive human trait, there is little that we know about the neurological mechanism behind it. Neuroscientist Dr. Andrey Vyshedskiy proposes a straightforward experiment that could test whether the ability to imagine a novel object involves the synchronization of groups of neurons, known as neuronal ensembles. Since the process involves mentally combining familiar images, scenes or concepts, Dr. Vyshedskiy proposes calling this process 'mental synthesis.' His research idea is published in the open-access Research Idea and Outcomes (RIO) Journal.
