We're bombarded with information at all times, so much that if we had to try and process it all times, we'd be paralyzed. Our cerebellum does information damage control by filtering out what changes. Evolution made it possible for us to conserve energy while still processing anomalies quickly.
DECEMBER 10, 2015 A new epidemiologic study showed that patients with early stage dementia, who had been referred to a specialist, have twice the risk of institutionalization compared to those who are not, according to a research study published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease this month. The research suggested the influence of early specialist referral for dementia patients on institutionalization risk and demonstrated that the benefits of early dementia diagnosis may lead to challenging issues.
SAN DIEGO, CA, Dec. 10, 2015 -- Ghosts are not your typical cell biology research subjects. But scientists at the Carnegie Institution for Science and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) who developed a technique to observe muscle stem/progenitor cells migrating within injury sites in live mice, report that 'ghost fibers,' remnants of the old extracellular matrix left by dying muscle fibers, guide the cells into position for healing to begin.
Pretty much everything happening in the brain would fail without astrocytes. These star-shaped glial cells are known to have a critical role in synapse creation, nervous tissue repair, and the formation of the blood-brain barrier. But while we have decades of data in mice about these nervous system support cells, how relevant those experiments are to human biology (and the success of potential therapies) has been an open question.
Many of the body's processes follow a natural daily rhythm or so-called circadian clock, so there are certain times of the day when a person is most alert, when the heart is most efficient, and when the body prefers sleep. Even bacteria have a circadian clock, and in a December 10 Cell Reports study, researchers designed synthetic microbes to learn what drives this clock and how it might be manipulated.
"The answer seems to be especially simple: the clock proteins sense the metabolic activity in the cell," says senior author Michael Rust, of the University of Chicago's Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology.
ANN ARBOR--One out of every four dollars employers pay for health care is tied to unhealthy lifestyle choices or conditions like smoking, stress and obesity, despite the fact that most large employers have workplace wellness programs.
In the largest study of its kind, researchers from the University of Michigan looked at 10 modifiable health risks in roughly 223,500 people across seven industries, said Michael O'Donnell, first author on the study and director of the
U-M Health Management Research Center at the School of Kinesiology.
Researchers have created a computer model that captures humans' unique ability to learn new concepts from a single example. Though the model is only capable of learning handwritten characters from alphabets, the approach underlying it could be broadened to have applications for other symbol-based systems, like gestures, dance moves, and the words of spoken and signed languages. Recent years have seen steady advances in machine learning, yet people are still far better than machines at learning new concepts, often needing just an example or two compared to the tens or hundreds machines typically require. What's more, after learning a concept for the first time, people can typically use it in rich and diverse ways.
In one of the most comprehensive studies to date to analyze job outcomes for U.S. university graduates with funded doctoral degrees, researchers found that nearly 40% of the doctoral recipients evaluated went into industry, and that these employees were more likely to work at high-wage establishments compared to their counterparts in academia. The study provides unique insights into where research-funded Ph.D.'s go when they graduate and enter the private sector, an area for which there is little existing data but results for which could help illuminate the impact of research on the economy. While the U.S. investment in scientific research can be documented readily, the output is harder to track. To overcome this obstacle, Nikolas Zolas et al.
LSD is known to cause changes in consciousness, including "ego-dissolution", or a loss of the sense of self. Despite a detailed knowledge of the action of LSD at specific serotonin receptors, it has not been understood how this these pharmacological effects can translate into such a profound effect on consciousness Today, a new report presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology in Hollywood, Florida, provides evidence to show that LSD reduces connectivity within brain networks, or the extent to which nerve cells or neurons within a network fire in synchrony. LSD also seems to reduce the extent to which separate brain networks remain distinct in their patterns or synchronization of firing.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- The anti-hormone therapy tamoxifen can reduce breast cancer recurrence by about half in women with hormone-sensitive breast cancer. But it works better in some women than others. Researchers are not sure why.
"We do know that some tumors are inherently resistant to tamoxifen because of tumor genetic changes," says Daniel L. Hertz, Pharm.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor in the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy and member of the U-M Comprehensive Cancer Center.
"These tumor have found pathways to overcome anti-estrogen treatment. But we also believe some patients may be less likely to benefit from tamoxifen or endocrine therapy because of their genetics," Hertz says.
Despite popular perceptions that cheerleading is dangerous, it is relatively safe - but it's not perfect and when injuries do happen they tend to be severe.
A new movie is out this month on NFL concussions, and the doctor who is the subject of the piece says football for anyone under age 18 should be banned - but an upcoming white paper from the American Council on Science and Health notes that a ban may be too heavy-handed. Cheerleading also has a lot of head injuries and concussions are not the top injury in youth football.
Clouds can increase warming in the changing Arctic region more than scientists expected, by delivering an unexpected double-whammy to the climate system, according to a new study by researchers at NOAA, the University of Colorado Boulder and colleagues.
Many strokes that required immediate treatment in emergency rooms may have been preventable, but stroke prevention has not advanced the way therapy for acute stroke has. Stroke prevention has fallen by the wayside as stroke patient outcomes have improved but the close monitoring of blood pressure, cholesterol levels and cardiac conditions remain important, finds a paper in JAMA Neurology.
Using a prevention scale they developed for this study, University of California Irvine neurologist Dr. Mark Fisher and colleagues discovered that 76 percent of acute stroke patients exhibited some degree of stroke preventability, while 26 percent exhibited high preventability.
