#Brain Research

Researchers from The Australian National University (ANU), in collaboration with The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, have developed a new type of hydrogel that could radically transform how we treat Parkinson's disease. The gel also offers hope for patients who have suffered from other neurological conditions such as...

Are your older patients finding it more difficult to concentrate or focus on daily work tasks and maintain their cognitive level?. If so, odds are good that they are feeling the effects of long-term stress and isolation as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This is even more frustrating if they are already showing cognitive level decline with either dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.

When it comes to type 2 diabetes, we tend to think we know all there is to know and are resigned to lifelong insulin injections. But its causes are not uniform throughout the world. For instance, in Asians a decrease in insulin production by pancreatic islet cells is central, while in Europeans the impaired ability of circulating insulin to regulate glucose levels is critical in the development of type 2 diabetes.

The human brain holds the secret to our unique personalities. But did you know that it can also form the basis of highly efficient computing devices? Researchers from Nagoya University, Japan, recently showed how to do this, through graphene-diamond junctions that mimic some of the human brain's functions. But, why...

Researchers at the University of Oxford have now uncovered a new target for sleep investigations within the mammalian brain—the cerebral cortex. The paper was published today in Nature Neuroscience. The cerebral cortex makes up about 80% of the brain's volume and is responsible for many complex phenomena, including perception, thought,...

Many folks over this past year experienced the loss of their senses of smell during the Covid pandemic. Anosmia, as it’s called in medical speak, is when foreign invaders mess with the parts in your brain that are responsible for your ability to detect scents. But anosmia might not just come about when you’ve got a respiratory infection. In fact, it may be an early sign of dementia.

Brains have evolved to do more with less. Take a tiny insect brain, which has less than a million neurons but shows a diversity of behaviors and is more energy-efficient than current AI systems. These tiny brains serve as models for computing systems that are becoming more sophisticated as billions of silicon neurons can be implemented on hardware.

Brewing a pot of coffee or going out to grab a cold brew can feel like an important step in a morning routine that often fuels productivity throughout the rest of the day. And for good reason: Research has shown that caffeine is linked to increased alertness, focus and concentration while also improving energy levels and mood.

A less invasive optogenetic device takes researchers a step closer to new treatments for chronic pain, depression, epilepsy, and more. Everything that happens in the brain is a result of neurons sending and receiving signals in complex networks that are not completely understood by scientists. These networks are what allow us to pick up a cup of coffee, laugh at a joke, or stand up from a chair.

Kiwi trans weightlifter Laurel Hubbard has made history competing in an individual event at the Tokyo Olympics. That was Monday. This is Tuesday. Welcome to the rest of your week. I’m Claire Cameron, managing editor of Inverse. Our top story today details what may be a landmark challenge to the...

What do language, music and art have in common? These defining aspects of human intelligence are all the result of the faculty to 'abstract' – the unique ability of the human mind to organize information beyond the immediate sensory reality. As we constantly face billions of bits of information streaming in from our senses, our brain must recast this maelstrom into simpler structures. How does the brain do so? Research in artificial intelligence suggests that even the best of our current algorithms struggle to handle the complexity of everyday, real-life problems.

When neurons communicate with each another, they transmit—or "fire"—small electrical impulses called action potentials or spikes. These action potentials are the fundamental units of information processing in the brain. Today, neuronal activity is often measured by calcium imaging, which uses advanced microscopy to detect changes in the fluorescence of a calcium indicator inside neurons. This approach has become very popular because it can detect neuronal activity simultaneously in many neurons in the intact brain. However, rather than detecting the action potentials directly, it is an indirect measure of neuronal activity: The fluorescence signals depend on calcium influx through calcium channels in the cell membrane, which are activated by action potentials. Individual action potentials cause a transient increase and subsequent decrease in intracellular calcium concentration that is much slower than the action potential itself. The calcium signal measured by microscopy is therefore a slow, distorted and noisy "shadow" of the real electrical activity of a neuron. It is thus desired to reconstruct the true fluctuations in action potential firing rate from the measured calcium signals, which is no trivial task.

Circadian rhythms have natural relative variations among humans known as chronotype. Chronotype or being a morning or evening person, has a specific physiological, behavioural, and also genetic manifestation. Whether and how chronotype modulates human brain physiology and cognition is, however, not well understood. Here we examine how cortical excitability, neuroplasticity, and cognition are associated with chronotype in early and late chronotype individuals. We monitor motor cortical excitability, brain stimulation-induced neuroplasticity, and examine motor learning and cognitive functions at circadian-preferred and non-preferred times of day in 32 individuals. Motor learning and cognitive performance (working memory, and attention) along with their electrophysiological components are significantly enhanced at the circadian-preferred, compared to the non-preferred time. This outperformance is associated with enhanced cortical excitability (prominent cortical facilitation, diminished cortical inhibition), and long-term potentiation/depression-like plasticity. Our data show convergent findings of how chronotype can modulate human brain functions from basic physiological mechanisms to behaviour and higher-order cognition.

Brain structure improves with time spent outdoors, regardless of sun exposure, activity, or other factors, new research suggests. The researchers believe fresh air could be behind the brain-building benefits, which is another reason to sneak in a weekday run and to take your runs outside when you can. As runners,...

Summary: An experimental small molecule helped restore the removal of mitochondria from dopamine-producing neurons in the brain. The findings may help in the development of new therapies for Parkinson’s disease. Source: Life. Treating mice that have a Parkinson’s disease-causing mutation with a small molecule compound restores the removal of damaged...

Senescent cells are capable of expressing a myriad of inflammatory cytokines and this pro-inflammatory phenomenon is known as senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP). The contribution of this phenomenon in brain ischemia was scarce. A mouse model of transient focal cerebral ischemia by compressing the distal middle cerebral artery (tMCAo) for 60 min was used. SASP, pro-inflammatory cytokines and cell cycle mRNAs levels were quantified at 30-min and 72 h post-surgery. Immunohistochemistry in paraffin embedded human brain slides and mouse brain tissue was performed. Our results showed an increase of both p16 and p21 mRNA restricted to the infarct area in the tMCAo brain. Moreover, there was an induction of Il6, Tnfa, Cxc11, and its receptor Cxcr2 mRNA pro-inflammatory cytokines with a high positive correlation with p16/p21 mRNA levels. The p16 was mainly shown in cytoplasm of neurons and cytoplasm/membrane of microglial cells. The p21 was observed in membrane of neurons and also it showed a mixed cytoplasmic and membranous pattern in the microglial cells. In a human stroke patient, an increase of P16 in the perimeter of the MCA infarct area was observed. These suggest a role of SASP in tMCAo mouse model and in human brain tissue. SASP potentially has a physiological role in acute ischemic stroke and neurological function loss.

Researchers report that infantile spasms, a rare but serious seizure disorder in babies, appear to be the result of a molecular pathway gone awry. In their study of a mouse model of the disorder, the researchers discovered that genetic mutations associated with the disease impair a pathway that is involved in building new synapses in the hippocampus, a brain region essential to learning and memory.

Do you have a brain for math? New research indicates levels of two key neurotransmitters can predict mathematics ability, suggesting brain chemistry may be playing a role in those who find math easy. The new study, published in the journal PLOS Biology, recruited 255 subjects spanning six-year olds in primary...