Trust Us Online

The adventurous among us have been hunting for the fountain of youth since the dark ages. As it turns out, it just might exist, though not in Bimini or Florida, as we once thought. It exists in our brains. Specifically, the hypothalamus, because it is there, that resides a peculiar signaling pathway — one like no other that we have discovered to date.

This pathway has the power to slow down or speed up the aging process. No foolin’. It’s already been proven to do so in mice. By messing with this pathway’s ability to do its job (which just might be to age you faster than you would without it) researchers have extended the lives of lab mice by 20 percent. And these mice didn’t just live longer. They lived younger. They remained youthful and vibrant longer than a mouse has any warrant to.

From a scientific point of view, it all comes down to the blocking of a particular protein complex named NF-κB (short for “nuclear factor kappa-light-chain-enhancer of activated B cells”). NF-κB, when activated, speeds up aging by blocking the gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH). By injecting the brain with GnRH and simultaneously blocking NF-κB, scientists have effectively struck a two-punch combo against aging and death itself. Even mental aging showed signs of slowing down.

What’s more, this might only be the tip of the iceberg. The team of scientists, based out of Johns Hopkins University, who discovered this scientific “fountain of youth” doesn’t quite yet have a handle on exactly how NF-κB and GnRH do what they do and whether or not this applies to humans. Theoretically, they surmise, further understanding of the process could eventually lead to reversing the cellular aging process, leaving your cells as healthy as they were the day you were born. Now that’s a fountain of youth we can get behind.

A team of neuroscientists announced a pretty cool creation on Wednesday: a completely transparent brain. Using a new technique involving something called hydrogel, the visionary crew turned an entire mouse brain into a rather durable substance that has the consistency of transparent jello. The best part? It still works (for the most part). They call it Clarity.

This is a big deal. The new see-through brains aren’t exactly functional enough to serve as transplants, but the new technique does maintain the brain’s basic biochemistry. That means that scientists can inject it with chemicals with dye attached and watch what happens. In the past, the main way scientists could see what was happening inside of a brain in real time was through the two-dimension MRI images, which has its limitations. The transparent brains offer a third dimension and a sense of perspective that science has never before seen.

View full article »

Scientists are beginning to understand how people tune in to a single voice in a crowded, noisy room.

This ability, known as the “cocktail party effect,” appears to rely on areas of the brain that have completely filtered out unwanted sounds, researchers report in the journalNeuron. So when a person decides to focus on a particular speaker, other speakers “have no representation in those [brain] areas,” says Elana Zion Golumbic of Columbia University.

The ability to extract sense from auditory chaos has puzzled scientists since the 1950s, Golumbic says. “It’s something we do all the time, not only in cocktail parties,” she says. “You’re on the street, you’re in a restaurant, you’re in your office. There are a lot of background sounds all the time, and you constantly need to filter them out and focus on the one thing that’s important to you.”

But until a few years ago, how the brain did this was a mystery. That’s changing, Golumbic says, thanks to new technology that allows scientists to monitor many different areas of the brain as they listen to multiple voices.

View full article »

It is now possible to map the activity of nearly all the neurons in a vertebrate brain at cellular resolution. What does this mean for neuroscience research and projects like the Brain Activity Map proposal?

In an Article that just went live in Nature Methods, Misha Ahrens and Philipp Keller from HHMI’s Janelia Farm Research Campus used high-speed light sheet microscopy to image the activity of 80% of the neurons in the brain of a fish larva at speeds of a whole brain every 1.3 seconds. This represents—to our knowledge—the first technology that achieves whole brain imaging of a vertebrate brain at cellular resolution with speeds that approximate neural activity patterns and behavior.

Interestingly, the paper comes out at a time when much is being discussed and written about mapping brain activity at the cellular level. This is one of the main proposals of the Brain Activity Map—a project that is being discussed at the White House and could be NIH’s next ‘big science’ project for the next 10-15 years.

The details of BAM’s exact goals and a clear roadmap and timeline to achieve them have yet to be presented, but from what its proponents have described in a recent Science paper the main aspiration of the project is to improve our understanding of how whole neuronal circuits work at the cellular level. The project seeks to monitor the activity of whole circuits as well as manipulate them to study their functional role. To reach these goals, first and foremost one must have technology capable of measuring the activity of individual neurons throughout the entire brain in a way that can discriminate individual circuits. The most obvious way to do this is by imaging the activity as it is occurring.

With improvements in the speed and resolution of existing microscopy setups and in the probes for monitoring activity, exhaustive imaging of neuronal function across a small transparent organism was bound to be possible—as this study has now shown.

View full article »

In a breakthrough research, Yale researchers have found a way to turn an old brain young.

The flip of a single molecular switch helps create the mature neuronal connections that allow the brain to bridge the gap between adolescent impressionability and adult stability.

Now, the Yale School of Medicine researchers have reversed the process, recreating a youthful brain that facilitated both learning and healing in the adult mouse.

Scientists have long known that the young and old brains are very different. Adolescent brains are more malleable or plastic, which allows them to learn languages more quickly than adults and speeds recovery from brain injuries.

The comparative rigidity of the adult brain results in part from the function of a single gene that slows the rapid change in synaptic connections between neurons.

By monitoring the synapses in living mice over weeks and months, Yale researchers have identified the key genetic switch for brain maturation.

The Nogo Receptor 1 gene is required to suppress high levels of plasticity in the adolescent brain and create the relatively quiescent levels of plasticity in adulthood. In mice without this gene, juvenile levels of brain plasticity persist throughout adulthood. When researchers blocked the function of this gene in old mice, they reset the old brain to adolescent levels of plasticity.

View full article »