Lifeboat Foundation

Humans and animals detect different stimuli such as light, sound, and odor through nerve cells, which then transmit the information to the brain. Nerve cells must be able to adjust to the wide range of stimuli they receive, which can range from very weak to very strong. To do this, they may become more or less sensitive to stimuli (sensitization and habituation), or they may become more sensitive to weaker stimuli and less sensitive to stronger stimuli for better overall responsiveness (gain control). However, the exact way this happens is not yet understood.

To better understand the process of gain control, a research team led by Professor Kimura at Nagoya City University in Japan studied the roundworm C. elegans. They found that, when the worm first smells an unpleasant odor, its nerve cells exhibit a large, quickly increasing, and continuous response to both weak and strong stimuli. However, after exposure to the odor, the response is smaller and slower to weak stimuli but remains large to strong stimuli, similar to the response to the first exposure to the odor. Because the experience of odor exposure causes more efficient movement of worms away from the odor, the nerve cells have changed their response to better adapt to the stimulus using gain control.

Then the researchers used mathematical modeling to understand this process. Mathematical modeling is a powerful tool that can be used to better understand complex biological processes. They found that the “response to first smell” consists of fast and slow components, while the “response after exposure” only consists of the slow component, meaning that the odor experience inhibits the fast component to achieve gain control. They further found that both responses could be described by a simple differential equation and that the slow and fast components correspond to the leaky integration of a first and second derivative term of the odor concentration that the worm senses, respectively. The results of this study showed that the prior odor experience only appears to inhibit the mechanism required for the fast component.

A team of biology researchers from Universität der Bundeswehr, Technische Universität München and the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, has found that people exhale more aerosols when engaging in endurance exercise than they do when engaging in resistance exercise. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As the global pandemic has progressed, scientists across the globe have studied various aspects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus spread. One such area of study has been comparison of types of activities that are more or less conducive to transmission of the virus.

In this new study, the researchers looked at exercise options and their related risk. Going to gyms to exercise is a popular way to keep in shape. But doing so can put people at risk from both airborne and surface viral and bacterial infections.

Hey folks, I’m excited to share a new essay with y’all on my proposed route towards nanoscale human brain connectomics. I suggest that synchrotron ‘expansion x-ray microscopy’ has the potential to enable anatomical imaging of the entire human brain with sub-100 nm voxel size and high contrast in around 1 year for a price of roughly $10M. I plan to continue improving this essay over time as I acquire more detailed information and perform more calculations.

For a brief history of this concept: I started exploring this idea during undergrad (working with a laboratory-scale x-ray microscope), but was cut short by the pandemic. Now, I’m working on a PhD in biomedical engineering centered on gene therapy and synthetic biology, but I have retained a strong interest in connectomics. I recently began communication with some excellent collaborators who might be able to help move this technology forward. Hoping for some exciting progress!

By Logan Thrasher Collins.

Continue reading “Feasibility of mapping the human brain with expansion x-ray microscopy” »

An organic artificial spiking neuron based on nonlinear ionoelectronic phenomena is reported that is sensitive to ionic and biomolecular species common in neuronal signalling. The neuron realistically emulates the function and firing properties of biological neurons and enables biohybrid interfaces made of artificial and biological components that function in real time.

An increase in transcriptional noise generally assumed to characterize aged cells and tissues is shown to derive instead from technical and biological issues that underlie single-cell RNA sequencing experiments.

Researchers took a closer look at the molecular structure of tinder fingus, a bell-shaped fungus that grows on trees — and they’ve found “ingeniously lightweight biological designs.”

When forming an image of an object, such as a photograph taken by a cell phone, light that has interacted with the object and either passed through or bounced off it is captured by the detector in the phone.

Some 25 years ago, scientists devised another, less direct way to do this. In the conventional form, information gathered from two detectors are instead used, by combining information from one capturing the light that has interacted with the object and one that has not interacted with the object at all. It is the light that has never interacted with the object that is used to obtain the image, though, resulting the technique taking on the name “ghost imaging.”

When entangled light is used, the quantum properties can be exploited to do this at very low light levels which can be a large advantage when looking at light-sensitive samples in biological imaging where too much light can damage or change the sample and thus destroying what one wishes to look at—this being quite a conundrum in the field.

The European mole, equipped with its formidable digging shovels, can effortlessly tunnel through the earth. The same holds true for the Australian marsupial mole. Despite residing in vastly different regions, the two species.

A species is a group of living organisms that share a set of common characteristics and are able to breed and produce fertile offspring. The concept of a species is important in biology as it is used to classify and organize the diversity of life. There are different ways to define a species, but the most widely accepted one is the biological species concept, which defines a species as a group of organisms that can interbreed and produce viable offspring in nature. This definition is widely used in evolutionary biology and ecology to identify and classify living organisms.

The fungal pathogen that wipes out much of humanity in HBO’s latest series The Last of Us is real, but can the cordyceps fungus actually turn humans into zombies one day?

“It’s highly unlikely because these are organisms that have become really well adapted to infecting ants,” Rebecca Shapiro, assistant professor at University of Guelph’s department of molecular and cellular biology, told Craig Norris, host of CBC Kitchener-Waterloo’s The Morning Edition.

In the television series, the fungus infects the brain of humans and turns them into zombies. In real life, it can only infect ants and other insects in this manner.