Find any two people with a diagnosis of depression, and there’s more than a fair chance one of them will also experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their life.
While the triggers for each condition are undoubtedly complex, it’s clear the genes we inherit can play a strong part in setting us up for a lifetime of bad mental health.
A new study led by researchers from the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia has now identified 509 genes shared by both psychiatric disorders.
Some populations of neurons simultaneously process sensations and memories. New work shows how the brain rotates those representations to prevent interference.
Sleepy head: Fruit flies with a gene mutation in the gene ISWI have poorly formed sleep circuits in their brains.
A gene that is poorly expressed in people with certain neurodevelopmental conditions is also essential for sleep, according to a new study in fruit flies.
A new generation of miniature recording probes can track the same neurons inside tiny mouse brains over weeks—and even months.
The new tools build on the success of the original Neuropixels probes released in 2017 and currently used in more than 400 labs. Neuropixels 2.0 are much smaller—about a third the size of their predecessors. They’re designed to record the electrical activity from more individual neurons and have the unique ability to track this activity over extended time periods. That makes them especially useful for studying long-term phenomena like learning and memory in small animals such as mice, says Tim Harris, a senior fellow at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus who led the project. Harris and his colleagues describe the advance in a paper published online April 15 in the journal Science.
Neuropixels 2.0’s advances come from several key innovations, Harris says. Janelia scientists and engineers developed new ways to process the data. Strategic changes to the layout of the probes helped make them better suited to certain tasks. And engineers at imec, the non-profit nanoelectronics center that manufactures the probes, used imec’s proprietary technology to design, develop, and fabricate the probe.
Elisabeth Schirmer, Stefan Schuster and Peter Machnik investigated the effects of bisphenols A and S on neuronal functioning. Using in vivo recordings in goldfish they demonstrate that basic neuronal properties such as action potentials and synaptic transmission are perturbed after chronic exposure to bisphenols.
Recent work has shown that human auditory cortex contains neural populations anterior and posterior to primary auditory cortex that respond selectively to music. However, it is unknown how this selectivity for music arises. To test whether musical training is necessary, we measured fMRI responses to 192 natural sounds in 10 people with almost no musical training. When voxel responses were decomposed into underlying components, this group exhibited a music-selective component that was very similar in response profile and anatomical distribution to that previously seen in individuals with moderate musical training. We also found that musical genres that were less familiar to our participants (e.g., Balinese gamelan) produced strong responses within the music component, as did drum clips with rhythm but little melody, suggesting that these neural populations are broadly responsive to music as a whole. Our findings demonstrate that the signature properties of neural music selectivity do not require musical training to develop, showing that the music-selective neural populations are a fundamental and widespread property of the human brain.
A multivariate genome-wide association study highlighting loci that influence both face and brain shape suggesting shared developmental axes during early embryogenesis. These loci did not overlap with those governing behavioral–cognitive traits or neuropsychiatric risk indicating divergence between early brain development and cognitive function.
Now THAT mechanism could be a game changer for functional, fully reversible cryonic suspension…
Indian jumping ants can shrink their brains by 20 per cent and then expand them back again to allow energy to be temporarily diverted towards egg production, according to a new study.
The inch-long arthropods were already known to be able to catch and kill prey twice their size, jump four inches in the air and compete in 40-day royal rumble death matches to decide the next queen of the colony.
Now new research shows that females prepare their bodies to lay eggs by releasing hormones that make their brains shrink by around 20 percent and cause their ovaries to balloon to five times their normal size.
In 2003, Lyon was just finishing school and working as a hired hacker. Companies tasked him with rooting out vulnerabilities in their systems, and he’d developed mapping tools for the job. His electronic sniffers would trace a network’s lines and nodes and report back what they found. Why not set them loose on the mother of all networks, he thought? So he did.
The resulting visualization recalled grand natural patterns, like networks of neurons or the large-scale structure of the universe. But it was at once more mundane and mind-boggling—representing, as it did, both a collection of mostly standard laptop and desktop computers connected to servers in run-of-the-mill office parks and an emerging technological force that was far more than the sum of it parts.
In 2010, Lyon updated his map using a new method. Instead of the traceroutes he used in 2003, which aren’t always accurate, he turned to a more precise mapping tool using route tables generated by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the internet’s main system for efficiently routing information. And now, he’s back with a new map based on BGP routes from the University of Oregon’s Route Views project. Only this time the map moves: It’s a roughly 25-year time-lapse of the internet’s explosive growth.
After a year of lockdown, many of us are finding it hard to think clearly, or remember what happened when. Neuroscientists and behavioural experts explain why.
