Lifeboat Foundation

The single-celled organism behind the infections is usually found in warm bodies of freshwater, including lakes and rivers. Once a person is infected — an exceedingly rare occurrence usually resulting from swimming or diving in infected waters — the amoeba travels from the nose into the brain.

Once there, the organism can kick off a nasty brain condition called primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM). And yep, according to the CDC, PAM is “usually fatal.”

The good news: there have only been 34 infections reported in the US in the last ten years, according to CDC data.

Summary: Researchers have identified a direct cellular interaction between the nervous system and the immune system. Pain sensing neurons around the lymph nodes can modulate lymph node activity.

Source: Broad Institute.

The nervous and immune systems have long been thought to be separate entities in the body, but new research has uncovered a direct cellular interaction between the two. Scientists from Harvard Medical School, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, MIT, and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard have found that pain-sensing neurons surround lymph nodes in mice, and can modulate the activity of these small organs, which are key parts of the immune system.

Summary: YKL-40 may be a key player in circadian rhythm disruptions associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Source: WUSTL

Fractured sleep, daytime sleepiness and other signs of disturbance in one’s circadian rhythm are common complaints of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and the problems only get worse as the disease progresses. But the reason for the link between Alzheimer’s and circadian dysfunction is not well understood.

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People who have meditated for thousands of hours exhibit a remarkable difference in their brainwaves. Psychologist and author Daniel Goleman says we can actually see what happens in the heads of those who have achieved “enlightenment” and the results are unprecedented in science.

Pre-Emptive Defense

All the same, Schroepfer seemed to acknowledge that getting people to actually use the tech might be a hard sell, according to the leaked meeting audio acquired by BuzzFeed News.

“We have to build responsibly to earn trust and the right to continue to grow,” Schroepfer said. “It’s imperative that we get this right so that people around the world get all these amazing technologies… without experiencing the downsides.”

All hail the powerful One climbed my wood structure that went straight up then went to the roof o.o. Also their hands make them like chimps.

How does intelligence ofs compare with other species? That was a topic of heated debate between 1905 and 1915 within the then-nascent field of comparative psychology.

In 1907, psychologist Lawrence W. Cole, who had established a colony ofs at the University of Oklahoma, and Herbert Burnham Davis, a doctoral student at Clark University, each published the results of nearly identical experiments on the processes of learning, association and memory ins. They relied on E.L. Thorndike’s puzzle-box methodology, which involved placing animals in wooden crates from which the animal had to escape by opening the latch or sequence of latches. They observed the number of trials required for successful completion and the extent to which the animal retained the ability to solve the same problem more quickly when confronted again with it. Using this method, they sought what Davis called “a tolerable basis” for ranking the intelligence ofs on the phylogenetic scale of evolutionary development. They independently concluded thats bested the abilities of cats and dogs, most closely approximating the mental attributes of monkeys.

Continue reading “Raccoon intelligence at the borderlands of science” »

Summary: A new method identified a large set of gene regulatory regions in the brain, selected throughout human evolution.

Source: Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.

With only 1% difference, the human and chimpanzee protein-coding genomes are remarkably similar. Understanding the biological features that make us human is part of a fascinating and intensely debated line of research. Researchers at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the University of Lausanne have developed a new approach to pinpoint, for the first time, adaptive human-specific changes in the way genes are regulated in the brain.

Electric cars and trucks may be the hottest topic in e-mobility, but quiet, clean-running electric drives have the ability to revolutionize all kinds of vehicles and machinery. We’ve seen it with the popularization and evolution of ebikes, and electric tech is slowly finding its way into more demanding powersports applications, like electric dirt bikes and snowmobiles. French startup MoonBikes Motors is carving some space between the e-snowmobile and e-dirt bike categories, creating a full-throttle electric snow bike meant to travel lightly and deliver sharp, explosive exhilaration on the snow.

It’s that time of year when experimental all-electric snow machines start rolling out from their high-altitude garages to carve their signatures into the Alpine snow and public consciousness. Last year it was the Austrian-built BobSla snow-kart motoring around its home turf at the Obergurgl-Hochgurgl ski area, and this year it’s the French-crafted MoonBike all-electric snow bike spraying snow in its own corner of the Alps.

Continue reading “Full-throttle electric snow bikes quietly tear up Alpine powder” »

Researchers have identified a cancer-causing mutation in the PDGFRA gene that drives cell mutation and growth when activated. The findings have implications for the treatment of a subset of glioblastoma brain cancer.