Lifeboat Foundation

Biotin is also known as vitamin H, named for the German words “Haar” and “Haut,” which mean hair and skin. This was due to the fact that even slight deficiencies cause hair thinning, skin rash or brittle fingernails. New research, just published in PNAS, now shows that some forms of severe neurodegeneration, like the frontotemporal dementia seen in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, can directly result from lack of sufficient biotin.

The authors discovered this by looking at fruit flies with dementia. Now, before anyone chuckles, fruit flies actually make a nice model of Alzheimer’s or other diseases when they are given the right genes. Human versions of defective MAPT (tau) genes cause these flies to develop tauopathies that resemble those that occur in our own brains. To delve deeper into the neurotoxicity of tau, they looked at over 7000 fly genes in a forward genetic screen before zeroing in on one significantly modified toxicity of the tauR406W mutant. This gene, Btnd, encodes the biotinidase enzyme that extracts biotin from food sources or recycles it from used enzymes.

Circa 2019

Livescience.com | By LIVESCIENCE

Scientists created miniature brains in the lab that formed intricate networks and produced brain waves similar to those fired by the developing brain of a preterm human baby, according to a new study.

Continue reading “Lab-Made Mini Brains Produce Brain Waves Just Like Those of Preterm Babies” »

https://youtube.com/watchv=efVBUDnD_no&feature=share

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Continue reading “The Mathematics of Consciousness” »

Deep learning has come a long way since the days when it could only recognize handwritten characters on checks and envelopes. Today, deep neural networks have become a key component of many computer vision applications, from photo and video editors to medical software and self-driving cars.

Roughly fashioned after the structure of the brain, neural networks have come closer to seeing the world as humans do. But they still have a long way to go, and they make mistakes in situations where humans would never err.

These situations, generally known as adversarial examples, change the behavior of an AI model in befuddling ways. Adversarial machine learning is one of the greatest challenges of current artificial intelligence systems. They can lead to machine learning models failing in unpredictable ways or becoming vulnerable to cyberattacks.

A scalpel-free alternative to brain surgery has the potential to benefit people with Parkinson’s disease symptoms that are much more severe on one side of the body, new research suggests.

More testing is needed, but the approach, which uses a technology called focused ultrasound, could offer a new option for patients whose symptoms are poorly controlled by medications and those who cannot or do not wish to undergo traditional brain surgery.

“This small brain region, the subthalamic nucleus, had a very strong and potent effect on parkinsonian symptoms when we targeted it with precise, focused ultrasound energy,” said researcher Jeff Elias, MD, a neurosurgeon at UVA Health and a pioneer in the field of focused ultrasound. “The key for the ultimate adoption of this new procedure will be further refinements of the technology to ensure reliability and safety.”

Summary: Using data from RNA sequencing, researchers have identified three molecular subtypes of Alzheimer’s disease.

Source: Mount Sinai Hospital.

Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have identified three major molecular subtypes of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) using data from RNA sequencing. The study advances our understanding of the mechanisms of AD and could pave the way for developing novel, personalized therapeutics.

Has some interesting parts, might interest some.

(not sure how novel)

As human beings age, the functioning of organs gradually deteriorates. While countless past studies have investigated the effects of aging on the human body, brain and on cognition, the neural mechanisms and environmental factors that can accelerate or slow down these effects are not yet fully understood.

Continue reading “Study explores the effects of immune responses on the aging brain” »

“It’s all thanks to the sacrifice of the hawk moth Manduca sexta, which is an extremely sensitive smeller, like other moths. When a moth picks up a scent, like that of a flower or a potential mate, the odors bind to proteins inside the antennae, and these proteins in turn activate neurons dedicated to specific chemicals. That means the antennae are producing electrical signals that researchers can tap into. In order to create a sort of moth-drone cyborg, mechanical engineer Melanie Anderson of the University of Washington cold-anesthetized a hawk moth in a freezer before removing its antennae. Then she cut both ends off of a single antenna and attached each to an itty-bitty wire hooked up to an electrical circuit. “A lot like a heart monitor, which measures the electrical voltage that is produced by the heart when it beats, we measure the electrical signal produced by the antenna when it smells odor,” says Anderson, lead author on a recent paper in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics describing the research. “And very similarly, the antenna will produce these spike-shaped pulses in response to patches of odor.””

Researchers slap a living antenna on a drone to give the machine an insanely keen sense of smell. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the “Smellicopter.”

Summary: People with spinal cord injuries have the same brain activity during processing speed tasks as healthy older adults. The findings suggest the theory of accelerated cognitive aging following SCI is correct.

Source: Kessler Foundation.

A team of rehabilitation researchers has studied processing speed deficits in individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI), comparing their brain activation patterns with those of healthy age-matched controls, and older healthy individuals. They found that the SCI group and older controls had similar activation patterns, but the SCI group differed significantly from their age-matched controls.