Lifeboat Foundation

Motor neurons are vital cells that facilitate muscle contraction and also affect sensation. In diseases like ALS and spinal muscular atrophy, motor cells are plagued with mutations that cause degrees of paralysis and pain in patients. In a study detailed in Cell Stem Cell, scientists developed a mechanism to directly reprogram stem cells into motor neurons.

Cell reprogramming is a novel exploration in medical studies that could treat numerous diseases by growing the body’s own stem cells into healthy cells. The mechanism of reprogramming, however, has just begun to be understood.

The researchers elucidated a new pathway for cell reprogramming by analyzing gene transcription in mice. As established by previous studies, reprogramming is brought about by a series of transcriptions, AKA, how the genes control the expression of other genes.

Continue reading “Reprogramming Stem Cells Could Soon Lead Us to a World Without Paralysis” »

This is the first time you’ll actually want a case of food poisoning.

The microglia are central to aging in the brain and science is already finding ways to reverse it like introducing young microglia to the brain to remove plaques associated with Alzheimers. Brain aging is not a one way process!

The difference between an old brain and a young brain isn’t so much the number of neurons but the presence and function of supporting cells called glia. In Cell Reports on January 10, researchers who examined postmortem brain samples from 480 individuals ranging in age from 16 to 106 found that the state of someone’s glia is so consistent through the years that it can be used to predict someone’s age. The work lays the foundation to better understand glia’s role in late-in-life brain disease.

“We extensively characterized aging-altered gene expression changes across 10 human brain regions and found that, in fact, glial cells experience bigger changes than neurons,” says Jernej Ule, a neurobiologist at the Francis Crick Institute and the University College London, who led the study with departmental colleague Rickie Patani (@PataniLab) and first author Lilach Soreq. “There’s quite a bit of regional information that will be of interest to different people—for example some will notice a very unique pattern of astrocyte-specific changes in the substantia nigra—and we provide a lot of data that still needs to be analyzed.”

Continue reading “Glia, not neurons, are most affected by brain aging” »

Playing God is a common objection to developing technologies to increase human lifespan and yet it is never used in relation to current therapies already available.

Here I’ll point out another of the articles going up at the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation, this time on the topic of the naturalistic fallacy where it occurs in opposition to healthy life extension. Our community would like to build medical therapies that address the causes of aging, thereby ending age-related disease and greatly extending healthy human life spans. It has always surprised me to find that most people, at least initially, object to this goal. It seems perfectly and straightforwardly obvious to me that aging to death, suffering considerably along the way, is just as much a problem to be overcome as any other medical condition that causes pain and mortality. Yet opposition exists, and that opposition is one of the greatest challenges faced when raising funding and pushing forward with research and development of rejuvenation therapies.

When it comes to treating aging as a medical condition the naturalistic fallacy is voiced in this way: aging is natural, what is natural is good, and therefore we shouldn’t tamper with aging. If you look around at your houses, your computers, your modern medicine, and consider that such an objection is perhaps just a little late to the game, and hard to hold in a self-consistent manner, then you’re probably not alone. Notably, the same objection is rarely brought up when it comes to treating specific age-related diseases, or in the matter of therapies that already exist. People who are uncomfortable about radical changes to the course of aging and who speak out against the extension of human life are nonetheless almost all in favor of cancer research, treatments for heart disease, and an end to Alzheimer’s disease. Yet age-related diseases and aging are the same thing, the same forms of damage and dysfunction, only differing by degree and by the names they are given.

Continue reading “Addressing Naturalistic Objections to Extending Healthy Human Life Spans” »

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a new computational model of a neural circuit in the brain, which could shed light on the biological role of inhibitory neurons — neurons that keep other neurons from firing.

The model describes a neural circuit consisting of an array of input neurons and an equivalent number of output neurons. The circuit performs what neuroscientists call a “winner-take-all” operation, in which signals from multiple input neurons induce a signal in just one output neuron.

Using the tools of theoretical computer science, the researchers prove that, within the context of their model, a certain configuration of inhibitory neurons provides the most efficient means of enacting a winner-take-all operation. Because the model makes empirical predictions about the behavior of inhibitory neurons in the brain, it offers a good example of the way in which computational analysis could aid neuroscience.

Cell powerhouses are typically long and lean, but with brain injury such as stroke or trauma, they can quickly become bloated and dysfunctional, say scientists who documented the phenomena in real time for the first time in a living brain.

The scientists also found that without giving these mitochondria anything but time, they often resume their usual healthy shape once blood and oxygen were restored to mild or moderately damaged tissue, said Dr. Sergei Kirov, neuroscientist in the Department of Neurosurgery at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University.

“We believe this is good evidence that mitochondria can recover their normal form following brief periods of ischemia from stroke or trauma and that drugs that enhance their recovery may improve overall recovery from these sorts of brain injuries,” Kirov said.

Continue reading “Brain cell powerhouses appear good treatment target for stroke, TBI recovery” »

Scientists identify the physical connection through which the prefrontal cortex inhibits instinctive behavior

From fighting the urge to hit someone to resisting the temptation to run off stage instead of giving that public speech, we are often confronted with situations where we have to curb our instincts. Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) have traced exactly which neuronal projections prevent social animals like us from acting out such impulses. The study, published in Nature Neuroscience, could have implications for schizophrenia and mood disorders like depression.

Continue reading “Neural connection keeps instincts in check” »

As I stated earlier, another example where we will see a convergence of tech and bio especially as we emerge QC forward and synbio technology such as gene/ cell circuitry. My guess when we mature these fields along with minerals like diamonds/ gem crystalized formation and their use in QC tech, we will began to wonder why we didn’t figure this out sooner.

When Edward Boyden was helping develop a tool to turn neurons on and off with light at Stanford a decade ago, he had a strong feeling it would spread far and wide. Even so, he’s been surprised by how quickly its fame has come.

“What I hadn’t quite anticipated was how fast it would take off,” said Boyden, who now leads the MIT Media Lab’s synthetic neurobiology research group. “It was almost as if the field was ready for the technology.”

Continue reading “Light-activated neurons hold bright promise for brain science” »

Excellent read for the new year.

We’re all familiar with the concept of sports coaching and personal trainers to help people achieve peak fitness, but what about the idea of a mind coach to help you reach your mental potential?

Some people are now turning to mind training to achieve their goals and see doing “inner work” as one important factor of success.

Continue reading “How to train your brain for success” »