Lifeboat Foundation

Like treasured recipes passed down from generation to generation, there are just some regions of DNA that evolution doesn’t dare tweak. Mammals far and wide share a variety of such encoded sequences, for example, which have remained untouched for millions of years.

Humans are a strange exception to this club. For some reason, recipes long preserved by our ancient ancestors were suddenly ‘spiced up’ within a short evolutionary period of time.

Because we’re the only species in which these regions have been rewritten so rapidly, they are called ‘human accelerated regions’ (or HARs). What’s more, scientists think at least some HARs could be behind many of the qualities that set humans apart from their close relatives, like chimpanzees and bonobos.

Graphene is a special material. Among its many talents, it can act as a superconductor, generate a super-rare form of magnetism, and unlock entirely new quantum states.

Now graphene has another amazing credit: it can record levels of magnetoresistance without a need to push the temperature down towards absolute zero.

High magnetoresistance – a material’s ability to change its electrical resistance in response to a magnetic field – is relatively rare, yet materials that can shift their properties in this fashion are useful in computers, cars, and medical equipment.

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Exercise decreases the risk of cancer and reduces side effects of cancer treatments. In addition, it improves patients’ quality of life and the prognosis of cancer patients. This is according to two new Finnish studies.

“It was previously thought that cancer patients should just rest after a cancer diagnosis. Today, we have more and more researched information that exercise can even improve the prognosis of cancer. However, it is not yet fully known how exercise controls cancer,” explains Research Assistant Tiia Koivula.

Previous preclinical studies have found that exercise affects the functioning of the immune system so that more immune cells are transferred to the tumor site and they become more active in destroying cancer cells. Two studies conducted at the Turku PET Center of the University of Turku in Finland aimed to find out whether a short exercise bout affects the mobilization of immune cells in cancer patients.

Pituitary tumors grow in the pituitary gland, the pea-sized structure just behind the eyes at the base of the brain. These tumors are almost always noncancerous, but they can cause problems if they create an overproduction of hormones in the body or grow large enough to press against the brain and optic nerves.

If you have a pituitary tumor, you may be wondering if there are any lifestyle changes you should make, such as your diet. We spoke with our clinical dietitians to learn more about diet and nutrition for people with pituitary tumors.

“A human brain model can simulate an experiment a million times for many different conditions, but the actual human experiment can be performed only once or a few times,” said Viktor Jirsa, a professor at Aix-Marseille University.

Responding to such critiques, the HBP worked to restructure the effort in its early days with new leadership, organization, and goals that were more flexible and attainable. “The HBP got a more versatile, pluralistic approach,” said Viktor Jirsa, a professor at Aix-Marseille University and one of the HBP lead scientists. He believes that these changes fixed at least some of HBP’s issues. “The project has been on a very productive and scientifically fruitful course since then.”

After restructuring, the HBP became a European hub on brain research, with hundreds of scientists joining its growing network. The HBP created projects focused on various brain topics, from consciousness to neurodegenerative diseases. HBP scientists worked on complex subjects, such as mapping out the brain, combining neuroscience and robotics, and experimenting with neuromorphic computing, a computational technique inspired by the human brain structure and function—to name just a few.

We have various ways of seeing what the brain is up to, from low-resolution electrodes that track waves of activity that ripple across the brain, to implanted electrodes that can follow the activity of individual cells. Combined with a detailed knowledge of which regions of the brain are involved in specific processes, we’ve been able to do remarkable things, such as using functional MRI (fMRI) to determine what letter a person was looking at or an implant to control a robotic arm.

But today, researchers announced a new bit of mind reading that’s impressive in its scope. By combining fMRI brain imaging with a system that’s somewhat like the predictive text of cell phones, they’ve worked out the gist of the sentences a person is hearing in near real time. While the system doesn’t get the exact words right and makes a fair number of mistakes, it’s also flexible enough that it can reconstruct an imaginary monologue that goes on entirely within someone’s head.

For Rance and others in the field, fezolinetant’s progress to this point is a sign that research into the causes and effects of menopausal symptoms is finally being taken seriously. In the next few years, the global number of postmenopausal women is expected to surpass one billion. But many women still struggle to access care related to menopause, and research into how best to manage such symptoms has lagged behind. That is slowly changing. Armed with improved animal models and a growing literature on the effects of existing treatments, more researchers are coming into the field to fill that gap.

They increasingly recognize that menopause and the transition to it, a phase labelled perimenopause, could set the stage for brain health in later life, and there are even hints that it could correlate with the risk of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Fezolinetant and similar drugs in the pipeline also represent a shift in thinking: from menopause as a condition of the female reproductive organs, to one that focuses on neurological causes and effects. “We think of menopause as being driven by changes in the ovary,” says Hadine Joffe, who studies mental health and ageing in women at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. “The notion of the brain at the helm of menopause, that is a different concept.”

Virgin hair refers to hair that grows back after chemotherapy and may differ in color, curliness, or texture. Learn how to care for your new style.