Brain networks come 'online' during adolescence to prepare teenagers for adult life

Neurons illustration (stock image).

New brain networks come 'online' during adolescence, allowing teenagers to develop more complex adult social skills, but potentially putting them at increased risk of mental illness, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Adolescence is a time of major change in life, with increasing social and cognitive skills and independence, but also increased risk of mental illness. While it is clear that these changes in the mind must reflect developmental changes in the brain, it has been unclear how exactly the function of the human brain matures as people grow up from children to young adults.

A team based in the University of Cambridge and University College London has published a major new research study that helps us understand more clearly the development of the adolescent brain.

The study collected functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data on brain activity from 298 healthy young people, aged 14-25 years, each scanned on one to three occasions about 6 to 12 months apart. In each scanning session, the participants lay quietly in the scanner so that the researchers could analyse the pattern of connections between different brain regions while the brain was in a resting state.

The team discovered that the functional connectivity of the human brain -- in other words, how different regions of the brain 'talk' to each other -- changes in two main ways during adolescence.

The brain regions that are important for vision, movement, and other basic faculties were strongly connected at the age of 14 and became even more strongly connected by the age of 25. This was called a 'conservative' pattern of change, as areas of the brain that were rich in connections at the start of adolescence become even richer during the transition to adulthood.

However, the brain regions that are important for more advanced social skills, such as being able to imagine how someone else is thinking or feeling (so-called theory of mind), showed a very different pattern of change. In these regions, connections were redistributed over the course of adolescence: connections that were initially weak became stronger, and connections that were initially strong became weaker. This was called a 'disruptive' pattern of change, as areas that were poor in their connections became richer, and areas that were rich became poorer.

By comparing the fMRI results to other data on the brain, the researchers found that the network of regions that showed the disruptive pattern of change during adolescence had high levels of metabolic activity typically associated with active re-modelling of connections between nerve cells.

Dr Petra Vértes, joint senior author of the paper and a Fellow of the mental health research charity MQ, said: "From the results of these brain scans, it appears that the acquisition of new, more adult skills during adolescence depends on the active, disruptive formation of new connections between brain regions, bringing new brain networks 'online' for the first time to deliver advanced social and other skills as people grow older."

Professor Ed Bullmore, joint senior author of the paper and head of the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge, said: "We know that depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders often occur for the first time in adolescence -- but we don't know why. These results show us that active re-modelling of brain networks is ongoing during the teenage years and deeper understanding of brain development could lead to deeper understanding of the causes of mental illness in young people."

Measuring functional connectivity in the brain presents particular challenges, as Dr František Váša, who led the study as a Gates Cambridge Trust PhD Scholar, and is now at King's College London, explained.

"Studying brain functional connectivity with fMRI is tricky as even the slightest head movement can corrupt the data -- this is especially problematic when studying adolescent development as younger people find it harder to keep still during the scan," he said. "Here, we used three different approaches for removing signatures of head movement from the data, and obtained consistent results, which made us confident that our conclusions are not related to head movement, but to developmental changes in the adolescent brain."

The study was supported by the Wellcome Trust.

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Materials provided by University of Cambridge. The original story is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Animal life thriving around Fukushima

Fukushima, Japan map (stock image).

Nearly a decade after the nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, researchers from the University of Georgia have found that wildlife populations are abundant in areas void of human life.

The camera study, published in the Journal of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, reports that over 267,000 wildlife photos recorded more than 20 species, including wild boar, Japanese hare, macaques, pheasant, fox and the raccoon dog -- a relative of the fox -- in various areas of the landscape.

UGA wildlife biologist James Beasley said speculation and questions have come from both the scientific community and the general public about the status of wildlife years after a nuclear accident like those in Chernobyl and Fukushima.

This recent study, in addition to the team's research in Chernobyl, provides answers to the questions.

"Our results represent the first evidence that numerous species of wildlife are now abundant throughout the Fukushima Evacuation Zone, despite the presence of radiological contamination," said Beasley, associate professor at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory and the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources.

Species that are often in conflict with humans, particularly wild boar, were predominantly captured on camera in human-evacuated areas or zones, according to Beasley.

"This suggests these species have increased in abundance following the evacuation of people."

The team, which included Thomas Hinton, professor at the Institute of Environmental Radioactivity at Fukushima University, identified three zones for the research.

Photographic data was gathered from 106 camera sites from three zones: humans excluded due to the highest level of contamination; humans restricted due to an intermediate level of contamination; and humans inhabited, an area where people have been allowed to remain due to "background" or very low levels of radiation found in the environment.

The researchers based their designations on zones previously established by the Japanese government after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident.

For 120 days, cameras captured over 46,000 images of wild boar. Over 26,000 of those images were taken in the uninhabited area, compared to approximately 13,000 in the restricted and 7,000 in the inhabited zones.

Other species seen in higher numbers in the uninhabited or restricted zones included raccoons, Japanese marten and Japanese macaque or monkeys.

Anticipating questions about physiological condition of the wildlife, Hinton said their results are not an assessment of an animal's health.

"This research makes an important contribution because it examines radiological impacts to populations of wildlife, whereas most previous studies have looked for effects to individual animals," said Hinton.

The uninhabited zone served as the control zone for the research.

The scientists said although there is no previous data on wildlife populations in the evacuated areas, the close proximity and similar landscape of the human-inhabited zone made the area the ideal control for the study.

The team evaluated the impact of other variables: distance to road, time of activity as captured by the cameras' date-time stamps, vegetation type and elevation.

"The terrain varies from mountainous to coastal habitats, and we know these habitats support different types of species. To account for these factors, we incorporated habitat and landscape attributes such as elevation into our analysis," Beasley said.

"Based on these analyses, our results show that level of human activity, elevation and habitat type were the primary factors influencing the abundance of the species evaluated, rather than radiation levels."

The study's results indicate the activity pattern of most species aligned with their well-known history or behavior patterns. Raccoons, who are nocturnal, were more active during the night, while pheasants, which are diurnal animals, were more active during the day. However, wild boar inside the uninhabited area were more active during the day than boar in human-inhabited areas, suggesting they may be modifying their behavior in the absence of humans.

One exception to these patterns was the Japanese serow, a goat-like mammal. Normally far-removed from humans, they were most frequently seen on the camera footage in rural human-inhabited upland areas. The researchers suggest this might be a behavioral adjustment to avoid the rapidly growing boar population in the evacuated zone.

The free-roaming menagerie in Fukushima also included the red fox, masked palm civet, weasel, sika deer and black bear. The full list of wildlife captured on camera and additional details on the study can be found at: esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fee.2149

Additional authors on this study include Phillip Lyons, University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, Aiken, South Carolina, and UGA's Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, Athens, Georgia; Kei Okuda and Thomas Hinton, Institute of Environmental Radioactivity, Fukushima University, Fukushima, Japan; and Mathew Hamilton, SREL, Aiken, South Carolina.

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Materials provided by University of Georgia. Original written by Vicky L. Sutton-Jackson. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

How the solar system got its 'Great Divide,' and why it matters for life on Earth

Illustration of inner solar system (stock image).

Scientists, including those from the University of Colorado Boulder, have finally scaled the solar system's equivalent of the Rocky Mountain range.

In a study published today in Nature Astronomy, researchers from the United States and Japan unveil the possible origins of our cosmic neighborhood's "Great Divide." This well-known schism may have separated the solar system just after the sun first formed.

The phenomenon is a bit like how the Rocky Mountains divide North America into east and west. On the one side are "terrestrial" planet, such as Earth and Mars. They are made up of fundamentally different types of materials than the more distant "jovians," such as Jupiter and Saturn.

"The question is: How do you create this compositional dichotomy?" said lead author Ramon Brasser, a researcher at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan. "How do you ensure that material from the inner and outer solar system didn't mix from very early on in its history?"

Brasser and coauthor Stephen Mojzsis, a professor in CU Boulder's Department of Geological Sciences, think they have the answer, and it may just shed new light on how life originated on Earth.

A sun disk holds vital clues

The duo suggests that the early solar system was partitioned into at least two regions by a ring-like structure that formed a disk around the young sun. This disk might have held major implications for the evolution of planets and asteroids, and even the history of life on Earth.

"The most likely explanation for that compositional difference is that it emerged from an intrinsic structure of this disk of gas and dust," Mojzsis said.

Mojzsis noted that the Great Divide, a term that he and Brasser coined, does not look like much today. It is a relatively empty stretch of space that sits near Jupiter, just beyond what astronomers call the asteroid belt.

But you can still detect its presence throughout the solar system. Move sunward from that line, and most planets and asteroids tend to carry relatively low abundances of organic molecules. Go the other direction toward Jupiter and beyond, however, and a different picture emerges: Almost everything in this distant part of the solar system is made up of materials that are rich in carbon.

This dichotomy "was really a surprise when it was first found," Mojzsis said.

Many scientists assumed that Jupiter was the agent responsible for that surprise. The thinking went that the planet is so massive that it may have acted as a gravitational barrier, preventing pebbles and dust from the outer solar system from spiraling toward the sun.

But Mojzsis and Brasser were not convinced. The scientists used a series of computer simulations to explore Jupiter's role in the evolving solar system. They found that while Jupiter is big, it was probably never big enough early in its formation to entirely block the flow of rocky material from moving sunward.

"We banged our head against the wall," Brasser said. "If Jupiter wasn't the agent responsible for creating and maintaining that compositional dichotomy, what else could be?"

A solution in plain sight

For years, scientists operating an observatory in Chile called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) had noticed something unusual around distant stars: Young stellar systems were often surrounded by disks of gas and dust that, in infrared light, looked a bit like a tiger's eye.

If a similar ring existed in our own solar system billions of years ago, Brasser and Mojzsis reasoned, it could theoretically be responsible for the Great Divide.

That's because such a ring would create alternating bands of high- and low-pressure gas and dust. Those bands, in turn, might pull the solar system's earliest building blocks into several distinct sinks -- one that would have given rise to Jupiter and Saturn, and another Earth and Mars.

In the mountains, "the Great Divide causes water to drain one way or another," Mojzsis said. "It's similar to how this pressure bump would have divided material" in the solar system.

But, he added, there's a caveat: That barrier in space likely was not perfect. Some outer solar system material may still have climbed across the divide. And those fugitives could have been important for the evolution of our own world.

"Those materials that might go to the Earth would be those volatile, carbon-rich materials," Mojzsis said. "And that gives you water. It gives you organics."

The rest is Earth history.

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Materials provided by University of Colorado at Boulder. Original written by Daniel Strain. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Life Giving Black Holes

Those hungry, all devouring black holes may in fact be much more generous than we have been led to believe.

Black holes are often given bad press. This, however, is not indicative to their true nature, which is in fact quite stable. A team of scientists are now looking to do away with all the bad press and have proposed that black holes are in fact life givers.

Traditionally when thinking about life in the universe – other than our own – we look to stars and something known as the Goldilocks zone. Like its namesake, the Goldilocks zone is not too hot and not too cold – it’s just right. That is, the temperature is just right for liquid water and thus life to exist. Albeit, these assumptions about what is just right for life to exist are just that –assumptions – based on what we know as life.

It is now known that the central nuclei of galaxies are home to a super massive black hole. The gas surrounding the central black hole is thus very luminous and, in some cases, can be more luminous than the rest of the galactic light. Such luminous galactic nuclei are known as Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). As well as being luminous, they are known for emitting at the high energy range, creating so-called ‘dead zones’ of radiation.

Three Harvard scientists – Manasvi Lingam, Idan Ginsburg and Shmuel Bialy – wanted to investigate just how detrimental this radiation is. Modelling the effects of the AGN’s radiative field, they were able to compute a galactic Goldilocks zone around the central black hole. Like the traditional Goldilocks zone around stars, any planets in this zone would be conducive to life. In fact, they found that not only would the planet’s atmosphere be unscathed, but as well the radiation would mediate prebiotic synthesis of biomolecular building blocks.

RSF in perspective

From a unified science perspective, where matter emerges from the granular Planck scale structure of space time, this same ‘black hole’ dynamic exists in stars. So, the idea that a black hole should also be conducive to life comes as no surprise. This new research into black holes as life givers will hopefully lead to new insights and a better understanding of the key processes involved in galactic evolution, planetary and solar system formation, and indeed life.

Article: https://www.sciencealert.com/radiation-from-black-holes-may-create-life-harvard-study-suggests

Some stress in early life extends lifespan, research in roundworms shows

Caenorhabditis elegans 

Some stress at a young age could actually lead to a longer life, new research shows.

University of Michigan researchers have discovered that oxidative stress experienced early in life increases subsequent stress resistance later in life.

Oxidative stress happens when cells produce more oxidants and free radicals than they can deal with. It's part of the aging process, but can also arise from stressful conditions such as exercise and calorie restriction.

Examining a type of roundworm called Caenorhabditis elegans, U-M scientists Ursula Jakob and Daphne Bazopoulou found that worms that produced more oxidants during development lived longer than worms that produced fewer oxidants. Their results are published in the journal Nature.

Researchers have long wondered what determines variability in lifespan, says Jakob, a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology. One part of that is genetics: If your parents are long-lived, you have a good chance for living longer as well. Environment is another part.

That other stochastic -- or random -- factors might be involved becomes clear in the case of C. elegans. These short-lived organisms are a popular model system among aging researchers in part because every hermaphroditic mother produces hundreds of genetically identical offspring. However, even if kept in the same environment, the lifespan of these offspring varies to a surprising extent, Jakob says.

"If lifespan was determined solely by genes and environment, we would expect that genetically identical worms grown on the same petri dish would all drop dead at about the same time, but this is not at all what happens. Some worms live only three days while others are still happily moving around after 20 days," Jakob said. "The question then is, what is it, apart from genetics and environment, that is causing this big difference in lifespan?"

Jakob and Bazopoulou, a postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the paper, found one part of the answer when they discovered that during development, C. elegans worms varied substantially in the amount of reactive oxygen species they produce.

Reactive oxygen species, or ROS, are oxidants that every air-breathing organism produces. ROS are closely associated with aging: the oxidative damage they elicit are what many anti-aging creams claim to combat. Bazopoulou and Jakob discovered that instead of having a shorter lifespan, worms that produced more ROS during development actually lived longer.

"Experiencing stress at this early point in life may make you better able to fight stress you might encounter later in life," Bazopoulou said.

When the researchers exposed the whole population of juvenile worms to external ROS during development, the average lifespan of the entire population increased. Though the researchers don't know yet what triggers the oxidative stress event during development, they were able to determine what processes enhanced the lifespan of these worms.

To do this, Bazopoulou sorted thousands of C. elegans larvae according to the oxidative stress levels they have during development. By separating worms that produced large amounts of ROS from those that produced little amounts of ROS, she showed that the main difference between the two groups was a histone modifier, whose activity is sensitive to oxidative stress conditions.

The researchers found that the temporary production of ROS during development caused changes in the histone modifier early in the worm's life. How these changes persist throughout life and how they ultimately affect and extend lifespan is still unknown. What is known, however, is that this specific histone modifier is also sensitive to oxidative stress sensitive in mammalian cells. Additionally, early-life interventions have been shown to extend lifespans in mammalian model systems such as mice.

"The general idea that early life events have such profound, positive effects later in life is truly fascinating. Given the strong connection between stress, aging and age-related diseases, it is possible that early events in life might also affect the predisposition for age-associated diseases, such as dementia and Alzheimer's disease," Jakob said.

Next, the researchers want to figure out what key changes are triggered by these early-life events. Understanding this might allow scientists to develop lifespan-extending interventions that work at later stages in life.

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Materials provided by University of Michigan. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Genetic discovery holds implications for better immunity, longer life

Caenorhabditis elegans

Wrinkles on the skin of a microscopic worm might provide the key to a longer, healthier life for humans.

Working with Caenorhabditis elegans, a transparent nematode found in soil, researchers at Washington State University's Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine were the first to find that the nervous system controls the tiny worm's cuticle, a skin-like exterior barrier, in response to bacterial infections. Their study was published today in Science Advances.

Often used in biologic research as a model organism, the C. elegans nematode has a relatively simple structure while still sharing several genetic similarities with more complex mammals including humans, so this discovery holds implications for human health as well.

"Our study challenges the traditional view that a physical barrier such as a worm's cuticle or a human's skin does not respond to infections but is part of the body's innate defense against a pathogen," said Assistant Professor Jingru Sun, the corresponding author on the paper. "We show that during infection the nematode can change its cuticle structure and that defense response is controlled by the nervous system."

Sun and her colleagues used technologies such as gene silencing and CRISPR gene editing to show that a G-protein-coupled receptor tied to a gene called npr-8 regulates collagens, proteins that are the key structural components of the nematode's cuticle. Nematodes whose NPR-8 receptor was removed survived longer when exposed to the pathogens that cause pneumonia, salmonella and staph infections. The cuticle of the nematodes without the receptor also remained smooth compared to their wild peers whose cuticle wrinkled in response to the same pathogens.

"For nematodes, it's important to maintain a healthy cuticle that acts as the first line of defense against external insults," said Durai Sellegounder, lead author on the paper and a postdoctoral researcher in Sun's Lab. "Many pathogens produce wicked proteins that try to destroy this barrier and establish infection. Our results show that the nervous system can detect these attacks and respond by remodeling or strengthening this protective structure."

Collagens are the most abundant proteins found in mammals, and declining collagen levels are associated with aging. For humans, collagen loss can create more problems than just unsightly wrinkles. While nematodes have only one "extracellular matrix," the cuticle, humans have an extracellular matrix on every organ and if that matrix is too stiff or too loose it can be harmful.

The WSU study results indicate that collagens play an important role in defense of pathogen infection, and the researchers speculate that the neural regulation of collagens might play a role in overall longevity as well. Their next goal is to understand the underlying defense response mechanisms.

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Materials provided by Washington State University. Original written by Sara Zaske. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Lost motivation.

You tend to lose your
motivation at some point
in your life.
So weak that your life
becomes dead kind of.

But no, you boost up yourself that

your life is not a waste.

You were born to make a difference.

So, getup and live in this world.

Treating MS with Ayurveda

In Ayurveda, cancer is a disease 
that is caused by the involvement 
of the three body elements, i.e., 
vata, and kapha. ... Also, the human 
body is constituted of five basic 
elements, i.e., ether, air, water and 
earth which manifest as three basic 
principles or elements, 'tridosha', i.e., 
Vata, pitta and kapha.

Beat the crap !

Keep working and beat the
crap of this world and make
a value of yourself that you
aren't a person to just come
and go.

Damn your life has a value
and it deserves to life a great
life.

Be happy

Happiness is the rarest
thing now a days.
So make yourself happy
and the company around
you the happiest.

So this way you'll stay
away from all the ailments
of the world. 

Anxiety

Anxiety disorders are a group of mental
disorders characterized by exaggerated 
feelings of anxiety and fear responses. 

Anxiety is a worry about future events and 
fear is a reaction to current events. These 
feelings may cause physical symptoms, 
such as a fast heart rate and shakiness.

My MS story

Diagnosed at 18 and now 28 years old,
its been 10 years and living with this
heck of a CNS; central nervous system
aka Neurological problem called Multiple
Sclerosis.

I did my mechanical engineering during this time
and later on Master of Engg. in CAD/CAM from
2015 to 2017 which went incomplete because
of not submitting my thesis.
Anyway life moves on, just study and
sitting in hom⇅e was waste to great extent.
All my ambition to work in industry as a
design engg., went in vain.

I had made this blog in 2013 after completion of
my b.tech mech. to share various topics
which i thought would be useful to you all.

So today i decided to share on my MS in
a bit elaborated way.

HOPE YOU GUYS HAD A GOOD READ.

Believe

Expectations

Hope you guys are enjoying, reading and learning from our blog posts. 

I 

When you broke.

Historical events.

True words.