Culture
CHICAGO --- Scientists have long known the brain's hippocampus is crucial for long-term memory. Now a new Northwestern Medicine study has found the hippocampus also plays a role in short-term memory and helps guide decision-making.
The findings shed light on how the hippocampus contributes to memory and exploration, potentially leading to therapies that restore hippocampal function, which is impacted in memory-related aging and neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia, the study authors said.
Identifying the causes of human neurodegenerative diseases is a global research priority, warranting frequent reviews of the accumulating knowledge. In doing just that, biologists from the Plant Physiology Laboratory at the University of Guam and neuroscientists from the Experimental Medicine Program at The University of British Columbia have published an update on the reputed environmental toxins that have been suspected of being involved in mammal neurodegeneration.
The population on Earth is increasingly growing and people are expected to live longer in the future. Thus, better and more reliable therapies to treat human diseases such as Alzheimer's and cardiovascular diseases are crucial. To cope with the challenge of ensuring healthy ageing, a group of international scientists investigated the potential of biosynthesising several polyamines and polyamines analogues with already known functionalities in treating and preventing age-related diseases.
That is the conclusion of new research published in the journal Geriatrics, which examined studies on several "telehealth" applications - smartphone apps used by patients and healthcare professionals to manage their condition.
Researchers found that smartphone apps and telehealth initiatives have the potential to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of healthcare systems and patients' quality of life in relation to pain management
Footprints from at least six different species of dinosaur - the very last dinosaurs to walk on UK soil 110 million years ago - have been found in Kent, a new report has announced.
The discovery of dinosaur footprints by a curator from Hastings Museum and Art Gallery and a scientist from the University of Portsmouth is the last record of dinosaurs in Britain.
The footprints were discovered in the cliffs and on the foreshore in Folkestone, Kent, where stormy conditions affect the cliff and coastal waters, and are constantly revealing new fossils.
Biologists have identified a family of algae as a living missing link in the microscopic domain.
One in six women and one in twelve men in Austria suffers from some form of IBS - therefore around one million people in all. Using currently available techniques, it is only possible to diagnose IBS by a process of elimination. Most people suffering from irritable bowel syndrome only go to their doctor when they have severe symptoms such as constipation, diarrhoea, abdominal pain, or a change in bowel motion.
Due to sample size limitations, previous studies of DMARD use and COVID-19 outcomes have combined several different rheumatic diseases and medications, and investigated a single outcome- for example, the risk of hospitalization. EULAR has given financial support to a global project collecting information on SARS-CoV-2 infection in people with rheumatic diseases. The COVID-19 Global Rheumatology Alliance physician-reported registry launched in March 2020 to collect data on adults with rheumatic disease and confirmed or presumptive COVID-19.
Climate warming plays a larger role than plant genes in influencing the number and identity of fungal species on oak leaves, especially in autumn. Recently published in the journal New Phytologist, this research by ecologists sheds light on how warming and tree genes affect the dynamics of fungal communities across the season.
Scientists have developed a new technique that could revolutionise medical imaging procedures using light.
A team of physicists, led by Dr David Phillips from the University of Exeter, have pioneered a new way in which to control light that has been scrambled by passage through a single hair-thin strand of optical fibre. These ultra-thin fibres hold much promise for the next generation of medical endoscopes - enabling high-resolution imaging deep inside the body at the tip of a needle.
RA is an inflammatory autoimmune disease that causes pain, swelling and stiffness in the joints. It can also cause fatigue, and the underlying inflammation may affect other body systems. Dementia is a symptom of damage to the brain, which can be caused by a number of different diseases - for example, Alzeimer's. Symptoms include memory loss, difficulty concentrating, confusion, and mood changes. It is not known what causes all types of dementia, but it is it thought that some of the damage could be caused by other underlying diseases.
Uveitis occurs in up to 20% of children with JIA, although this varies depending on the specific type of JIA that each child has. Jens Klotsche and colleagues shared new data at the 2021 EULAR congress analysing the risk of uveitis events after discontinuing disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARD) in children with one of two JIA categories: extended oligoarthritis and rheumatoid factor (RF)-negative polyarthritis.
Fruit flies have found at least two solutions to the problem of sorting their sex chromosomes: a matter of life and death.
A new paper in Scientific Reports led by researchers at William & Mary's Virginia Institute of Marine Science challenges increased salinity and seawater temperatures as the established explanation for a decades-long increase in the prevalence and deadliness of a major oyster disease in the coastal waters of the mid-Atlantic.
Ben Mulhearn and colleagues estimated the incidence of GCA seen during the COVID-19 pandemic and compared it to data from 2019, before the pandemic hit. The two distinct peaks of COVID-19 reflected by UK hospital admissions of COVID-19-positive patients allowed the authors to investigate the relationship in time between COVID-19 and GCA incidence.