cardiology

Increased production of neurons in hypothalamus found in mice fed high fat diets

Development, Memory, Neuroscience, Psychology ,

(Medical Xpress) — A research team made up of people from a wide variety of biological sciences has found that mice fed a diet high in fat tend to see an increase in the number of neurons created in the hypothalamus, a region of the brain associated with regulating energy use in the body. The team, as they describe in their paper published in Nature Neuroscience, write that the increase in neurons occurs in a part of the hypothalamus called the median eminence, which lies outside the blood-brain barrier.

Paul Allen donates additional $300 million to brain research facility

Development, Memory, Neuroscience, Psychology ,

(Medical Xpress) — Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has added an additional $300 million to the $200 million he’s already given to the brain research facility in Seattle he started back in 2003, the Allen Institute for Brain Science. This new grant is to go towards a new initiative for the Institute, outlined by Christof Koch, chief scientist at the Institute and Harvard neuroscientist R. Clay Reid, (who will be joining the Institute) in a recent comment brief in the science journal Nature. The new funding will go towards studying the visual cortex in the brain, starting with mice, and eventually moving to humans.

Computer model of spread of dementia can predict future disease patterns years before they occur

Development, General, Memory, Neuroscience, Psychology ,

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College have developed a computer program that has tracked the manner in which different forms of dementia spread within a human brain. They say their mathematic model can be used to predict where and approximately when an individual patient’s brain will suffer from the spread, neuron to neuron, of “prion-like” toxic proteins — a process they say underlies all forms of dementia.