
Brain's 'memory center' needed to recognize image sequences but not single sights
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The visual cortex stores and remembers individual images, but when they are grouped into a sequence, mice can't recognize that without guidance from the hippocampus, according to a new study by neuroscientists at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.
How early is the course of COVID-19, mild or severe, determined? In Cell, researchers examined nasal cells sampled from patients at the time of diagnosis, looking for differences between those who developed severe disease and those who experienced a mild illness. Cells from patients who developed severe COVID-19 exhibited a more muted antiviral response. If the early stages of infection can determine disease severity, it opens a path for scientists to develop early therapeutic interventions.
Long thought of as a generic alarm system, the locus coeruleus may actually be a sophisticated regulator of learning and behavior, according to a new review by MIT researchers. They will test this hypothesis with a new grant.
Every drug starts with the search for an active substance targeting disease-related key players. However, there is no perfect drug that affects the one target: no effect without side effects. A group led by Prof. Herbert Waldmann and Dr. Slava Ziegler at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund has now identified an unexpected effect for a group of characterized active substances: they all modulate cholesterol metabolism, a home-made problem, as it seems.
Study at the Federal University of São Paulo developed a recipe combining chickpea flour and psyllium, a plant-derived soluble fiber. The product is nourishing and rated highly by consumers in qualitative surveys.
Imagine meeting a friend on the street, and imagine that with every step they take, your visual system has to process their image from scratch in order to recognize them. Luckily, our visual system is able to retain information obtained in motion, thereby presenting us with a consistent picture of our surroundings. These are the findings of a study conducted by SISSA, in collaboration with the Penn and KU Leuven and published in Nature Communications, which explains the neuronal underpinnings of this phenomenon.
In a new University of California, Irvine-led study, researchers found that a certain protein prevented regulatory T cells (Tregs) from effectively doing their job in controlling the damaging effects of inflammation in a model of multiple sclerosis (MS), a devastating autoimmune disease of the nervous system.
University of Tsukuba scientists employed a mathematical model to simulate the differentiation of epithelial cells based on signaling molecules from the liver's portal vein. This work may lead to new tools to better understand the very complicated signaling pathways involved in cell differentiation.
An internal transporter that enables us to use the copper we consume in foods like shellfish and nuts to enable a host of vital body functions also has the essential role of protecting the receptor that enables us to grow new blood vessels when ours become diseased, Medical College of Georgia scientists report.
An international team of researchers led by Kumamoto and Tokyo Universities (Japan) have shown that the L452R mutation of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which is common to two variants (Epsilon and Delta), is involved in cellular immunity evasion via the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) A24, and enhances viral infectivity. HLA-A24 is one of the most prominent HLA-class I alleles, especially in East/Southeast Asian populations, which might make them particularly vulnerable to variants with the mutation.