Category Biology/Biotechnology

A bioactive foam could be used to replace skull bone lost to injury, surgery, or birth defect. Credit: Texas A&M University

A Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute team is developing a new material that can be used to replace skull bone lost to injury, surgery, or defect. The bioactive foam is malleable when exposed to warm saline (similar to a sponge), allowing surgeons to easily shape it to fit irregular defects in the skull, where it hardens in place. Once implanted in the skull, specially coated pores within the foam attract bone cells, naturally regenerating bone to replace the foam, which dissolves over time.

The foam – a shape memory polymer coated in a bioactive polydopamine – is intended as an alternative to materials currently used to treat cranio-maxillofacial gaps...

Researchers plan to test whether restoring hippocampal oscillations (mimicking the effects of sleep in CA1) is sufficient for promoting normal memory formation when mice are sleep-deprived.

Scientists have known that a lack of sleep can interfere with the ability to learn and make memories. Now, a group of University of Michigan researchers have found how sleep deprivation affects memory-making in the brain. Previously, researchers knew that depriving mice of sleep after the mice performed a task resulted in the mice forgetting aspects of that task. But researchers weren’t sure what function of the hippocampus was kept from doing its job...

Human EPS cells (green) can be detected in both the embryonic part (left) and extra-embryonic parts (placenta and yolk sac, right) of a mouse embryo. Credit: Salk Institute

What totipotent stem cells can do that pluripotent ones can’t do, however, is develop into tissues that support the embryo, like the placenta. These are called extra-embryonic tissues, and are vital in development and healthy growth. Now, scientists at the Salk Institute, in collaboration with researchers from Peking University, in China, are reporting their discovery of a chemical cocktail that enables cultured mouse and human stem cells to do just that: generate both embryonic and extra-embryonic tissues...

Prefrontal cortex shapes memory formation by modulating hippocampal encoding

Neurons in the prefrontal cortex “teach” neurons in the hippocampus to “learn” rules that distinguish memory-based predictions in otherwise identical situations, suggesting that learning in the present helps guide learning in the future, according to research conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published April 5 in the journal Neuron. The study investigated memory flexibility and interference, the mechanisms by which the brain interprets events and anticipates their likely outcomes. The hippocampus is a temporal lobe brain structure for remembering recent events...