Category Health/Medical

Just three minutes of exposure to deep red light once a week, when delivered in the morning, can significantly improve declining eyesight, finds a pioneering new study by UCL researchers.

Published in Scientific Reports, the study builds on the team’s previous work*, which showed daily three-minute exposure to longwave deep red light ‘switched on’ energy producing mitochondria cells in the human retina, helping boost naturally declining vision.

For this latest study, scientists wanted to establish what effect a single three-minute exposure would have, while also using much lower energy levels than their previous studies...

In the human brain, the hormone insulin also acts on the most important neurotransmitter for the reward system, dopamine. This was shown by researchers from the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD) in Tübingen. Insulin lowers the dopamine level in a specific region of the brain (striatum *) that regulates reward processes and cognitive functions, among other things. This interaction can be an important driver of the brain’s regulation of glucose metabolism and eating behavior. The study has now been published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Worldwide, more and more people are developing obesity and type 2 diabetes. Studies show that the brain plays an important role in causing these diseases...

Loss of this gene affects daily behavior, disrupting ~24-hour sleep-wake cycles. Life is organized on a 24-hour schedule. Central to this regular rhythm is the circadian clock, timekeepers that are present in virtually every organ, tissue and cell type. When a clock goes awry, sleep disruption or a variety of diseases can result.

A recent Northwestern University discovery could help in understanding how this clock is linked to daily cycles. A team of neurobiologists has identified a new gene, called Tango10, that is critical for daily behavioral rhythms. This gene is involved in a molecular pathway by which the core circadian clock (the “gears”) controls the cellular output of the clock (the “hands”) to control daily sleep-wake cycles.

While the study was done using the fruit fl...

Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering are using generative adversarial networks (GANs) — technology best known for creating deepfake videos and photorealistic human faces — to improve brain-computer interfaces for people with disabilities.

In a paper published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, the team successfully taught an AI to generate synthetic brain activity data. The data, specifically neural signals called spike trains, can be fed into machine-learning algorithms to improve the usability of brain-computer interfaces (BCI).

BCI systems work by analyzing a person’s brain signals and translating that neur...