Category Health/Medical

Assistant Professor Xiaoke Chen, right, discusses the functions of the paraventricular thalamus with researcher Greg Nachtrab, one of his co-authors on a new paper.
Credit: L.A. Cicero/Stanford University

In order to learn about the world, an animal needs to do more than just pay attention to its surroundings. It also needs to learn which sights, sounds and sensations in its environment are the most important and monitor how the importance of those details change over time. Yet how humans and other animals track those details has remained a mystery.

Now, Stanford biologists think they’ve figured out how animals sort through the details...

Booze on the brain
Studying fruit flies, researchers at Brown University found that alcohol hijacks a conserved memory pathway in the brain, forming the cravings that fuel addiction. The pink areas are the fly’s memory centers and the green dots are where the first molecular signaling “domino” Notch has been activated.
Kaun Lab/Brown University

Researchers have found that alcohol hijacks a conserved memory pathway in the brain and changes which versions of genes are made, forming the cravings that fuel addiction. One of the many challenges with battling alcohol addiction and other substance abuse disorders is the risk of relapse, even after progress toward recovery...

Association of Cardiorespiratory Fitness With Long-term Mortality Among Adults Undergoing Exercise Treadmill Testing. JAMA Network Open, 2018; 1 (6): e183605 DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2018.3605

Elite performers had an 80% reduction in mortality risk when compared to lower performers. Cleveland Clinic researchers have found that better cardiorespiratory fitness leads to longer life, with no limit to the benefit of aerobic fitness.

Researchers retrospectively studied 122,007 patients who underwent exercise treadmill testing at Cleveland Clinic between Jan. 1, 1991, and Dec. 31, 2014, to measure all-cause mortality relating to the benefits of exercise and fitness. The paper was published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open.

The study found that increased c...

Respiration modulates olfactory memory consolidation in humans. The Journal of Neuroscience, 2018; 3360-17 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3360-17.2018

The way we breathe may affect how well our memories are consolidated (i.e. reinforced and stabilised). If we breathe through the nose rather than the mouth after trying to learn a set of smells, we remember them better, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden report in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Research into how breathing affects the brain has become an ever-more popular field in recent years and new methodologies have enabled more studies, many of which have concentrated on the memory. Researchers from Karolinska Institutet now show that participants who breathe through the nose consolidate their memories better.

“Our study shows that we ...