Brain aging may be detected decades before symptoms appear, with links to gut health

brain gut
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

A new UCLA study has found a connection between how quickly the brain ages and the bacteria and chemical byproducts found in the gut, offering a clue to what drives brain aging long before symptoms appear.

Researchers have long used brain scans to estimate a person’s “brain age,” a measure that can differ from someone’s actual age in years. When a brain looks older than expected on a scan, prior research has linked it to poorer memory, thinking skills and mood. However, most of these studies involved older adults or people with existing brain diseases. Whether this gap between brain age and chronological age means anything in younger, generally healthy people has been unclear.

In a new study published in the journal eBioMedicine, UCLA Health rese...

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Tightly guided atoms could enable low power quantum navigation when GPS fails

Jongmin Lee adjusts a machine that produces optical nanofibers.
Sandia National Laboratories scientist Jongmin Lee adjusts a machine that produces optical nanofibers 200 times thinner than a human hair. When laser beams travel through the nanofiber, halos of light form very close to it, guiding atoms along its length for quantum sensing. Credit: Photo by Craig Fritz

Within tiny halos of light clinging to a vanishingly thin wisp of optical fiber, scientist Jongmin Lee guides atoms like marbles through a narrow pipe. Rock the fiber and the atoms shift side by side; they just don’t fall off. But don’t be deceived by the seemingly delicate nature of his experiment. Lee is exploring how to measure motion precisely in rough-and-tumble environments.

A quantum sensing scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, Lee is an expert in a type of motion sensor...

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Scientists discover a strange new form of ice that could help explain the interiors of Neptune and Uranus

Neptune
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Scientists have discovered that there is ice deep inside planets like Neptune and Uranus and want to find out what form it takes and how it behaves. They cannot dig for it and transport it all the way back to Earth, so they do the next best thing: recreate those extreme conditions in the lab.

That’s exactly what a team of scientists led by Alexis Forestier from the CEA, France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, did. What they discovered could help us better understand the strange magnetic fields and deep interior layers of these distant worlds.

The weird world of hot ice
On those planets, ice is not like the frozen cubes you put into a cold drink...

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Stress hormone timing creates a different kind of obesity, study suggests

histology of liver tissue
Liver tissue from mice after 60 days of treatment. From left to right: control, glucocorticoid-rhythm flattening, and high-fat diet. The top row shows H&E-stained liver tissue, while red staining in the bottom row marks fat in the liver. Mice with flattened glucocorticoid rhythms on a standard diet displayed minimal liver fat compared with mice fed a high-fat diet, despite similar obesity. Scale bar, 100 µm. Credit: Teruel Lab

Obesity caused by disrupted stress-hormone rhythms is metabolically very different from obesity caused by a high-fat diet, according to a new preclinical study by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators...

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