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MS Paint Art - January 2012

Look younger, feel younger

January 30th 2012 21:12
feel younger look younger lifestyle fitness








Eats red meat 3 times a week
Stresses over paying bills on time
Does light exercise twice a week
Spends most of her time alone

Fails to take medications for high blood pressure
Does not take vitamin D


She's added over 7 years to her age



Happily married father of 3
Never smoked
Recently laid off from his job
Jogs for a half hour 3 days a week
Eats breakfast every morning
Parents passed away in their late 40's



This reduces his age by almost 6 years



Never been married
Walks her dog every day
Goes to dinner with friends every weekend
Eats 4 servings of fruits and vegetables daily
Follows doctor's instructions carefully to help manage her asthma
Does not stress about life's little problems



And she's reduced her age by just over 4 years


Their chronological ages are respectively, 60,43,32



It's up to you, really, according to Real Age






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World in Two Dimensions

January 29th 2012 20:25

Brain world flatland science memory







Brain Likely Encodes the World in Two Dimensions
Our internal representation of the world is flat



When we drive somewhere new, we navigate by referring to a two-dimensional map that accounts for distances only on a horizontal plane. According to research published online in August in Nature Neuroscience, the mammalian brain seems to do the same, collapsing the world into a flat plane even as the animal skitters up trees and slips deep into burrows.


“Our subjective sense that our map is three-dimensional is illusory,” says Kathryn Jeffery, a behavioral neuroscientist at University College London who led the research. Jeffery studies a collection of neurons in and around the rat hippo­campus that build an internal representation of space. As the animal travels, these neurons, called grid cells and place cells, respond uniquely to distance, turning on and off in a way that measures how far the animal has moved in a particular direction.

Past research has focused on how these cartographic cells encode two-dimensional space. Jeffery and her col­leagues decided to look at how they respond to changes in altitude. To do this, they enticed rats to climb up a spiral staircase while the scientists collected electrical recordings from single cells. The firing pattern encoded very little in­formation about height.

The finding adds evidence for the hypothesis that the brain keeps track of our location on a flat plane, which is defined by the way the body is oriented. If a squirrel, say, is running along the ground, then scampers straight up a tree, its internal two-dimensional map simply shifts from the horizontal plane to the vertical. Astronauts are some of the few humans to de­scribe this experience: when they move in space to “stand” on a ceiling, they report a moment of disorientation before their mental map flips so they feel right side up again.

Researchers do not know yet whether other areas of the brain encode altitude or whether mammals simply do not need that information to survive. “Maybe an animal has a mosaic of maps, each fragment of which is flat but which can be oriented in the way that’s appropriate,” Jeffery speculates. Or maybe in our head, the world is simply flat.


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brain memories decades how learning






Scientists, including Indian-origin researchers, have found that a prion-like protein plays a key role in storing long-term memories.

Memories in our brains are maintained by connections between neurons called “synapses”.

Neuroscientists at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have discovered a major clue from a study in fruit flies, hardy, self-copying clusters or oligomers of a synapse protein are an essential ingredient for the formation of long-term memory.

The finding supports a surprising new theory about memory, and may have a profound impact on explaining other oligomer-linked functions and diseases in the brain, including Alzheimer’s disease and prion diseases.

“Self-sustaining populations of oligomers located at synapses may be the key to the long-term synaptic changes that underlie memory; in fact, our finding hints that oligomers play a wider role in the brain than has been thought,” Kausik Si, senior author of the study, said.

Si’s investigations in this area began nearly a decade ago during his doctoral research in the Columbia University laboratory of Nobel-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel.

He found that in the sea slug Aplysia californica, which has long been favored by neuroscientists for memory experiments because of its large, easily-studied neurons, a synapse-maintenance protein known as CPEB (Cytoplasmic Polyadenylation Element Binding protein) has an unexpected property.

A portion of the structure is self-complementary and, much like empty egg cartons, can easily stack up with other copies of itself. CPEB thus exists in neurons partly in the form of oligomers, which increase in number when neuronal synapses strengthen.

These oligomers have a hardy resistance to ordinary solvents, and within neurons may be much more stable than single-copy “monomers” of CPEB. They also seem to actively sustain their population by serving as templates for the formation of new oligomers from free monomers in the vicinity.

CPEB-like proteins exist in all animals, and in brain cells they play a key role in maintaining the production of other synapse-strengthening proteins. Studies by Si and others in the past few years have hinted that CPEB's tendency to oligomerize is not merely incidental, but is indeed essential to its ability to stabilize longer-term memory.

“What we’ve lacked till now are experiments showing this conclusively,” Si said.

In the new study, Si and his colleagues examined a Drosophila fruit fly CPEB protein known as Orb2. Like its counterpart in Aplysia, it forms oligomers within neurons.

“We found that these Orb2 oligomers become more numerous in neurons whose synapses are stimulated, and that this increase in oligomers happens near synapses,” Amitabha Majumdar, lead author of the study, said.

The key was to show that the disruption of Orb2 oligomerization on its own impairs Orb2’s function in stabilizing memory. Majumdar was able to do this by generating an Orb2 mutant that lacks the normal ability to oligomerize yet maintains a near-normal concentration in neurons.

Fruit flies carrying this mutant form of Orb2 lost their ability to form long-term memories.

“For the first 24 hours after a memory-forming stimulus, the memory was there, but by 48 hours it was gone, whereas in flies with normal Orb2 the memory persisted,” Majumdar said.

The study has been published in the online issue of the journal Cell.






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Google replaces the brain

January 26th 2012 22:13
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Fuel for children's brains

January 26th 2012 00:35
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10 ways to keep your brain healthy

January 26th 2012 00:28
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Healthy Fast - Food Meals for Kids

January 23rd 2012 09:27
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Train Your Brain to Focus

January 22nd 2012 18:21
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How to Stop a Headache Head-On

January 21st 2012 21:19
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Sex-Life Boosters and Busters

January 20th 2012 22:54
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Exercising the brain

January 18th 2012 23:00
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Brain Adapts Quickly to a Broken Arm

January 17th 2012 21:26
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Monkey business

January 16th 2012 05:11
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Cut 500 Calories at Your Desk

January 15th 2012 22:42
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Internet overuse can damage brain

January 14th 2012 20:19
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Lowering Cholesterol

January 13th 2012 20:37
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The Fragile Teenage Brain

January 11th 2012 00:41
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Listen to Music

January 10th 2012 09:16
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what is a face and what's not?

January 9th 2012 20:35
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11 Delicious Weight Loss Foods

January 9th 2012 20:26
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Excuses, excuses, excuses. DO STOP!

January 8th 2012 23:10
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Brain grows up

January 8th 2012 23:03
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10 ways to help your brain

January 6th 2012 18:45
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Brain Tumor Vaccine

January 5th 2012 20:05
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Find out how your brain works

January 4th 2012 09:54
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Marijuana affects brain functioning

January 3rd 2012 21:20
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Brain games to help you stay sharp

January 1st 2012 19:59
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