Posts Tagged ‘yale university research’
Apart from specific brain diseases, brain undergoes normal wear and aging. Memory, in its various facets, is one of the mental skills that suffer more with advancing age. In new research, we analyzed now what brain components fail more memory with aging. The results have been somewhat unexpected.
Judging from the evidence obtained in previous studies, everything seemed to indicate that spatial memory would be most affected by aging. But instead of this, the Wisconsin researchers have found that the aging brain seems to be more likely to lose its ability to react to signs that indicate when it’s time to stop, even momentarily, the task you are working for move to another address.
Anyway, this is consistent with the difficulty for older people to do several things at once, and explain the precise cause. The team of Mark Laubach, Faculty of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA, was studying the impact of aging on working memory, the type of memory that allows us to remember that dinner is cooking as we speak by phone, and we can not leave it too long to fire or burn. Read the rest of this entry »
More than 100 million years the mammalian genome experienced a dramatic transformation that led to a fundamental change in its reproduction. The organ in the ancestors of humans and other mammals was used for the development of eggs became a uterus for embryonic and fetal development.
This has been confirmed in new research, which provides unprecedented detail about the molecular changes that allowed to mammals carry their developing young protected in the uterus instead of placing them in nests, or transport from one place to another in the maternal pouch like kangaroos.
The majority scientific opinion was, until now, that the changes were produced by small mutations in DNA that accumulated over time. But in this case, the team of Gunter Wagner and Vincent J. Lynch, specialists in ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University Read the rest of this entry »
Since the citizen science project via the Internet Planet Hunters was set in motion in December 2010, 40,000 Internet users from around the world have been helping the professional astronomers to analyze the light of 150,000 stars with hope to discover Earth-like planets orbiting some of them.
Planet Hunters works through and uses the help of volunteers to analyze the data gathered by NASA’s Kepler mission. This space telescope has been searching for planets located beyond our solar system (called exoplanets) since its launch in March 2009.
Recently, a team of astronomers from Yale University has announced the discovery of the first two potential exoplanets discovered by users of Planet Hunters. Candidate planets orbit their stars with periods ranging from 10 days to 50, much less than 365 days it takes for the Earth to give a complete loop around the sun, and have diameters ranging in size from two times and average up to eight times the diameter of the Earth. Read the rest of this entry »
A new study shows that neural networks in the brains of middle-aged and elderly have weaker connections and emit signals weaker than those of the young. That explains in large part, why older people often have a greater tendency to forget things, compared to younger people.
But the really amazing about this study is that we found suggests that memory could be corrected weakened.
As people age, they tend to forget things more easily distracted and experience more difficulty with the mental functions of executive.
They have long known of these deficiencies associated with age, but not well known cellular basis of these common cognitive difficulties. Read the rest of this entry »
The bright colors of birds have inspired poets and delighted lovers of nature, but the birds themselves are able to see many more colors and hues than humans.
Scientists have speculated for years about how birds evolved their color, but a new study is the first in which they have explored the ability of the birds themselves to see these and other colors.
The birds have cones in their retina that are sensitive to ultraviolet, so they can see colors that are invisible to humans.
The team of Richard Prum of Yale University, and Mary Caswell Stoddard, University of Cambridge, has analyzed the question of why birds have not yet developed the capacity to produce, for example, two distinctly different colors in ultraviolet their feathers, which would be invisible to humans but quite perceptible to birds. Read the rest of this entry »
The exact configuration of our visual system depends on a pattern of spontaneous activity in the brain that occurs long before birth, according to a new study. In the development of sight, not only genes involved. What happens in the womb is crucial.
It was long debated how much influence heredity, and how the environment in developing neural circuits.
Scientists now know that genes provide the basic plans for the initial development of the brain and the connections between brain cells fit precisely later, at another stage of development.
But how experience influences the configuration of the visual system in mammals, which have relatively long gestation periods during which the fetus never has visual stimulation? In other words, if the experience influences neuronal development, it is difficult to explain how the vision would be affected before birth because the fetus does not see anything in the uterus. Read the rest of this entry »
It has taken a decisive step towards the goal of clarifying the origin of one of the most notorious characteristics of the human brain. That trait is the set of grooves and convolutions which increase the usable area of the brain and allow a higher intellect, including abstract thinking and reasoning ability.
In a study by scientists from Turkey and the United States has discovered one of the heads of the furrows and convolutions of the human brain: a small variation within a gene that determines the formation of the convolutions. Read the rest of this entry »
Imagine a material that is stronger than steel but just as versatile as plastics, can take an almost unlimited range of shapes. Over many decades, scientists in the development of new materials have attempted to obtain an ideal substance in that it could be molded into complex shapes with the same ease and low cost plastic, but without sacrificing the strength and durability metal.
Now a team of researchers led by Jan Schroers, materials scientist at Yale University, has shown that some recently developed metallic glasses can be molded into complex shapes such as plastics, and without sacrificing the strength or durability of own metals. Read the rest of this entry »