DISCLAIMER: in no way is this an article to justify not getting vaccinated or not wearing a mask in closed spaces! At this point, I think most of us can agree that a diet rich in vegetables/fruits is good for your health. But what wasn’t entirely clear was the relationship between nutrition and COVID-19 risk […]
It is said that music can appease the beasts, and every parent in the world has heard of the –unproven– Mozart effect for producing smarter babies, however, what not everyone knows is that one of his compositions, the Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K. 448, can actually decrease the epileptic activity in the […]
It happens often. We see someone who reminds us of someone else we know, or we have met, but we cannot remember where, only the face is familiar. Whether there was a single cell in the brain responsible for familiar face recognition was a long-standing question in neuroscience. Now, it seems that those cells, which […]
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were hints at particular genes which increased some people’s susceptibility to get infected and the severity of illness once infected. Now, an international study (nearly 3500 researchers from 25 countries) on more than 45000 people infected with SARS-CoV-2, showed a link between 13 genetic variants and the […]
If you’re like me and spent hours of your day sitting at a desk typing on a keyboard, I am sure you have imagined how cool it’d be to just have your thoughts translated into typed words just like that. Well, new research on brain implants recently published in the journal Nature has shown that […]
Brain training apps hold the promise that with just a few minutes a day of playing simple games, people can improve cognitive skills like memory. However, is that anything more than a promise? Most evidence on this topic is contradictory, with some studies reporting benefits and others no effects, but a recent real-word study published […]
When hungry, not only our bodies long for food, our brains do too. And it appears that when it comes to social interaction, a similar thing happens. Social deprivation leads to a brain angry for social contact. A recent study [Livia Tomova et al (2020) Acute social isolation evokes midbrain craving responses similar to hunger […]
Spaceflight is known to affect human physiology, but the molecular mechanisms driving these changes to our bodies in space, like for instance, the loss of muscular mass, are yet unknown. A recent study in the journal Cell used a multi-omics approach to try and examine these mechanisms. The researchers employed data from NASA’s GeneLab and […]
Gene editing could be the solution to progeria, a genetic disease, characterized by extremely fast ageing. Progeria causes fast ageing and premature death in people carrying a single-point mutation in the LMNA gene, which basically leads to the production of a toxic protein which slowly damages the cells, ageing the bodies. This simple misspelling of […]
Mitochondria are the energy-making machines in the cell. Also, since evolutionarily they are thought to evolve from symbiotic bacteria, they have their own little genomes, which are mainly evolved through the maternal side, and also maybe because of their important function, mutations in genes affecting them are very damaging, and even lethal. However, mitochondrial DNA […]