While I was at school it was almost a dogma that you’d not get a neuron more than those you were born with. Later, at university we learned that actually there was a region in the human brain, namely the hippocampus (key region for memory formation) where there was indeed adult neurogenesis, that is, formation […]
A s a recent mom, I can attest to the fact that at least some humans don’t quite get enough sleep, but the thing is, independently of why my baby thinks sleep is for cowards, in a new article researchers Charles Nunn and David Charles, have shown by comparing sleep patterns of 30 species of […]
There are plenty of examples of drugs that have been repurposed in recent years. For instance, thalidomide, the initially prescribed medication for headache in pregnant women which led to countless numbers of babies born with body malformations during the 50s and 60s, now this drug is used for treating certain types of cancer, such as […]
Diagnosis is one of the trickiest steps in disease management for many diseases, ranging from some types of cancer to rare diseases or neurodegenerative disorders, like Alzheimer’s for instance. Even though we have been hearing long about the disease, to date the only reliable diagnosis comes from a postmortem brain analysis and the finding of […]
In science, for a phenomenon to be reliable, it needs to be validated by a certain statistical value, the p-value, which by giving an estimate of the probability that the result would be the product of chance, serves as a measure of the probability that a certain event happening is true. So far, the convention […]
Like father like son. We have all heard it one time or another. The layman explanation to hereditary characters. Whether the cause is genetic inheritance or the effect of growing up in a certain environment, is quite something else. When talking about the origin of intelligence, there are always discussions. Even though there is undoubtedly […]
Unless you’ve been sitting in a cave for the last couple of years, you have probably heard about the new great promise of gene therapy: the gene editing CRISPR system. This new addition to the molecular biology toolbox is groundbreaking for what it implies. It does not simply “force in” a healthy copy of whichever […]
Diabetes is a disease typically associated with old age, especially when speaking of type 2, characterized for insulin resistance, and associated with obesity and therefore, more likely to occur in old age. A recent couple of papers published in Cell and Science Translational Medicine point to the healing potential of a fasting-mimicking diet for resetting […]
What determines being left or right handed? As a scientific question might seem irrelevant, but actually handedness is a good example of a brain phenomenon called lateralization which basically refers to the location of certain brain activities in one brain hemisphere or the other (for example, language areas are located in the left hemisphere). There […]
We live in a society permanently obsesed with the idea of youth. Therefore, it is not surprising to find supposedly miraculous potions, ointments and elixirs that offer precisely that. But the idea of permanent youth is not a new idea, it comes from way back, as does the notion that young blood would help rejuvenate […]