The needs imposed by a globalized society that maintains activity 24 hours a day and 7 days a week are being addressed by increasing working hours and extending work activity into the weekend. Karoshi, which can be translated literally as “overwork death” in Japanese, is occupational sudden mortality. In Asian countries, the risk of karoshi […]
Health • Microbiology • Neurobiology • Neuroscience • Physiology
Gut microbiota has a surprising importance in processes related to the development of the nervous system, its functioning and to psychology and behavior, both in people and in animals. The microorganisms produce substances that after crossing the intestinal epithelium reach the blood and through it and after crossing the blood-brain barrier they reach the brain […]
Health • Medicine • Neuroscience • Pharmacy
Ayahuasca is an illegal entheogenic drug, substances that have the capacity to generate a mystical experience, a psychological sensation of contact with the divinity. Ayahuasca is an infusion prepared from the Banisteriopsis caapi liana and other ingredients, which include leaves of Psychotria viridis , Diplopyterys cabrerana and Mimosa tenuiflora . Psychotria has dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a […]
Recently, the journal Science showed in its cover an amazing image of a close up into the fly brain. This is the result of the combined effort of two research groups working on imaging. The first one (Boyden’s) had developed a way to increase the size of preserved samples, like a brain slice, up to […]
I told once to a very dear friend that my daughter had 1200 friends on Facebook and he answered me: well, I have just two and I am not sure about one of them. I hope to be the other one. Friendship is one of the great challenges and pleasures of our existence, one of […]
Several researchers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) are warning about an AI winter, which means that scientists might lose the interest on the discipline, institutions reduce drastically the funding towards its research and lose presence in the public debate. It wouldn’t be the first AI winter though. The last two decades have been […]
Author: Nicola Molinaro is an Ikerbasque Research Fellow at BCBL – Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language Research on language comprehension has always underscored the speed and precision with which the brain integrates and process the input while at the same performing multiple parallel tasks. This extreme efficiency is explained by the ability of […]
Each of the Voyager probes, two unmanned spacecrafts launched in 1977, has a gold-plated audio-visual disc, a recording that aims to introduce us to a possible alien and to show the diversity of living beings and cultures that planet Earth has. Carl Sagan said that «The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only […]
The most effective interventions in people with autism are based on a personal work by specialized professionals and these therapies, when well designed and well done, achieve a constant improvement in different areas such as social communication, the presence of stereotypes and other atypical behaviors characteristic of autism. However, person-to-person therapies are by their very […]
Author: Fernando Giraldez is currently Professor of Physiology at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona, and has a broad experience in teaching and research in Neuroscience and Developmental Biology. The view that music, maths and language are related is quite widespread. We know that they share common abstract properties and their associated skills and abilities […]