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In March 2015, Li-Huei Tsai set up a tiny disco for some of the mice in her laboratory. For an hour each day, she placed them in a box lit only by a flickering strobe. The mice — which had been engineered to produce plaques of the peptide amyloid-β in the brain, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease — crawled about curiously. When Tsai later dissected them, those that had been to the mini dance parties had significantly lower levels of plaque than mice that had spent the same time in the dark.
Tsai, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, says she checked the result; then checked it again. “For the longest time, I didn’t believe it,” she says. Her team had managed to clear amyloid from part of the brain with a flickering light. The strobe was tuned to 40 hertz and was designed to manipulate the rodents’ brainwaves, triggering a host of biological effects that eliminated the plaque-forming proteins. Although promising findings in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease have been notoriously difficult to replicate in humans, the experiment offered some tantalizing possibilities. “The result was so mind-boggling and so robust, it took a while for the idea to sink in, but we knew we needed to work out a way of trying out the same thing in humans,” Tsai says.
Tsai’s study was the first glimpse of a cellular response to brainwave manipulation. “Her results were a really big surprise,” says Walter Koroshetz, director of the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland. “It’s a novel observation that would be really interesting to pursue.”
[...] In addition to potentially leading to treatments, these studies could break open the field of neural oscillations in general, helping to link them more firmly to behaviour and how the brain works as a whole.
[...] Whatever their role, Tsai mostly wants to discipline brainwaves and harness them against disease. Cognito Therapeutics has just received approval for a second, larger trial, which will look at whether the therapy has any effect on Alzheimer’s disease symptoms. Meanwhile, Tsai’s team is focusing on understanding more about the downstream biological effects and how to better target the hippocampus with non-invasive technologies.
For Tsai, the work is personal. Her grandmother, who raised her, was affected by dementia. “Her confused face made a deep imprint in my mind,” Tsai says. “This is the biggest challenge of our lifetime, and I will give it all I have.”
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 05 2018, @12:22PM (2 children)
Bad news. You are already senile if you think you see a smiling magic sky being.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 06 2018, @05:43AM (1 child)
Well, I am of the opinion that if one gets his spirituality from anything else than God himself, through meditation and personal research, one does not become a servant of God, rather he becomes a servant of the entity who he listened to, and, regretfully, actually believed. If I believed God was a magic sky faerie, I consider you have every right to claim my senility. Hell, even I would claim it.
Personally, I see God as Entropy. Energy. Physics. Even Love. I see electromagnetic phenomena, that is a part of God I am seeing. God's Law. No man can put it asunder. Works the same for everyone, not a respecter of persons. Based solely on observation, I feel we are far too complex of design to have come from slime+time. Whatever it is, this thing is intelligent. I am quite a small collection of atomic particles by comparison, and somehow am I intelligent? Or am I an interface to God? I have no way to know.
I have listened to enough men... to come to the conclusion that very few actually understand that which they preach. Most of them are nothing more than beggars, trying to make a living through handouts. Psychological warfare on poor ignorant people, scaring them out of their meager resources. I have even heard preachermen telling poor people to even go take out a loan in order to "plant their seed". Where "planting the seed" was defined as sending a thousand bucks to a rich man, who makes no bones about how rich he is.
No wonder people are abandoning religion in droves. Most people are intelligent enough to see through the crap and are refusing this manipulation. I've refused it too.
If anything, religion made a "none" out of me.
Read the Bible... you will find even Jesus Christ had the same problem with religions. They even up and killed Him because He would not cower to them.
I know its a stale post... but I had to get it out of me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 06 2018, @07:20AM
Your feelings on the matter may be a little biased and you may also not understand the scale at which you speak.
There are an estimated 1,000,000,000,000 species on Earth
Foxes took less than 50 years to domesticate
Dogs were domesticated about 15,000 years ago
Life has been around for about 4,000,000,000 years
https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=138446&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click [nsf.gov]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_red_fox [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_history_of_life [wikipedia.org]