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A landmark study has identified specific patterns of connections across the brain associated with symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ( ADHD), highlighting the importace of considering diverse neurological functions in understanding the nature of the condition.

While the study is far from unique in its attempts to identify physical characteristics of ADHD in the brain’s wiring, its method does aim to improve on past efforts.

US researchers developed a new technique that provides a broad view of the brain to analyze brain scans from around 6,000 children, addressing some limitations in past research.

“Neuroimaging studies of ADHD have been hindered by small sample sizes, small effects, and differences among study methods,” write bioinformatician Michael Mooney from Oregon Health & Science University and colleagues in their published paper.

Using what’s known as a polyneuro risk score (PNRS) to combine small differences into brain-wide connectivity patterns, the researchers could predict ADHD symptoms in two independent cohorts. The findings could help future research into the disorder, as well as indicate a new way to study brain imaging in other neurological conditions.

ADHD is a complex neurological disorder that affects millions of children and adults. Its diagnosis is based largely on behavior, usually presenting externally as difficulties with attention, impulsivity, and sometimes hyperactivity.

Early diagnosis of ADHD can have a significant beneficial impact on the lives of patients and their families. One study found those who don’t get diagnosed until adulthood are four times more likely to die early than the general population.

The disorder is often stigmatized, sometimes attributed to laziness or a lack of self-control. However, studies suggest ADHD stems from differences in how the brain functions on a structural level. The precise nature and extent of these structural differences is unclear, possibly because effects in specific parts of the brain are small, making the identification of individual neurological features a challenge.

ADHD manifests differently in different people, which could be related to how different functional brain systems interact. This connectivity between functional networks can be measured via changes in blood flow in the brain while it’s not focused on a task – resting-state functional connectivity MRI (rs-fcMRI).

A 2014 review of rs-fcMRI research on ADHD revealed some consistency in findings concerning the brain’s default mode network. Recent meta-analysis indicated that connectivity in multiple brain networks is associated with ADHD; however most studies haven’t looked at brain-wide effects.

“Given considerable evidence that ADHD is associated with alterations in widely distributed brain networks, and the small effects of individual brain features, a whole-brain perspective focusing on cumulative effects is warranted,” the team writes.

The researchers constructed and validated a PNRS to represent the cumulative, total effect of brain-wide measurements of resting state functional connectivity linked to ADHD symptoms.

They used data from rs-fcMRI scans and ADHD symptom scores of 5,543 participants; children aged 9-10 years when they enrolled in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, a long-term US study of brain development into adulthood.

The link between PNRS and ADHD symptoms was then further tested with 553 participants from the Oregon ADHD-1000 cohort, an independent dataset of people aged 7 to 11 at baseline who have annual follow up tests into adulthood.

The ‘ADHD PRNS’ was significantly associated with ADHD symptoms across both groups. In the Oregon group, people with an ADHD PRNS in the highest 10 percent were 3.86 times more likely to have diagnosed ADHD than those below the median.

When analysis was repeated for those with a second scan taken 1.83 years later, the strength of the link between PRNS and ADHD was almost exactly the same.

The most significant associations with ADHD were spread across multiple brain networks. The strongest effects were associated with regions that are most active when the brain is at rest, known as the default mode network; and a structure called the cingulo-opercular network, which includes areas involved in cognitive control, attention, and task monitoring.

Previous research indicates dysregulation of these networks contributes to ADHD.

The PNRS didn’t match polygenic risk scores, which indicate a person’s genetic likelihood to have ADHD, suggesting environmental influences also contribute. Mooney and team conclude that more research is still needed to determine how genes, environment, and brain connections all interact to cause ADHD.

That said, PNRS could be a useful predictor of ADHD, and potentially reveal connections with other conditions like depression. By combining it with other factors, we might gain valuable insights into neurological behavioral disorders.

“The findings highlight the promise of approaches examining cumulative, brain-wide effects, and the importance of using large samples for improving reproducibility of neuroimaging studies,” the authors write.

The study has been published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Tomatoes could help fight off bacterial infections in your gut, a new study has found.

One of the world’s most widely consumed vegetables (or perhaps fruit?), they are packed with antioxidants, vitamins, and other compounds – two of which scientists at Cornell University in the US have identified for their potent bacteria-killing properties in a series of cell experiments.

The research team, led by Cornell microbiologist Jeongmin Song, was interested in Salmonella, a genus of enteric bacteria that invade the intestine, often causing food poisoning.

Specifically, the team focused on one typhoidal serotype of Salmonella, Salmonella enterica Typhi, which lives only in humans and causes typhoid fever when it slips into the bloodstream from the gut and spreads through the body.

Like other foodborne pathogens, proper food handling and storage along with access to antibiotics can help people avoid food poisoning from Salmonella.

However, typhoid fever remains a big public health problem in many parts of the world where people don’t have access to clean water, sanitation, or typhoid vaccines. It spreads person-to-person via contaminated food and water, and children are at highest risk.

In 2016, the world’s first outbreak of extensively drug-resistant typhoid swept across Pakistan, and eight years later, infectious disease experts still fear it could seed regional or global outbreaks if not controlled.

Malnutrition is also common in Pakistan, and other countries throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. A 2023 study of 64 countries found that almost half of children under 2 years didn’t consume any fruits or vegetables in their diet.

“Our main goal in this study was to find out if tomato and tomato juice can kill enteric pathogens, including Salmonella Typhi, and if so, what qualities they have that make them work,” explains Song.

Lab-grown cultures of Salmonella Typhi exposed to freshly pulped tomato juice were killed off within 24 hours, and not because of the juice’s acidity.

The researchers scanned the genome of tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum) looking for genes encoding small proteins called peptides that might act as antimicrobial agents.

From four initial candidates, the team identified two antimicrobial peptides that inhibited the growth of Salmonella Typhi and even killed off a strain resistant to ciprofloxacin, the primary antibiotic used to treat typhoid fever.

Lastly, the researchers modeled the shape of their two lead candidate peptides and simulated their interactions with the bacterial cell membranes. As the modeling predicted, the two peptides ruptured Salmonella Typhi’s cell membranes in just 45 minutes.

In further experiments, the compounds also killed Salmonella Typhimurium, a strain of non-typhoidal Salmonella that causes non-lethal food poisoning.

Bearing in mind these are just cell experiments, the study findings aren’t a reason to go guzzling tomato juice by the gallon; no one type of food is going to work its magic alone.

Rather, the study underscores public health messaging that encourages people to eat tomatoes as part of a balanced diet that includes lots of other fruits and vegetables – provided they are prepared with good food hygiene methods, it might help ward off illness and food poisoning.

But that depends on affordability and access.

The study has been published in Microbiology Spectrum.

If you’re fascinated by Nature, these images of spiral galaxies won’t help you escape your fascination.

These images show incredible detail in 19 spirals, imaged face-on by the JWST. The galactic arms with their multitudes of stars are lit up in infrared light, as are the dense galactic cores, where supermassive black holes reside.

The JWST captured these images as part of the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) programme. PHANGS is a long-running program aimed at understanding how gas and star formation interact with galactic structure and evolution.

One of Webb’s four primary science goals is to study how galaxies form and evolve, and the PHANGS program feeds that effort. The VLT, ALMA, the Hubble, and now the JWST have all contributed to it.

“Webb’s new images are extraordinary. They’re mind-blowing even for researchers who have studied these same galaxies for decades.”

Janice Lee, Project Scientists, Space Telescope Science Institute.

The JWST can see in both near-infrared (NIR) and mid-infrared (MIR) light. That means it reveals different details, and more details, than even the powerful Hubble Space Telescope, which operates in visible light, UV light, and a small portion of infrared light.

In these JWST high-resolution images, the red color is gas and dust emitting infrared light, which the JWST excels at seeing. Some of the images have bright diffraction spikes in the galactic center, which are caused by an enormous amount of light.

That can indicate that a supermassive black hole is active, or it could be from an extremely high concentration of stars.

“That’s a clear sign that there may be an active supermassive black hole,” said Eva Schinnerer, a staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. “Or, the star clusters toward the center are so bright that they have saturated that area of the image.”

Stars near a galaxy’s center are typically much older than stars in the arms. The further a star is from the galactic center, the younger it typically is. The younger stars appear blue and have blown away the cocoon of gas and dust that they spawned in.

Orange clumps indicate even younger stars. They’re still wrapped in their blanket of gas and dust and are still actively accreting material and forming.

“These are where we can find the newest, most massive stars in the galaxies,” said Erik Rosolowsky, a professor of physics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

The new images were released alongside some of the Hubble’s views of the same galaxies. These highlight how observing different wavelengths of light reveals or obscures different details in the galaxies. In the PHANGS observing program, different telescopes have observed galaxies in visible light, infrared light, UV light, and radio.

Since the human eye can’t see infrared, different visible colors are assigned to different wavelengths of light in order to make the images meaningful. In the JWST image of NGC 628 above, the galaxy’s center is filled with old stars that emit some of the shortest wavelengths of light the telescope can detect. They’ve been given a blue color to make them visible.

In the Hubble image, the same region is more yellow and washed out. The region emits the longest wavelengths of light that the Hubble can sense, so it has different color assignments than the JWST.

Janice Lee is a project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

She spoke for all of us when she said, “Webb’s new images are extraordinary. They’re mind-blowing even for researchers who have studied these same galaxies for decades. Bubbles and filaments are resolved down to the smallest scales ever observed and tell a story about the star formation cycle.”

These galaxies are all spiral galaxies like the Milky Way, meaning their massive arms define them. The spiral arms are more like waves that travel through space rather than individual stars moving collectively. Astronomers study the arms because they can provide key insights into how galaxies build, maintain, and shut off star formation.

“These structures tend to follow the same pattern in certain parts of the galaxies,” Rosolowsky added. “We think of these like waves, and their spacing tells us a lot about how a galaxy distributes its gas and dust.”

Ever since it began science operations, the JWST has given astronomers an overwhelming flow of data that will fuel research for years and decades to come. These beautiful images are just a part of a larger data release that includes a catalogue of about 100,000 star clusters.

“The amount of analysis that can be done with these images is vastly larger than anything our team could possibly handle,” said the University of Alberta’s Erik Rosolowsky. “We’re excited to support the community so all researchers can contribute.”

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.

Researchers connecting pieces of the massive Alzheimer’s puzzle are closer to slotting the next one in place, with yet another link between our guts and brain.

Recent animal studies have demonstrated Alzheimer’s can be passed on to young mice through a transfer of gut microbes, confirming a link between the digestive system and the health of the brain.

A new study adds further support to the theory that inflammation could be the mechanism through which this occurs.

“We showed people with Alzheimer’s disease have more gut inflammation, and among people with Alzheimer’s, when we looked at brain imaging, those with higher gut inflammation had higher levels of amyloid plaque accumulation in their brains,” says University of Wisconsin psychologist Barbara Bendlin.

University of Wisconsin pathologist Margo Heston and an international team of researchers tested for fecal calprotectin, a sign of inflammation, in stool samples of 125 individuals recruited from two Alzheimer’s prevention cohort studies.

Participants underwent several cognitive tests on enrollment, as well as interviews on family history and tests for a high-risk Alzheimer’s gene. A subset took clinical tests for signs of amyloid protein clumps, a common indication that pathology responsible for the neurodegenerative condition was underway.

While levels of calprotectin were generally higher in older patients, it was even more pronounced in those with Alzheimer’s characteristic amyloid plaques.

Levels of other Alzheimer’s disease biomarkers also increased with levels of inflammation, and memory test scores dropped with higher calprotectin too. Even the participants without a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s had poorer memory scores with higher levels of calprotectin.

“We can’t infer causality from this study; for that, we need to do animal studies,” cautions Heston.

A laboratory analysis has previously shown gut bacteria chemicals can stimulate inflammatory signals in our brains. What’s more, other studies have found increased gut inflammation in patients with Alzheimer’s compared to controls.

Heston and colleagues suspect microbiome changes trigger gut changes that lead to system-wide inflammation. This inflammation is mild but chronic, causing subtle, incremental damage that eventually interferes with the sensitivity of our body’s barriers.

“Increased gut permeability could result in higher blood levels of inflammatory molecules and toxins derived from gut lumen, leading to systemic inflammation, which in turn may impair the blood-brain barrier and may promote neuroinflammation, and potentially neural injury and neurodegeneration,” says University of Wisconsin bacteriologist Federico Rey.

The researchers are now testing mice to see if diet changes associated with increased inflammation can trigger the rodent version of Alzheimer’s.

Despite decades of research there’s still no effective treatment for the millions of people with Alzheimer’s worldwide. But with a greater understanding of the biological processes, scientists are getting closer, piece by piece.

This research has been published in Scientific Reports.

For eons, humans have worn personal ornaments that tether them to their people; precious items that reflect a clan identity through life and into the grave. But those cultural associations don’t always follow family lines.

A new study comparing thousands of pendants from across ice age Europe, dating to between 34,000 and 24,000 years ago, suggests there were at least nine distinct cultural groups of hunter-gatherers within the broader population referred to as the Gravettians, each with their own relatively distinct styles of ornament.

Additional analyses of genetic data from burial sites reveal that some of these categories shared the same cultural embellishments even though they were of different ancestries.

“We’ve shown that you can have two [distinct] genetic groups of people who actually share a culture,” Jack Baker, lead author of the study and archeology doctoral student at the University of Bordeaux in France, told Scientific American’s Sarah Wild.

The earliest known instance of ancient humans adorning themselves with beads dates back to around 140,000 years ago, with shell beads found in modern-day Morocco. But the practice of wearing beads really exploded about 45,000 years ago, when ornamental traditions spread across Europe.

“This is the moment when personal ornaments acquire a degree of diversity, enabling researchers to more precisely investigate their role as cultural markers,” Baker and colleagues explain in their paper.

To investigate, Baker compiled existing records of thousands of hand-chiseled beads and pendants found at 112 sites dotted across Europe, from Portugal to Russia.

Based on their age and other associated artifacts, these ornaments had previously been lumped together as one culture, the Gravettian people. Best known for their venus figures, including the Venus of Willendorf, this widespread population thrived across Europe for around 10,000 years before dying out before the peak of the last ice age.

But the diversity of ornaments, once collated en masse, was striking. The researchers identified 134 different types of beads that the Gravettians had crafted from animal bones, teeth, shells, amber, and stone. Some resembled fishtails; others owls.

While most of the trinkets were found in the ruins of Gravettian dwellings, some were excavated from burial sites where DNA samples had also been collected.

Comparing ornaments across geographical distances, Baker and colleagues identified nine distinct cultural groups with unique preferences for different types of beads depending on their geography.

Baker says these differences had ‘crystalized‘ in the artifacts found in graves, and could have been worn as a way for people to quickly identify each other.

However, the analysis also suggests that cultural boundaries were at times fluid, with neighboring groups occasionally swapping styles.

Moreover, when the patterns among artifacts were layered over genetic evidence, a more complex story emerged.

The researchers identified two distinct cultural groups in modern-day Italy where DNA evidence had suggested only one existed. And, in another region, spanning present-day France and Belgium, individuals of different genetic backgrounds decorated themselves with the same types of cultural keepsakes.

Researchers have previously cautioned against muddling archeological and genetic evidence. However, archeologist Peter Jordan from Lund University and Hokkaido University has lauded Baker and colleagues’ paper as a “landmark study” that reveals how examining ancient artifacts and DNA in tandem can reveal rich tapestries of cultural behaviors and group relations that aren’t detectable by studying either DNA or artifacts alone.

The findings also strike a chord that even during bleak ice ages, our ancestors whittled and carved beautiful pendants to identify their people and distinguish themselves from others, Baker says.

“The sense of belonging felt by all humans today is deeply rooted in our shared history and played an important role in determining how Gravettian people adorned themselves,” the team concludes.

The study has been published in Nature Human Behaviour.

Simulating miniaturized versions of human organs in the lab is an emerging tool in medical research, and researchers now have a new ‘heart-on-a-chip’ model to make use of.

The team behind the chip, from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, says that it will have an important role to play in testing the safety of cancer treatments, which have been shown to risk heart damage while fighting cancer cells.

Noteworthy upgrades over previous heart-chip models include the maturity of the cells that the team developed from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs), and its ability to beat much like a human heart – at around 60 beats per minute.

“Ultimately, multi-lineage, hiPSC-based systems such as the heart-chip presented here may reduce reliance on animal models that are traditionally used for preclinical drug cardiotoxicity testing,” the researchers write in their published paper.

Capable of transforming into any type of cell, hiPSCs were engineered to become heart cells and blood vessel cells before being put onto a flexible silicone material called polydimethylsiloxane or PDMS.

A crucial part of the heart chip design is its two parallel channels, which enable the heart cells (cardiomyocytes) and blood vessel cells (endothelial cells) to be kept separate as they are in a human body while still close enough to interact.

By simulating the flow of blood and the mechanical movements of the heart in response to certain drug treatments, scientists can predict potential toxicity problems that could cause arrhythmia or the death of muscle cells.

“The heart-chip platform we have developed enables the screening of potentially cardiotoxic chemotherapeutic agents on multiple cardiovascular cell types in a physiologically-relevant model,” write the researchers.

The heart-chip remained functional for several weeks, offering the opportunity for longer-term investigations into how drugs and other environmental factors influence the heart.

As well as helping in the development of safer drugs, the heart-on-a-chip should also be able to teach scientists more about the intricacies of heart disease – how it starts and progresses, and how it might be treated.

In recent years we’ve seen a steady stream of improvements in the way these chips are developed and produced, providing super-precise simulations of how parts of the human body react on the smallest scales.

“These results suggest that heart-chips can be used for drug toxicity screening and may unveil potential cell-type specific toxicities in response to cardiotoxic compounds,” write the researchers.

The research has been published in The Royal Society of Chemistry’s Lab on a Chip.

A deep sea exploration company has released a sonar image they say may be the remains of the plane of Amelia Earhart, the famed American aviatrix who disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.

Deep Sea Vision (DSV), a South Carolina-based firm, said the image was captured after an extensive search in an area of the Pacific to the west of Earhart’s planned destination, remote Howland Island.

Earhart went missing while on a pioneering round-the-world flight with navigator Fred Noonan.

Her disappearance is one of the most tantalizing mysteries in aviation lore, fascinating historians for decades and spawning books, movies and theories galore.

The prevailing belief is that Earhart, 39, and Noonan, 44, ran out of fuel and ditched their twin-engine Lockheed Electra in the Pacific near Howland Island while on one of the final legs of their epic journey.

DSV said the blurry image captured by an unmanned underwater submersible at a depth of 16,000 feet (5,000 meters) using side scan sonar “reveals contours that mirror the unique dual tails and scale of her storied aircraft.”

On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan took off from Papua New Guinea, nearing the end of their record-setting journey around the world never to be seen again. Until today.

Deep Sea Vision found what appears to be Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra. pic.twitter.com/CTVDI6Jxpg

— Deep Sea Vision (@DeepSeaVision) January 27, 2024

“We always felt that she would have made every attempt to land the aircraft gently on the water, and the aircraft signature that we see in the sonar image suggests that may be the case,” DSV chief executive Tony Romeo said in a statement.

DSV said the exploration team spent 90 days searching 5,200 square miles (13,500 square kilometers) of the Pacific Ocean floor, “more than all previous searches combined.”

DSV said it is keeping the exact location of the find confidential for now and is planning further search efforts.

But Romeo said the discovery was made applying what is known as the “Date Line theory” first advanced in 2010 by Liz Smith, a former NASA employee.

This theory posits that Noonan forgot to turn the calendar back a day as they flew over the International Date Line, resulting in a miscalculation of his celestial star navigation and a westward navigational error of 60 miles (100 kilometers).

Earhart, who won fame in 1932 as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, took off on May 20, 1937 from Oakland, California, hoping to become the first woman to fly around the world.

She and Noonan vanished on July 2, 1937 after taking off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, on a challenging 2,500-mile (4,000-kilometer) flight to refuel on Howland Island, a speck of a US territory between Australia and Hawaii.

They never made it.

© Agence France-Presse

Elon Musk on Monday claimed in a post on X that a Neuralink brain implant has, for the first time, been inserted into a human patient’s brain.

“The first human received an implant from @Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well,” Musk wrote. “Initial results show promising neuron spike detection.”

The first product is called Telepathy, Musk said in a follow-up post, adding that the device “enables control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking. Initial users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs.”

“Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer,” he continued. “That is the goal.”

Musk previously said the Neuralink device would record and stimulate brain activity, acting as a “Fitbit in your skull,” and claimed the implant would eventually “solve” conditions including autism and schizophrenia.

Business Insider’s Hilary Brueck reported in 2019 that neuroscientists believe Neuralink won’t likely be able to “solve” mental health conditions or change the developmental architecture of the brain when it is impacted by diseases like Alzheimer’s.

However, the technology may be effective at stimulating electrodes, thereby helping paralyzed patients achieve better mobility or helping blind patients to see.

Representatives for Neuralink did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Years in the making

The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO has been promising that Neuralink would soon begin testing on humans since 2019.

The FDA initially rejected Neuralink’s request for approval to test its brain chips in humans last March, citing concerns that they could overheat or move in the brain, Reuters reported. Approval was ultimately granted in May 2023.

The approval prompted thousands of prospective patients to sign up as volunteers to have a portion of their skull removed and the implant inserted.

When the company began recruiting for its first human trial in September, Neuralink said in a blog post that it was seeking patients with spinal cord injuries who have paralysis in all four limbs or who have been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

While Neuralink says it hopes to help people with neurological disorders with its implanted devices, the company also aims to eventually develop an implant that will allow people to send messages or play games using only their thoughts.

Musk, who in 2022 claimed he plans to implant one of the chips in his own brain someday, has said he aims to create such a powerful interface through Neuralink that it will enable humans to process information faster, speed up cognition, and “achieve a sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence.”

But some experts are skeptical. In 2019, Business Insider’s Brueck spoke to Columbia University neuroscientist Randy Bruno, who said he was unsure that Neuralink could ever facilitate such super-enhanced thinking power due to the basic function of the brain.

“Neurons work at a certain speed,” Bruno, a researcher who implants probes into mouse brains, said. “I think that’s ultimately going to be limiting.”

Others have raised concerns over the ethics of the technology and its development, and Musk’s promises about what Neuralink will be able to do.

“We should, of course, hope that the intervention ultimately functions as advertised with few potential adverse side-effects,” Jason T. Eberl, professor and director of the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University, told Healthline in 2022.

“However, any for-profit medical device company also has a vested interest in generating a consumer base, which is why they make the sometimes grandiose claims they do.”

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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