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TAO, Together As One

If you want to decide over TAO’s brand, vote now. “Together As One”, is a new social app that is different than every other social app you know. It cannot be owned by a big corporation and it cannot be banned. (“Hand in a circle” is my favourite, as it couldn’t be used for commercial brands) https://tinyurl.com/m6c6pb73

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First study shows tie between probiotic and improved symptoms of depression

Probiotics may relieve symptoms of depression, as well as help gastrointestinal upset, research from McMaster University has found.

In a study published in the medical journal Gastroenterology (May 2), researchers of the Farncombe Family Digestive Health Research Institute found that twice as many adults with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) reported improvements from co-existing depression when they took a specific probiotic than adults with IBS who took a placebo.

The study provides further evidence of the microbiota environment in the intestines being in direct communication with the brain said senior author Dr. Premysl Bercik, an associate professor of medicine at McMaster and a gastroenterologist for Hamilton Health Sciences.

“This study shows that consumption of a specific probiotic can improve both gut symptoms and psychological issues in IBS. This opens new avenues not only for the treatment of patients with functional bowel disorders but also for patients with primary psychiatric diseases,” he said.

IBS is the most common gastrointestinal disorder in the world, and is highly prevalent in Canada. It affects the large intestine and patients suffer from abdominal pain and altered bowel habits like diarrhea and constipation. They are also frequently affected by chronic anxiety or depression.

The pilot study involved 44 adults with IBS and mild to moderate anxiety or depression. They were followed for 10 weeks, as half took a daily dose of the probiotic Bifidobacterium longum NCC3001, while the others had a placebo.

At six weeks, 14 of 22, or 64%, of the patients taking the probiotic had decreased depression scores, compared to seven of 22 (or 32%) of patients given placebo.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) showed that the improvement in depression scores was associated with changes in multiple brain areas involved in mood control.

“This is the result of a decade long journey - from identifying the probiotic, testing it in preclinical models and investigating the pathways through which the signals from the gut reach the brain,” said Bercik.

“The results of this pilot study are very promising but they have to be confirmed in a future, larger scale trial,” said Dr. Maria Pinto Sanchez, the first author and a McMaster clinical research fellow.

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Link Worthy:

Lights and Colour

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Sleep Scientist Warns Against Walking Through Life ‘In An Underslept State’

The National Sleep Foundation recommends an average of eight hours of sleep per night for adults, but sleep scientist Matthew Walker says that too many people are falling short of the mark.

“Human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent gain,” Walker says. “Many people walk through their lives in an underslept state, not realizing it.”

Walker is the director the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He points out that lack of sleep — defined as six hours or fewer — can have serious consequences. Sleep deficiency is associated with problems in concentration, memory and the immune system, and may even shorten lifespan.

“Every disease that is killing us in developed nations has causal and significant links to a lack of sleep,” he says. “So that classic maxim that you may [have] heard that you can sleep when you’re dead, it’s actually mortally unwise advice from a very serious standpoint.”

Walker discusses the importance of sleep — and offers strategies for getting the recommended eight hours — in his new book, Why We Sleep.

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Study sheds light on link between diseases like Alzheimer's and normal aging in the brain

In a recent Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience paper, Drs. Della David and Frank Baumann together with their teams at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases and Hertie Institute, showed that changes in proteins associated with aging were directly implicated in the protein formations commonly associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Neurodegenerative diseases are often associated with protein aggregates. These are clumps of proteins created when misfolded proteins - proteins that have lost the elaborate but recognizable shape that dictates their function - assemble together to form a highly intractable structure. Recent research has also shown that even in the absence of disease, proteins can aggregate increasingly with age.

In the case of Alzheimer’s the researchers investigated whether the Amyloid beta (Aβ) aggregates closely associated with the disease could be induced by aging seeds: proteins that clump together with age to form aggregates. This would occur through a hypothesized phenomenon called cross-seeding, where different protein aggregates can induce each other’s aggregation. Crucially, the few existing examples of cross-seeding occur between disease-associated proteins.

The study’s experiments on C. elegans, an organism whose limited number of cells and relative complexity makes it an ideal test subject, showed that age-dependent protein aggregates can induce Aβ aggregation in vitro, and that the age-dependent protein aggregates of older C. elegans specimens were particularly likely to cross-seed Aβ aggregates.  

In order to verify the applicability of these results to mammals, the same tests were performed in vitro on mouse brain extracts of varying age, with similar outcomes.

By performing a protein count via mass spectrometry for C. elegans, the study also identified some proteins for further investigation. The most promising candidates for cross-seeding activity were proteins present as minor components in disease-associated aggregates, which aggregate increasingly after middle-age.

Furthermore, the researchers demonstrated that one of these aggregation-prone proteins, PAR-5, can induce Aβ toxicity in vivo. According to paralysis rates, the combination of overexpressed PAR-5 with overexpressed Aβ accelerated Aβ toxicity in C. elegans.

Combined with the mass spectrometry, these experiments further highlight that certain minor components may qualify as proteins that “could be more prone to aggregate in specific brain regions and thus help the generation and spreading of disease-associated seeds in certain brain circuits.”

This study thus predicts that changes in protein conformations associated with old age may initiate Alzheimer’s disease through Aβ aggregation and toxicity.

Given that the study’s in vitro assays cannot mimic the entire complexity of the brain and picture all neurobiological interactions, the researchers encourage an “in vivo assessment by injecting age-dependent aggregates into a pre-symptomatic transgenic mouse models for Alzheimer’s disease.”

They add that aggregating proteins should be mapped in both healthy and neurodegenerative human brain samples, as a way of clarifying “which aging seeds need to be looked at and whether certain aging seeds would be more prone to seed or associate with specific disease types in specific anatomical areas.”

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A Breath of Fresh Air: Drexel Scientists Reveal How the Brain Generates Respiratory Rhythm

Bringing a steady supply of fresh air to the lungs can seem like a simple task, but breathing is a careful orchestration of brain and body.

Diseases like Rett syndrome, central sleep apnea and congenital central hypoventilation syndrome are characterized by breathing difficulties that may be caused by dysfunction in the brain’s breathing center. Now, Drexel University scientists have introduced a new concept of how the brain is involved in this essential function, providing new insight into how breathing disorders could be treated in the future.

The brainstem, which connects the brain with the spinal cord, generates the breathing rhythm and controls its rate, depending on the body’s demands. While this process normally occurs automatically, we can also control our breathing voluntarily, such as when speaking or eating.

Twenty-five years ago, a cluster of neurons within the brainstem, called the pre-Bötzinger complex (pre-BötC), was identified as the likely source of rhythmic inhalation. Following this breakthrough, researchers have spent years attempting to understand how the pre-BötC operates.

“For any cyclical biologic process, you need some mechanism that generates a rhythm, and then that rhythm is translated to a motor pattern. How exactly the pre-BötC generates that rhythm has remained a mystery,” said Bartholomew Bacak, PhD, a researcher in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, and an MD student in the College of Medicine.

Two decades after the discovery of the pre-BötC, scientists hypothesized that two distinct systems in the brain interact to initiate breathing: a “rhythm-generating” layer composed of high-frequency neurons and a “pattern-forming” layer, which signals the diaphragm to contract and the lungs to fill with air.

Using a series of computational models, Drexel researchers in the Laboratory for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience, under the leadership of Ilya Rybak, PhD, are the first to challenge this paradigm.

Their study, recently published in the journal eLife, suggests that mixed-mode oscillations in the pre-BötC — or regular back-and-forth movements — result from synchronizations of many neurons with different levels of excitability. Neurons with low excitability have low bursting frequencies, but generate strong activity and recruit other neurons, ultimately producing the large amplitude bursts that cause breathing.

The discovery could have important implications for our understanding of the brain’s control of breathing. The findings may ultimately impact how scientists research and clinicians treat respiratory disorders.

Many other parts of the nervous system also contain networks of neurons with diverse excitability. A challenge for future studies is to investigate whether networks similar to those in the pre-BötC complex generate the rhythms that control other repetitive actions, such as walking and chewing.

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42nd Street, 1986

Photo by Matt Weber

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If you haven’t yet heard Amanda Palmer’s stunning string quartet tribute to Bowie, do yourself a favor, then read my extensive conversation with Palmer about art as non-ownable nourishment, patronage vs. commerce, and the story behind her Bowie project. 

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Editorial Límits cover collection by Irene Clua

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Listen

Wiped Out - Lurch & Chief (2015)

The Bohicas - The Making Of (2015)

Sarah Jaffe - Don’t Disconnect (2014)

Wye Oak - Shriek (2014)

Phantogram - Voices (2014)

Goldfrapp - Tales Of Us (2013)

Bonobo - Late Night Tales (2013)

Alex Winston - King Con (2012)

Choir Of Young Believers - Rhine Gold (2012)

Austra - Feel It Break (2011)

Bell X1 - Chop Chop (2011)

Bonobo - Black Sands (2010)

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The abyss

(Image: Core on Boldomatic)

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Meet Clues

Clues is my new magazine with curated links and original content posts around the topics of design, culture and technology.

Clues →

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(Source: NPR)

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Bot Mono will come in Thin, Light, Book, Regular, Bold and Black, as well as Thin Italic, Light Italic, Book Italic, Regular Italic, Bold Italic and Black Italic.

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Here is a glimpse of the new font family Bot Mono I have been working on over the past six months. The typeface is nearly complete, missing a number of characters in European languages like Greek and the Baltic languages. Italics have not been developed yet as well, so it may take a few more months until the final release.