#brain tissue

Also, from the home page of the Facebook group they refer to on their linktree as their "cult"

Still Life

Artists have options – a huge palate of shades and hues to splash across a canvas. But ‘painting’ real life so it can be seen under a microscope is often limited. Using brightly coloured fluorescent stains to highlight specific biological bits is only useful if they can be separated afterwards by their unique colourful properties – their spectra. With similar colours this becomes a challenge, especially in the brain, where spectra may change in different tissues. Here researchers use a technique, called PICASSO, that allows them to use many distinct colours in a stained slice of a mouse’s brain. The secret is mutual information – how much ‘information’ from one colour bleeds into the spectrum of another. By designing software to minimise this overlap during analysis, scientists spot different blends in nearby structures – potentially expanding the palette of colours available to paint still, and not so still, microscopic life.

Written by John Ankers

Video from work by Junyoung Seo, Yeonbo Sim and Jeewon Kim, and colleagues

Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea

Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Nature Communications, May 2022

im trying eggnog! im gonna document it right here in this post! bc eggnog is supposed to be good for seizures idk aNYWAY HERE WE GO

im a lil nervous... ok first sip EW OH MY GOD ITS BAD EW

or maybe its ok 2nd sip here we go not as bad but i will finish this glass and never have eggnog again

A season of head hits left its mark on college football players’ brains, even when those hits didn’t cause concussions. Routine head bumps over the course of a season were linked to abnormal brain tissue in part of players’ brain stems, researchers report August 7 in Science Advances. It’s unclear if these brain stem changes affect mental performance, or whether the changes are permanent. But the study suggests that in addition to the big hits that cause concussions, these smaller knocks could cause trouble.

During the 2011, 2012 and 2013 football seasons, a team led by researchers at the University of Rochester in New York recruited players from the university to participate in a study looking at head impacts and brain health. Each player wore an accelerometer in his helmet to capture the forces at play during all practices and games during a single season. The players also underwent pre- and post-season brain scans. A measure called fractional anisotropy let researchers estimate how well stretches of white matter brain tissue can carry neural signals, a key job of healthy brain tissue.

Excerpt:

There's little question that air pollution is toxic for the human body. Studies have shown that particulate matter in the air can lead to lung disease, heart disease, strokes, and lung cancer. But researchers thought the brain might be protected due to the blood brain barrier—a natural system that filters out foreign substances and certain neurotransmitters before they circulate in the brain. A new study from researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles shows that many heavy metals found in the air may make it into brain tissue, and those pollutants are activating genes that may lead to cancers or neurodegenerative disorders.

"Science Implant Human Brain 'Organoids' Inside Rats and Mice"

 According to a new report by STATNews, scientists have implanted human brain cells into lab rodents, with many of the transplants successful. In one case, the rodent survived for at least two months, according to the summaries of the two papers presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, D.C.  Four years ago, scientists in Vienna discovered that human brain tissue could be created from stem cells. Since then, scientists have been able to make human brain organoids produce new neurons and develop the six layers of the human cortex, the region in the brain responsible for advanced cognitive functions.  The previously unreported experiments are notable in how the human organoids implanted into mice connected with the rodent's circulatory system, marking the first-ever brain vascularization in a rodent. Furthermore, mature neurons from the human brain organoid sent axons into “multiple regions of the host mouse brain,” reported by team lead Fred Gage of the Salk Institute.  Although the extent of the organoid's growth is limited to the tiny confines of the rodents in the study, the experiment has garnered international attention, with many questioning the ethics “of whether you are creating something human-ish that you have to take seriously in terms of according it dignity and respect — and figuring out what that even means,” said bioethicist Hank Greely of Stanford University.