#brain tissue

[stereofeathers]

Just when you start getting desensitized to people selling human bones on the internet some wacky motherfucker on tiktok starts selling vials of chopped up brain tissue as pendants, like wow omg how epic and cool

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

[bpod-bpod]

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

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[indizombie]

"We classify patients into possible or probable CTE," neurologist Dr Rowena Mobbs, an expert in concussion injuries from Macquarie University, said. The reason there is no "definite" category is because the disease can only be diagnosed after death, through analysis of brain tissue. The development of CTE is associated with repeated head trauma, like concussion. But little is known about how many knocks can cause it, or how hard those knocks really need to be. This is because CTE can also be caused by "subconcussive impacts", which are smaller head knocks that don't lead to a loss of consciousness but can still damage the brain over time. "Subconcussion is when there are no symptoms at all from a head knock. Those little repetitive head knocks can add up," Dr Mobbs said.

Laura Kewley and Paul Kennedy, 'Julie suffered 60 concussions during her sporting career. At age 54, her brain has been permanently damaged', ABC

[intelligentliving]

Microplastics Found To ‘Stick Around’ In Human Organs

At Arizona State University (ASU), scientists conducted a study that found nano- and micro-plastics could enter our bodies and stick around our organs, potentially causing harm. Previous research on humans’ plastic consumption rate has shown that these particles can pass through the gastrointestinal tract. According to National Geographic, humans may...

[fanggq]

nog

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

conclusion: it tastes good when it first hits you but then it tastes like leaves(?) and alcohol. second sip is better bevause youre used to it but it is still not good. could nOT finish it

[sciencenewsforstudents]

Even without concussions, just one football season may damage players’ brains

A group of college football players underwent brain scans after a season of play. The results suggest the sport could impact neural signaling.

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.

The 38 players included in the study collectively took 19,128 hits. And by the end of their season, the players on average had lower measures of fractional anisotropy in their right midbrains — a part of the brain stem. These declines were more tightly linked to the number of hits that twisted heads, as opposed to direct head-on hits. Those rotational forces might be particularly damaging to brain tissue, a finding that fits with results from earlier studies, the researchers write.

[rjzimmerman]

Air Pollution Linked to Genetic Changes in the Brain

Many heavy metals found in the air may make it into brain tissue, according to researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

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.

To understand how air pollution impacts the brain, doctor Julia Ljubimova, director of the Nanomedicine Research Center at Cedars-Sinai, produced air with the same chemical makeup as that found in Riverside, California, in the Los Angeles Basin. She and her team then subjected rats to the air, with different groups of rats breathing the polluted air for two weeks, one to three months, and 12 months. After examining the rodent brains, the researchers found higher than normal concentrations of heavy metals including cadmium, cobalt, lead, nickel, vanadium and zinc accumulated in the rats exposed to the pollution for a month or more. Even more disturbing, coarse particles of the pollutants had switched on certain genes. The research appears in the journal Scientific Reports.

[newsotu]

"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.

Read more about this fascinating story at: https://www.statnews.com/2017/11/06/human-brain-organoids-ethics/