Do intelligent people think faster? Researchers at the BIH and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, together with a colleague from Barcelona, made the surprising finding that participants with higher intelligence scores were only quicker when tackling simple tasks, while they took longer to solve difficult problems than subjects with lower IQ scores. In personalized brain simulations of the 650 participants, the researchers could determine that brains with reduced synchrony between brain areas literally “jump to conclusions” when making decisions, rather than…

Medicine is becoming increasingly complex, not least due to new technologies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) aims to help doctors manage the flood of information and make the best possible decisions for their patients. With the recently founded AI Center for Health Care, the state of Bremen is promoting cross-institute cooperation on this future topic through the U Bremen Research Alliance – and is bolstering health research in Bremen. As one of the activities in the lead project “Artificial Intelligence”, establishing the…

How bacteria use electricity and carbon dioxide to produce useful chemicals. In microbial electrosynthesis, microorganisms use CO2 and electricity to produce alcohol, for example. How this process works biologically, however, has only been speculated about until now. Researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology (Leibniz-HKI) have now been able to confirm experimentally for the first time that the bacteria use electrons from hydrogen and can produce more chemical substances than previously known. Microbial electrosynthesis is…

Scientists uncover cellular process behind oxygen production. One out of 10 breaths contains oxygen generated by cellular mechanism in microscopic algae. Take a deep breath. Now take nine more. According to new research, the amount of oxygen in one of those 10 breaths was made possible thanks to a newly identified cellular mechanism that promotes photosynthesis in marine phytoplankton. Described as “groundbreaking” by a team of researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, this previously unknown process accounts…

Researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) identify a protein in some people with schizophrenia that causes schizophrenia-like features in mice. Links have been reported between schizophrenia and proteins produced by the immune system that can act against one’s own body, known as autoantibodies. In a study published last month in Brain Behavior and Immunity, Japanese researchers identified autoantibodies that target a ‘synaptic adhesion protein’, neurexin 1α, in a subset of patients with schizophrenia. When injected into mice, the…

Rice U. engineers’ device is gentle on neurons, could serve as sensory prosthesis. Conventional implantable medical devices designed for brain stimulation are often too rigid and bulky for what is one of the body’s softest and most delicate tissues. To address the problem, Rice University engineers have developed minimally invasive, ultraflexible nanoelectrodes that could serve as an implanted platform for administering long-term, high-resolution stimulation therapy. According to a study published in Cell Reports, the tiny implantable devices formed stable, long-lasting and seamless…

An international team consisting of researchers from Japan and Luxembourg show for the first time that pathological forms of the alpha-synuclein protein present in the blood of patients can be used for the diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease and its differentiation from several other neurodegenerative motor disorders. Their ground-breaking results, recently published in Nature Medicine, constitute a major step towards developing better diagnostics based on a simple blood test. Parkinson’s disease, dementia with Lewy bodies and multiple system atrophy compose a…

… against the important carbapenem antibiotics. In 2050, the number of people dying as a result of infection with antibiotic-resistant bacteria could rise to ten million, according to WHO forecasts. For targeted therapies and to prevent the spread of antibiotic resistance, rapid and accurate diagnosis of resistance is essential. A new rapid test developed by DZIF researchers in cooperation with the company Coris BioConcept now makes it possible to detect over 95 percent of carbapenem resistance in patients infected with…

The cancer gene MYC drives unrestrained growth of most human cancers. It has been called the “Mount Everest” of cancer research because of the difficulty of designing medications that can disable it, and the expectation that an effective MYC drug could help so many cancer patients. Research groups from the The Wertheim UF Scripps Institute in Florida, the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund and the University of Münster have joined forces and climbed that peak by developing…

Ultrastructural changes in brain tissue promote inflammatory processes. Multiple sclerosis (MS) is the most common inflammatory disease of the central nervous system. It is characterized by inflammatory foci and damage in the brain’s so-called white matter, which consists of long nerve fibers and myelin. A German-Dutch research team has now shown that ultrastructural changes in healthy areas in the white matter of MS patients make the tissue more susceptible to inflammation and the formation of lesions. This could promote the…

… brings blood pressure monitoring to your fingertips. Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a simple, low-cost clip that uses a smartphone’s camera and flash to monitor blood pressure at the user’s fingertip. The clip works with a custom smartphone app and currently costs about 80 cents to make. The researchers estimate that the cost could be as low as 10 cents apiece when manufactured at scale. The technology was published May 29 in Scientific Reports….

KRISS demonstrated carrier transport mechanism of photoanode with protective film to optimize green hydrogen production, The development can contribute to the realization of carbon-free green hydrogen and artificial photosynthesis. Hydrogen has been gaining attention as a clean and efficient energy source. However, is hydrogen really environmentally friendly? Most hydrogen commonly used now is “grey hydrogen” derived from fossil fuels. Since its production process accompanies generation of green house gas, it can be said that grey hydrogen is not environmentally friendly…

How inherited neurodegenerative diseases develop. Our cells are crisscrossed by a system of membrane tubes and pockets called the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). It is crucial for the production of biomolecules and is continuously built up and degraded. Degradation, known as ER-phagy, is promoted by the protein ubiquitin, which controls many processes in the cell. If the proteins involved in ER-phagy are defective, neurodegenerative diseases result. This has been discovered by an international research team led by Goethe University Frankfurt (as…

of part of the brain’s protein destruction machine at synapses. A major component of the cell’s protein destruction machine moonlights at brain synapses. A new study by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research discovered a ‘moonlighting’ function carried out by a complex that normally works to degrade proteins in cells – this protein destruction machine is called the proteasome. The scientists found, by counting and visualizing individual protein complexes, that one part of the proteasome (the 19S…

Arrangement of proteins could be responsible for diseases. Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s or Huntington’s disease: the behavior of certain molecules that play a role in sub-cellular processes influence the development of such neurodegenerative diseases. Scientists from Mischa Bonn’s department at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research and Sapun Parekh’s lab at the University of Texas have now studied a specific protein using various methods to better understand the mechanism behind these diseases. Processes inside human cells are tightly regulated in time…

MHH neurophysiologist demonstrates the effect of the antipsychotic amisulpride on harmful protein deposits in nerve cells of the brain. A clinical trial will investigate the drug’s efficacy in dementia patients. A common feature of many neurodegenerative diseases are pathological protein deposits in the brain. These protein aggregates cause nerve cells to die and, as a result, entire brain areas to shrink, which manifests itself in affected individuals as progressive dementia. The so-called tau protein in particular is involved in the…