Tag: mit research

MIT Researchers Believe Targeting Treatments to This Brain Circuit May Reverse Memory Decline

As we age, the retention power of our memory often degrades. This makes performing everyday tasks difficult. It gets very difficult to remember things. For instance, elderly people could forget by afternoon what they ate for breakfast. They may even find it difficult to recall a conversation they had with someone. One key brain region linked to this type of memory is the anterior thalamus, which is primarily involved in the recollection of our surroundings and how to navigate them. The thalamus is an egg-shaped structure in the middle of the brain whose primary function is to relay incoming sensory information — such as hearing, taste, sight, and touch — from the body to the brain. However, it does not relay information related to smell.

In a recent study on mice, researchers have identified a circuit in the anterior thalamus that is key to remembering how to navigate a maze. They found that this circuit is usually impaired in older mice. But if this circuit’s activity is enhanced, it greatly improves the ability of the mice to run the maze correctly.

The researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) focussed on this region of the brain in their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and say this could be an ideal target for treatments to reverse memory loss in elderly people.

They say if a non-invasive or minimally invasive technology is developed to target treatments in this part of the human brain, it could offer a way to help prevent age-related memory loss.

Guoping Feng, senior author of the study, said that instead of influencing the prefrontal cortex, which has many distinct roles, they want to uncover more specific and druggable targets in this area by studying how the thalamus affects the cortical output.

An advantage of targeting the thalamus for treatments is that it limits possible disturbances to other parts of the brain.

We can trigger anxiety-related behaviour by directly activating neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex, but this will not happen with AV (anteroventral) activation, said Ying Zhang, lead author of the study.

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Eight New Echoing Black Hole Binaries Discovered in Our Galaxy: MIT Researchers

Black holes are intriguing and mysterious objects. They are dreaded, too, because their gravitational pull is so strong that they do not allow anything to pass through them, not even light, except on the rare occasions when they feed. When a black hole pulls in gas and dust from an orbiting star, it sends out spectacular bursts of X-ray that bounce and echo off the gas spiralling inwards. During this phase, the back hole illuminates its extreme surroundings. Researchers from MIT have now found eight new echoing black hole binaries — systems with a star orbiting, and occasionally being eaten away by, a black hole — in our galaxy Milky Way. Previously, only two were known.

The researchers looked for flashes and echoes from nearby black hole X-ray binaries, using a new automated search tool, called the “Reverberation Machine”. This research was supported, in part, by NASA.

By comparing the echoes, they created a general picture of how a black hole evolves during an outburst. They found a black hole first undergoes a “hard” state, whipping up a corona of high-energy photons along with a jet of relativistic particles that is launched away at close to the speed of light. A final, high-energy flash is emitted by the black hole at a given point. The system then enters a low-energy (soft) condition.

This final flash could indicate that a black hole’s corona extends briefly before disappearing completely. These findings, published in the Astrophysical Journal, could help explain how larger, supermassive black holes at the center of a galaxy shape its formation.

 

“The role of black holes in galaxy evolution is an outstanding question in modern astrophysics,” said Erin Kara, assistant professor of physics at MIT, in a statement. Kara said by understanding the outburst in these small black hole binaries they hope to understand how similar outbursts in supermassive black holes affect their native galaxies.

For their study, the team picked up 26 black hole X-ray binary systems known to emit X-ray outbursts. Of these, the team found that 10 systems were close and bright enough that they could discern X-ray echoes amid the outbursts. Eight of the 10 had never been known to produce echoes before.

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