news 2022

Altruistic behaviour takes place in a different part of the brain to similar activity to help oneself, new research has found. An area of the brain specifically involved in putting in effort to help others out has been pinpointed by scientists at the University of Birmingham and University of Oxford.

A study by University of Manchester neuroscientists into the effect of surprise on our memory has inadvertently discovered a method which might help us to perform better in exams. In the study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience , 26 people were shown pictures of objects that were either natural, such as fruit, tress, flowers, or man-made such as a computer mouse and telephone.

People who make a living fishing off the coral reefs around the Maldives say their daily income is down by almost a quarter due to sharks stealing their catch. The waters around the Maldives, a collection of islands in the Indian Ocean, were designated a shark sanctuary in 2010 to help conserve shark species which had been in decline, primarily due to overfishing.

Researchers from the Milner Centre for Evolution have found that gut bacteria co-evolve with their hosts. Your gut microbiome, the community of bacteria living in your digestive system, is not just affected by your diet and environment, but can be influenced by your genes too, say scientists. A team of researchers from the UK and Germany studying the microbiomes of house mice, found that the genetic make-up of the mouse host had a significant influence over the composition of the bacteria in the gut, with many species being heritable from one generation to the next.

By estimating people's brain age from MRI scans using machine learning, a team led by UCL researchers has identified multiple risk factors for a prematurely ageing brain. They found that worse cardiovascular health at age 36 predicted a higher brain age later in life, while men also tended to have older brains than women of the same age, as they report in The Lancet Healthy Longevity .

A new AI-enabled, optical fibre sensor device developed at Imperial College London can measure key biomarkers of traumatic brain injury simultaneously The 'promising' results from tests on animal brain tissues suggest it could help clinicians to better monitor both disease progression and patients' response to treatment than is currently possible, which indicate the high potential for future diagnostic trials in humans.

The deadliest form of brain cancer returns because tumours adapt to treatment by recruiting help from nearby healthy tissue, say researchers who are trying to find a cure for the disease. A new study, by a global team including Leeds experts, has found that in response to treatment, high-grade gliomas appear to remodel the surrounding brain environment, potentially creating interactions with nearby neurons and immune cells in ways that protect the tumour cells and hide them from the body's defences.

A preeminent study has, for the first time, directly measured energetic cost of chewing in humans and has suggested it may have played a crucial role in the evolution of human jaws, chewing muscles and teeth. The University of Manchester led study - published in the journal Science Advances - indicates that you exert more energy when chewing hard to process foods like nuts and raw fruit.

An analysis of bumblebee wings from a network of UK museums shows signs of stress linked to increasingly hotter and wetter conditions. As well as revealing what is linked to stress in bees in the past, the study can help predict when and where bees will face most stress and potential decline in the future.

An artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that can detect subtle brain abnormalities which cause epileptic seizures has been developed by a UCL-led team of international researchers. The Multicentre Epilepsy Lesion Detection project (MELD) used over 1,000 patient MRI scans from 22 global epilepsy centres to develop the algorithm, which provides reports of where abnormalities are in cases of drug-resistant focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) - a leading cause of epilepsy.

Researchers from the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB) have developed a new enzyme engineering platform to improve plastic degrading enzymes through directed evolution. To illustrate the utility of their platform, they have engineered an enzyme that can successfully degrade poly(ethylene) terephthalate (PET), the plastic commonly used in plastic bottles.

DNA damage caused by factors such as ultraviolet radiation affect nearly three-quarters of all stem cell lines derived from human skin cells, say Cambridge researchers, who argue that whole genome sequencing is essential for confirming if cell lines are usable. Almost three-quarters of the cell lines had UV damage.

Researchers from the University of Oxford, KTH Royal Institute of Technology , Science for Life Laboratory , and the Karolinska Institutet , Solna, Sweden, have found that individual prostate tumours contain a previously unknown range of genetic variation. Understanding which cells give rise to which areas of cancer can improve our understanding of how a tumour has grown and developed, including how it has changed genetically, over time.

Dr Charlie Arber (UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology) has been named the winner of Alzheimer's Society's first ever research image competition, with a picture of brain cells grown from the skin of people with dementia. The Spotlight on Dementia contest aimed to shine a light on crucial dementia research done by academics who are funded by the charity, and challenged them to showcase their work through creative images and video.

Apple trees respond to a common viral infection by targeting a gene in the same pathway that genetic scientists are aiming at, find scientists from The University of Manchester The discovery published in Current Biology shows that the fruit trees, which develop rubbery branches when infected, mirrors how scientists are trying to genetically modify trees.

Sepsis is a primary cause of mortality in newborns, particularly in lowand middle-income countries (LMICs). A new study coordinated by Professor Tim Walsh at the Ineos Oxford Institute for Antimicrobial Research (IOI) and Department of Biology looks at the links between the presence of bacteria resistant to antibiotics isolated from mothers and their newborn babies living across 7 LMICs in Africa and South Asia.

UK scientists have highlighted a mutation in the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 that allows the virus to evade important immune cells induced by infection and vaccines. The P272L Spike mutation first arose during the UK's second wave of COVID-19, which began in September 2020, and has been pinpointed to the part of the Spike protein most frequently recognised by killer T-cells.

Researchers have built a new easy-to-use test that could diagnose non-infectious diseases like heart attacks and cancers more quickly. The new test works by detecting molecular signals in the body called biomarkers, which are already used in things like COVID-19 testing where the presence of SARS-CoV-2 genes indicates COVID-19.

A major study of children with intellectual disabilities has highlighted the additional challenges that they often face, including a much-increased likelihood of being diagnosed as autistic, as well as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and other mental health difficulties.

Researchers from Oxford's Institute of Population Ageing, Tufts University and the University of Manchester have discovered that common viruses appear to play a role in some cases of Alzheimer's disease (AD). The causes of most cases of Alzheimer's are currently unknown, but there is growing evidence to suggest microbial organisms are involved, in particular, herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1), the so-called cold sore virus.