Week 5 [18-24.05.2020] Brain training

The brain is a unique organ that we often forget when exercising our body. The brain should be trained as well as our body to remain fully functional for a long time. Many research results indicate that aerobic exercise and cognitive reasoning training help to improve brain health. Such training in older people allows for better fitness in the hippocampus regions particularly vulnerable to aging and dementia. Despite research in a selected narrow-screen group of people between 56-75 years of age, researchers agree that we should begin to care for the efficiency of our brain much earlier, and not only when we experience significant cognitive loss.

For sure each of us has heard a lot that crosswords, Sudoku and similar games are the perfect training for our brains. There are many pros and cons. First of all, it's hard to measure how much playing such games affects neural connections. In addition, by solving a lot of crosswords, we become great at solving them, but they do not affect other brain functions such as making decisions or planning.

Dr. Chapman suggests that first of all we should eliminate bad habits acting against the healthy function of the frontal lobe, e.g. multitasking, studies show that the brain can do only one thing at a time. We should also take breaks from technology even for up to 30 minutes. By building good habits we will be able to improve e.g. innovate thinking or development of new solutions.

Quoting " Our brains become quickly jaded by routine so push past the predictable to better your brain health across the lifespan.”

Read the following articles:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/make-your-brain-smarter/201403/do-brain-games-really-boost-brainpower

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00338/full

 

1. Which training do you think has a better effect on our brain: aerobic or cognitive reasoning?

2. Do you play any games or solve crosswords to improve brain cognition? If not why?

3. Do you think that in a world full of technology and the ubiquitous rat race, can we afford to slow down, put down the phone and allow our brain to relax?

Week 5 [18-24.05.2020] Does the brain wash itself?

Deep, peaceful sleep is essential for our physical and mental health.  It is also necessary  for maintaining cognitive functions.  Slow waves in neural activity contribute to memory consolidation. Cerebrospinal fluid purifies the brain of metabolic products.  Now we have another argument that long and deep sleep is good for us: it triggers rhythmic waves of blood and cerebrospinal fluid that seems to work like a washing cycle, creating oscillations that in turn correlate with the flow of cerebrospinal fluid.  Such oscillations can help to clear the brain of toxic waste in real time. These results were recently published in the Science journal .  The authors of the study are the first to indicate that the brain, through its electrical activity during sleep, can trigger waves of cerebrospinal fluid.   Purifying itself in this way.  Further research into this phenomenon may help to explain why bad sleep or lack of it was previously associated with the spread of toxic proteins and worsening memory loss in people with Alzheimer's disease..

Questions

1. Are you satisfied with your sleep?
2. Did you have any physical or mental effects when you  pulled an all-nighter?
3. Is the combination of fmri and eeg a good idea? Only 13 people were examined in the study.  Is this enough to draw these conclusions? 
4. Do you like to work at night? If yes, do you think that's healthy?

http://212.182.24.236/nextcloud/index.php/s/b7Xna5yRy4CjEkB

Week 5 [18-24.05.2020] How does the brain link events to form a memory?

Hi, everyone!!!

Today I will share with you a link to article about brain.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200508112903.htm

The brain has a powerful ability to remember and connect events separated in time. A scientists at Columbia’s Zukerman Institute uncovered a mechanism by which hippocampus builds bridges across time. They done a research on mice.

Please read the article and answer a few questions

1. Have you ever witnessed an accident? Do you remember it?
2. Do you remember information easily?
3. What do you think about this article? 
4. How could we use the results presented in this article?

WEEK 4 [04.05 - 10.05] Viruss

Do you remember the WinCIH virus, also popularly known as Chernobyl? A lot of myths grew up about it, some of which were obviously not true. The virus itself is almost forgotten today - only older computer users have heard about it or even had the unpleasantness to experience it on their own equipment. The most interesting thing in its history is that it was never intended to spread and cause the damage it did.

1. Were you a victim of some kind of virus?

2. What types of virus do you think are the most dangerous?

3. What new types of viruses will emerge in the future? How and what will they attack?

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/04/26/20-years-ago-today-what-we-can-learn-from-the-cih-virus

WEEK 4 [04.05 - 10.05] COVID -19 origin

I would like to present the article about coronavirus. The topic of coronavirus is essential part of our life in times of pandemic. I found article describing the origin of COVID-19. The presented results show that COVID-19 is not a laboratory construct or a manipulated virus. The article includes the review what can be deducted about coronavirus origin and conduct comparative analyze of genomic data. The possible scenarios of appearing of the SARS-CoV-2 genome were presented. The features of COVIC-19 were presented and basing on these features the authors explain that the genetic data show that coronavirus is not based on any virus backbone used before. Authors give two possible origin of coronavirus: natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer, natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer and selection during passage. If the researchers understand how an animal virus jumped the species boundary, it allows to prevent the future zoonic events. The genomes described in the articles explain in part the infectiousness and transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 in humans. The authors sum up the article concluding, that it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of COVID-19 origin.

Here, you can find the link to article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

1. What is your opinion about the origin of coronavirus?

2. During the COVID pandemic did you do anything that you had not had time for before, if so, what was it?

3. What do you miss most of the things, you could do before pandemic of coronavirus and why?

4. What do you think about prohibition  of using cars during Sunday and other holidays? Please explain your point of view. I watched how the quarantine looks like in others countries. People are not allowed to use the cars during Sunday and other holidays for example in Kazakhstan and Beirut.

Week 4 [04-10.05.2020] A tree with 40 fruits

On one tree 40 different kinds of stone fruit grow harmoniously.

The tree created by Aken is a hybrid on which 40 different kinds of stone fruit grow simultaneously. The name of the initiative is "Tree with 40 fruits". The process is also very time-consuming and lengthy. The grafting of a sprouting branch of one species takes 8 to 9 years.

The grafting process consists of cutting a piece of a branch with a donut from a tree of one of the varieties and inserting it into a crack in the branch in a living tree, then wrapping the wound with tape until it heals and the donut starts to grow into a new branch. Although it originally began with a slight fascination, over the years the project has developed on a much wider scale.

https://youtu.be/ik3l4U_17bI

Did you know that such hybrids are possible?

What are the main reasons for grafting trees?

Are you not afraid to eat fruit from such a tree?

Are you interested in gardening?