Morning Feeling - Healthy Brain Aging - Inside Cells - Headache Pain
Breedlove, S
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02225-2
How the brain wakes up from sleep — and produces that morning feeling
Katie Kavanagh
How does your brain wake up from sleep? A study of more than 1,000 arousals from slumber has revealed precisely how the brain bestirs itself during the transition to alertness1 — a finding that might help to manage sleep inertia, the grogginess that many people feel when hitting the snooze button.
Recordings of people as they woke from the dream-laden phase of sleep showed that the first brain regions to rouse are those associated with executive function and decision-making, located at the front of the head. A wave of wakefulness then spreads to the back, ending with an area associated with vision.
The findings could change how we think of waking up, says Rachel Rowe, a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, who was not involved with the work. The results emphasize that “falling asleep and waking up aren’t simply reverse processes, but really waking up is this ordered wave of activation that moves from the front to the back of the brain”, whereas falling asleep seems to be less linear and more gradual.
The study was published today in Current Biology1.
The wide-awake brain shows a characteristic pattern of electrical activity, recorded by sensors on the scalp — it looks like a jagged line made up of small, tightly packed peaks and valleys. Although the pattern looks similar during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when vivid dreams occur, this stage features a lack of skeletal-muscle movement. The peaks are taller during most stages of non-REM sleep, which ranges from light to very deep slumber.
Scientists already knew that the ‘awakened’ signature occurs at different times in different brain regions, but common imaging techniques did not allow these patterns to be explored on a precise timescale.
© 2025 Springer Nature Limited
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Even healthy brains decline with age. Here's what you can do
Jon Hamilton
After about age 40, our brains begin to lose a step or two.
Each year, our reaction time slows by a few thousandths of a second. We're also less able to recall items on a shopping list.
Those changes can be signs of a disease, like Alzheimer's. But usually, they're not.
"Both of those things, memory and processing speed, change with age in a normal group of people," says Matt Huentelman, a professor at TGen, the Translational Genomics Research Institute, in Phoenix.
Huentelman should know. He helps run MindCrowd, a free online cognitive test that has been taken by more than 700,000 adults.
About a thousand of those people had test scores indicating that their brain was "exceptional," meaning they performed like a person 30 years younger on tests of memory and processing speed.
Genetics played a role, of course. But Huentelman and a team of researchers have been focusing on other differences.
A key protein called Reelin may help stave off Alzheimer's disease, according to a growing body of research.
A protein called Reelin keeps popping up in brains that resist aging and Alzheimer's
"We want to study these exceptional performers because we think they can tell us what the rest of us should be doing," he says.
Early results suggest that sleep and maintaining cardiovascular health are a good start. Other measures include avoiding smoking, limiting alcohol and getting plenty of exercise.
Huentelman was one of several dozen researchers who met in Miami this summer to discuss healthy brain aging. The event was hosted by the McKnight Brain Research Foundation, which funds studies on age-related cognitive decline and memory loss.
To preserve cognitive function in later life, "we're going to have to understand [brain] aging at a mechanistic level," says Alice Luo Clayton, a neuroscientist who is the group's chief executive officer.
© 2025 npr
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Super-resolution microscopes showcase the inner lives of cells
By Katarina Zimmer
Using a tiny, spherical glass lens sandwiched between two brass plates, the 17th century Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was the first to officially describe red blood cells and sperm cells in human tissues, and observe “animalcules” — bacteria and protists — in the water of a lake.
Increasingly powerful light microscopes followed, revealing cell organelles like the nucleus and energy-producing mitochondria. But by 1873, scientists realized there was a limit to the level of detail. When light passes through a lens, the light gets spread out through diffraction. This means that two objects can’t be distinguished if they’re less than roughly 250 nanometers (250 billionths of a meter) apart — instead, they’ll appear as a blur. That put the inner workings of cell structures off limits.
Electron microscopy, which uses electron beams instead of light, offers higher resolution. But the resulting black-and-white images make it hard tell proteins apart, and the method only works on dead cells.
Now, however, optics engineers and physicists have developed sophisticated tricks to overcome the diffraction limit of light microscopes, opening up a new world of detail. These “super-resolution” light microscopy techniques can distinguish objects down to 100 nanometers and sometimes even less than 10 nanometers. Scientists attach tiny, colored fluorescent tags to individual proteins or bits of DNA, often in living cells where they can watch them in action. As a result, they are now filling in key knowledge gaps about how cells work and what goes wrong in neurological diseases and cancers, or during viral infections.
“We can really see new biology — things that we were hoping to see but hadn’t seen before,” says molecular cell biologist Lothar Schermelleh, who directs an imaging center at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Here’s some of what scientists are learning in this new age of light microscopy.
Overcoming the diffraction limit
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https://undark.org/2025/07/18/book-excerpt-headache/
Why Do Headaches Feel So Different From Other Kinds of Pain?
By Tom Zeller Jr.
During the week between two experimental infusions at the Danish Headache Center, where I had agreed to be a test subject, I rented a small flat in central Copenhagen, near Assistens Cemetery. This is where many notable Danes have been laid to rest, and I took some time that September to visit the monuments, which were shrouded in manicured stands of mature poplars and willows.
The accompanying article is adapted from “The Headache: The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction — and a Search for Relief,” by Tom Zeller Jr. (Mariner Books, 310 pages). Copyright © 2025. Reprinted by permission.
The grave of Niels Bohr, one of the 20th century’s leading figures in theoretical physics, is marked by a gray stone pillar with an owl perched on top. Hans Christian Andersen, the author who gave us “The Little Mermaid” and “The Ugly Duckling,” among other treasured stories, resides here too. But it felt most appropriate to my mission that Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who thought suffering was where life’s meaning is forged, occupied his own leafy corner of the park.
In the Kierkegaardian tradition, suffering is redemptive — the feedstock of enlightenment — and rather than wallow in its insults and pains, the sufferer should embrace its power to transform. “Even the heaviest suffering cannot be heavier than a mountain,” he once wrote. “And thus, if the sufferer believes that his suffering is beneficial to him — yes, then he moves mountains. In order to move a mountain, you must get under it.”
I was thinking of Kierkegaard when I first presented my arm to Lanfranco Pellesi, then a researcher at the Danish Headache Center, for my initial infusion. Pellesi had an early interest in studying near-death experiences, before turning his attention to pain, and then from pain to headaches. It struck me as such an obvious trajectory — one that followed an almost inevitable path — and I asked him how he made sense of that progression. “I think probably it links to the problem of conscience — where it is, where it’s not.”
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