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Gizmorama - January 29, 2014
Good Morning, Have you ever wondered why our brains slow down over time? Is so, the answer might surprise you! That's all I'll say.
Learn about these interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.
Until Next Time,
ErinP.S. Did you miss an issue? You can read every issue from the Gophercentral library of newsletters on our exhaustive archives page. Thousands of issues, all of your favorite publications in chronological order. You can read AND comment. Just click
GopherArchives****-- More experience, rather than age, is why our brains slow down --*TUEBINGEN, Germany - Our brains slow as we age not because of cognitive decline but because the have so much more experience to wade through, European researchers say. While it has long been assumed age leads to a steady deterioration of brain function, researchers at the University of Tuebingen in Germany suggest older brains may take longer to process ever increasing amounts of knowledge, a process that may be misidentified as declining capacity. Because most standard cognitive measures may confuse increased knowledge for declining capacity, such measures are flawed, the researchers said. Led by Michael Ramscar, the research team used computers, programmed to act as though they were humans, to "read" a certain amount each day, learning new things along the way. When a computer was allowed to "read" just a limited amount, its performance on cognitive tests resembled that of a young adult. However, when the same computer was exposed to an amount of data which represented a lifetime of experiences, its performance looked like that of an older adult. It was slower -- not because its processing capacity had declined, but because increased "experience" gave it more data to process, and that processing takes time. "What does this finding mean for our understanding of our aging minds, for example older adults' increased difficulties with word recall? These are traditionally thought to reveal how our memory for words deteriorates with age, but Big Data adds a twist to this idea," Ramscar said. The study has been published in the journal Topics in Cognitive Science.
*-- Plant virus may be infecting honeybees, leading to colony declines --*BELTSVILLE, Md. - A viral pathogen that typically infects plants has been found in honeybees and could help explain a decline in their numbers, U.S. researchers say. It could be involved in the phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious malady that has wiped out entire hives in the United States since it was first identified in 2006, a release from the American Society for Microbiology said Tuesday. A routine screening of bees for frequent and rare viruses "resulted in the serendipitous detection of Tobacco Ringspot Virus, or TRSV, and prompted an investigation into whether this plant-infecting virus could also cause systemic infection in the bees," Yan Ping Chen from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, said. About 5 percent of known plant viruses are pollen-transmitted and thus potential sources of host-jumping viruses that could infect bees, the researchers said. "The increasing prevalence of TRSV in conjunction with other bee viruses is associated with a gradual decline of host populations and supports the view that viral infections have a significant negative impact on colony survival," the researchers said. The team of researchers from the United States and China has reported their findings in the journal mBio.
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