Weird, shape-shifting glial cells are your brain's caretakers. They're the first responders in the event of a head injury, and — having colonized every nook and cranny of the place while you were still in the womb — they're your cranial custodians. These tentacled helpers clear out the junk and are vital to keeping your brain smoothly humming along. But now a new study has discovered something startling about them: they eat healthy brain cells in mice who don't get enough shut-eye. And maybe in us, too.
The study, by Michele Bellesi, Luisa De Vivo, Mattia Chini, and Chiara Chirelli, looked at two kinds of glial cells in mice:
There were three groups of mice in the study. The first group could sleep as long as they wanted, the second group was kept awake an extra eight hours before being allowed to sleep, and the third were kept away for five days to mimic chronic sleep loss. The researchers found that both kinds of glial cells put in destructive overtime in tired mice's brains.
Astrocyte (GERRY SHAW)
In the group of well-rested mice, astrocytes were seen to be active in about 6% of a mouse's synapses. In mice whose sleep had been delayed, they appeared in a larger 8%. And in the profoundly sleep-deprived mice, astrocytes were active in 13.5% of the synapses, more than double the areas of activity in the well-rested mice. “We show for the first time that portions of synapses are literally eaten by astrocytes because of sleep loss," asserts Bellesi.
Whether this is a good or bad thing is unclear. Some of the pruning was done to the largest synapses: well-used, mature connections. Bellisi suspects, “They are like old pieces of furniture, and so probably need more attention and cleaning."
Microglia and neurons (GERRY SHAW)
More worrying is the similar increase in activity discovered in microglial cells of sleep-deprived mice. Overactive microglial cells in humans have been previously linked to a variety of brain disorders. Bellisi again: “We already know that sustained microglial activation has been observed in Alzheimer's and other forms of neurodegeneration." Other studies have also linked sleep deprivation to the onset of dementia, and this could be the mechanism at work.
Assuming the results in this study of mice also hold true for humans, the obvious takeaway is that we should all be careful to get the sleep we need. According to the Sleep Foundation, these are the current recommendations for how much sleep you should be getting:
Rest well!
Airspeeder, the world's newest motorsport, is set to debut its first race in 2021.
What can you expect to see? Something like a mix between Red Bull's air racing and the pod-racing scenes from "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" — manned electric cars flying close together in the desert at 120 mph, nose-diving off cliffs, and racing over lakes, all while hopefully avoiding collisions.
Airspeeder calls its vehicles flying electric cars, but it's probably easier to think of the wheelless multicopters as car-sized drones. Powered by electric batteries, the carbon-fiber craft use eight propellers to fly, and the tiltable motors are designed to allow pilots to navigate through the course's pylons at high speeds.
Credit: Airspeeder
To prevent crashes, Airspeeder is working with the companies Acronis and Teknov8 to develop "high-speed collision avoidance" systems for its Speeders.
"As they compete, Speeders will utilise cutting-edge LiDAR and Machine Vision technology to ensure close but safe racing, with defined and digitally governed no-fly areas surrounding spectators and officials," Airspeeder wrote in a blog post.
Credit: Airspeeder
Beyond motorsports, Airspeeder hopes to help advance the electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) sector. This sector is where companies like Uber, Hyundai, and Airbus are working to develop air taxis, which could someday take the ridesharing industry into the skies. By 2040, the autonomous urban aircraft industry could be worth $1.5 trillion, according to a 2019 report from Morgan Stanley.
Still, many technical and regulatory hurdles remain. Matt Pearson, Airspeeder's founder and CEO, thinks the futuristic motorsport will help to not only speed up that process, but also pave the way for self-driving cars.
"Even with autonomous vehicles on the ground, it's a difficult thing to get right because computers have to make decisions very fast," Airspeeder's founder and CEO, Matt Pearson, told GQ." But in a racing environment, you have a pretty controlled course and you have the ability to make all the vehicles cooperate with each other. You have a whole load of vehicles talking to each other, so if there's an incident or a pilot slows down or there's a traffic jam on the course they're all aware of each other. This is something we think will revolutionise autonomous vehicles on the ground. It's technology that will make flying cars a reality in our cities in the future."
Airspeeder has yet to announce a date for the first race, but Pearson said he hopes to put on three races over the first season. The company is developing two courses: one in California's Mojave Desert, and one near Coober Pedy in South Australia.
The "placebo effect" is real. It's the name for a strange phenomenon that most notably occurs during clinical trials. People who are given an inactive substance, like a sugar pill, often experience the same therapeutic benefit as those who are given actual medicine. It's not their imagination — it really happens. (Even better, recent research suggests that therapeutic benefits occur even when the person knows that they were given a placebo.)
Now, a new study from the University of Westminster (UOW) Centre for Nutraceuticals in London and published in Frontiers in Nutrition suggests that the placebo effect may explain yet another phenomenon: Athletic performance.
The research showed that treadmill runners who rinsed their mouths with a pink liquid increased their performance over runners who swished with exactly the same liquid but without the coloring. Why pink? The color is generally linked to sweetness, and the researchers wondered if that association would subconsciously trick the runners into an expectation of more carbohydrates and thus energy.
Author Sanjoy Deb explains:
"The influence of color on athletic performance has received interest previously, from its effect on a sportsperson's kit to its impact on testosterone and muscular power. Similarly, the role of color in gastronomy has received widespread interest, with research published on how visual cues or color can affect subsequent flavor perception when eating and drinking."
Running for science
Credit: Ryan De Hamer / Unsplash
For the study, the researchers recruited ten healthy adults — six men, four women. All were regular exercisers, with an average age of 30. The participants were told that they would be testing the relative benefits of two commercial sports drinks after watching a brief video explaining the value of such beverages. Previous research found that mid-exercise rinsing with such drinks can reduce the perceived intensity of exercise.
The drinks consisted of 0.12 grams of sucralose dissolved in 500 mL of plain water — an artificially sweetened rinse low in calories. The liquids contained no other additives common to sports drinks such as caffeine. The pink version had non-caloric coloring added but was otherwise identical.
After a 12-minute warmup phase of jogging followed by running, the athletes ran at a difficult pace for 30 minutes, rinsing with their drinks as they ran. Following a brief cool-down, they were interviewed to capture their impressions of the exercise session. (Each runner tested both drinks.)
Think pink
The researchers found that when the volunteers used the pink rinse, they ran an average of 212 meters farther and 4.4 percent faster. They also enjoyed the exercise more.
Deb said, "The findings from our study combine the art of gastronomy with performance nutrition, as adding a pink colorant to an artificially sweetened solution not only enhanced the perception of sweetness, but also enhanced feelings of pleasure, self-selected running speed, and distance covered during a run."
The researchers also plan to dig deeper into the phenomenon by investigating the possibility that the pinkness of the beverage is somehow directly activating the brain's reward areas.
