Excess weight harms memory and learning ability. Free Technical Library News

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Excess weight harms memory and learning ability

24.09.2018

Like humans, mice that eat a lot of fatty foods gain weight very quickly. After 12 weeks of the high-fat diet, the rodents weighed nearly 40 percent more than their counterparts who received the standard diet. Animals participating in the experiment of American scientists showed signs of weakened mental strength: mice with excess weight remembered the location of an object in labyrinths worse than mice "in shape".

Nerve cells have microscopic processes called dendritic spines (they are located on dendrites - processes of neurons) that are able to form a synoptic connection with other neurons. Compared to normal mice, the obese mice had fewer dendritic spines in several parts of the hippocampus, a brain structure that plays a big role in learning and memory.

The results show that the number of processes on the dendrites is reduced due to the fault of immune cells called microglia. In obese mice, these cells were more active just among the processes of nerve cells: they destroy dendritic spines. When the researchers tried to interfere with the microglia, the nerve cell outgrowths were protected and the mice scored better on tests of thinking.

Similar studies in the future will help find protection against brain problems associated with obesity. Overweight people are at higher risk for diseases such as Alzheimer's, and some researchers suspect that microglia may be responsible for brain disease in general.

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Birds that fly in flocks, antelopes and zebras that run in herds, and fish that huddle in schools do it for a reason - obviously, being in a group gives them some benefit. Maybe it’s safer for them, maybe it’s easier for them to look for food, maybe it’s just physically easier to move around in a large company - it’s known, for example, that birds really fly faster in large flocks.

Researchers at the University of Warwick tried to explain flocking behavior in terms of the common notion that birds, fish, and all living things in general desire the greatest possible freedom. This means that they need as much information as possible about what is happening around - then, having collected information about the surrounding space, it will become better clear where you can move. Simply put, birds (for convenience, we will only talk about birds) want to know all the possibilities - and it turns out that in order to know all the possibilities, you need to fly in a flock.

The authors of the work did not observe the birds themselves, but instead built a virtual model in which the virtual "birds" tried to "see" as much as possible around them. Several features quickly emerged in their behavior: firstly, they aimed at each other, secondly, they repeated the movements of their neighbors, and thirdly, they tried not to crash into each other. In other words, the virtual "birds" formed a flock for which it was possible to predict where it would move, how many "birds" were in it, etc. - moreover, what is important, the parameters of the virtual flock were close to how real flocks behave , herds and shoals.

The algorithm that describes the behavior in a flock is similar to the algorithm called a search tree, which is used, for example, in chess programs: game options look like a tree branching at nodes where different turns of the game are possible. The algorithm searches the search tree for the line of play that gives the greatest benefit.

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