Comment

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 2 minutes ago

Humans are evolved for nature, not cities, say anthropologists

A new paper by evolutionary anthropologists argues that modern life has outpaced human evolution. The study suggests that chronic stress and many modern health issues are the result of an evolutionary mismatch between our primarily nature-adapted biology and the industrialized environments we now inhabit.

Over hundreds of thousands of years, humans adapted to the demands of hunter-gatherer life—high mobility, intermittent stress and close interaction with natural surroundings.

Industrialization, by contrast, has transformed the human environment in only a few centuries, by introducing noise, air and light pollution, microplastics, pesticides, constant sensory stimulation, artificial light, processed foods and sedentary lifestyles.

In our ancestral environments, we were well adapted to deal with acute stress to evade or confront predators. 

The lion would come around occasionally, and you had to be ready to defend yourself—or run. The key is that the lion goes away again.

Today's stressors—traffic, work demands, social media and noise, to name just a few—trigger the same biological systems, but without resolution or recovery. Our body reacts as though all these stressors were lion, say the researchers.

Whether it's a difficult discussion with your boss or traffic noise, your stress response system is still the same as if you were facing lion after lion. As a result, you have a very powerful response from your nervous system, but no recovery.

This stress is becoming constant.

In their review, the researchers synthesize evidence suggesting that industrialization and urbanization are undermining human evolutionary fitness. From an evolutionary standpoint, the success of a species depends on survival and reproduction. According to the authors, both have been adversely affected since the Industrial Revolution.

They point to declining global fertility rates and rising levels of chronic inflammatory conditions such as autoimmune diseases as signs that industrial environments are taking a biological toll.

There's a paradox where, on the one hand, we've created tremendous wealth, comfort and health care for a lot of people on the planet, but on the other hand, some of these industrial achievements are having detrimental effects on our immune, cognitive, physical and reproductive functions.

One well-documented example is the global decline in sperm count and motility observed since the 1950s, which the researchers  link to environmental factors. This is thought to be tied to pesticides and herbicides in food, but also to microplastics.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 13 minutes ago

Could atoms be reordered to enhance electronic devices?
Reordering atoms in SiGeSn barriers surrounding GeSn quantum wells unexpectedly increases charge carrier mobility, contrary to prior assumptions. This enhancement is likely due to atomic short-range ordering, suggesting that manipulating atomic arrangements could significantly improve electronic device performance and miniaturization, with implications for neuromorphic and quantum computing.

 Christopher R. Allemang et al, High Mobility and Electrostatics in GeSn Quantum Wells With SiGeSn Barriers, Advanced Electronic Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1002/aelm.202500460. advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.c … .1002/aelm.202500460

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 40 minutes ago

Investigations, comparing experiment with theory, demonstrate conclusively that dressed quarks with dynamically generated masses are the active degrees of freedom underlying the structure of the proton and its excited states. They also solidify the case that experimental results can be used to assess the mechanisms responsible for EHM.

Patrick Achenbach et al, Electroexcitation of Nucleon Resonances and Emergence of Hadron Mass, Symmetry (2025). DOI: 10.3390/sym17071106. www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/17/7/1106

Part 3

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 44 minutes ago

Over the past decade, significant progress has been made in understanding the dominant portion of the universe's visible mass. This is driven by studies of the distance (or momentum) dependence of the strong interaction within a QCD-based approach known as the continuum Schwinger method (CSM).

Bridging CSM and experiments via phenomenology, physicists analyzed nearly 30 years of data collected. The comprehensive effort has given scientists the most detailed look yet at the mechanisms responsible for EHM.

 The comprehensive effort has given scientists the most detailed look yet at the mechanisms responsible for EHM.

QCD describes the dynamics of the most elementary constituents of matter known so far: quarks and gluons. Through QCD processes, all hadronic matter is generated. This includes protons, neutrons, other bound quark-gluon systems and, ultimately, all atomic nuclei. A distinctive feature of the strong force is gluon self-interaction.

Without gluon self-interaction, the universe would be completely different.

It creates beauty through different particle properties and makes real-world hadron phenomena through emergent physics.

Because of this property, the strong interaction evolves rapidly with distance. This evolution of strong-interaction dynamics is described within the CSM approach. At distances comparable to the size of a hadron, ~10^-13 cm, its relevant constituents are no longer the bare quarks and gluons of QCD.

Instead, dressed quarks and dressed gluons emerge when bare quarks and gluons are surrounded by clouds of strongly coupled quarks and gluons undergoing continual creation and annihilation.

In this regime, dressed quarks acquire dynamically generated masses that evolve with distance. This provides a natural explanation for EHM: a transition from the nearly massless bare quarks (with masses of only a few MeV) to fully dressed quarks of approximately 400 MeV mass. Strong interactions among the three dressed quarks of the proton generate its mass of about 1 GeV, as well as the masses of its excited states in the range of 1.0–3.0 GeV.

This raises the question: Can EHM be elucidated by mapping the momentum dependence of the dressed-quark mass from experimental studies of the proton and its excited states?

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 45 minutes ago

How most of the universe's visible mass is generated: Experiments explore emergence of hadron mass

Deep in the heart of the matter, some numbers don't add up. For example, while protons and neutrons are made of quarks, nature's fundamental building blocks bound together by gluons, their masses are much larger than the individual quarks from which they are formed.

This leads to a central puzzle … why? In the theory of the strong interaction, known as quantum chromodynamics or QCD, quarks acquire their bare mass through the Higgs mechanism. The long-hypothesized process was confirmed by experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland and led to the Nobel Prize for Peter Higgs in 2013.

Yet the inescapable issue remains that this mechanism contributes to the measured proton and neutron masses at the level of less than 2%. This clearly demonstrates that the dominant part of the mass of real-world matter is generated through another mechanism, not through the Higgs. The rest arises from emergent phenomena.

The unaccounted mass and how it arises have long been open problems in nuclear physics, but scientists  are now getting a more detailed understanding of this mass-generating process than ever before.

So, what gives protons and other strongly interacting particles (together called hadrons) their added "heft?" The answer lies in the dynamics of QCD. Through QCD, the strong interaction generates mass from the energy stored in the fields of the strongly interacting quarks and gluons. This is termed the emergence of hadron mass, or EHM.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 58 minutes ago

Psilocybin, a 5-HT_2A receptor agonist with therapeutic potential in psychiatric disorders that share overlapping pathophysiology as BI, is a promising candidate.

As the majority of IPV victims are female, Allen, Sun and their colleagues performed their experiments on female rats. To model IPV-related brain injuries, they subjected the rats to mild injuries that mirrored those observed in many victims of IPV.

"Female rats underwent daily mTBI (lateral impact) followed by NFS (90 s) for five days, followed by 16 weeks of recovery," the authors explained.

Four months after the rats had been subjected to the injuries, they were either given a dose of psilocybin or a placebo (i.e., saline water) injection. 24 hours later they completed behavioral tasks designed to assess their memory, learning, motivation and anxiety levels.

Psilocybin is known to activate 5-HT2A receptors, a subtype of serotonin receptor that are known to play a role in the regulation of mood, mental processes and the brain's adaptability (i.e., plasticity). Using a drug that can block the activity of 5-HT2A receptors, the researchers also tried to determine whether these receptors played a key role in any effects they observed.

"To investigate whether psilocybin's effects were 5-HT2A receptor dependent, additional rats received pre-treatment with selective 5-HT2A receptor antagonist M100907 (1.5 mg/kg) one hour before psilocybin administration," wrote the authors. in their paper.
Overall, the results of this research team's experiments suggest that psilocybin could help to reverse some of the behavioral, cognitive and brain-related damage caused by repeated physical attacks. The female rats they tested were found to exhibit less anxiety-like and depression-like behaviors after they received psilocybin, while also performing better in memory and learning tests.

As this study was carried out in rats, its findings cannot be confidently applied to humans yet. In the future, human clinical trials could help to determine whether psilocybin is in fact a safe and effective therapeutic strategy to aid recovery from IPV-related brain injuries.

 Josh Allen et al, Psilocybin mitigates chronic behavioral and neurobiological alterations in a rat model of recurrent intimate partner violence-related brain injury, Molecular Psychiatry (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41380-025-03329-x.

Part 2

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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 1 hour ago

Psilocybin could reverse effects of brain injuries resulting from intimate partner violence, rat study finds

The term intimate partner violence (IPV) refers to physical, sexual or psychological abuse perpetrated by an individual on their romantic partner or spouse. Victims of IPV who are violently attacked and physically abused on a regular basis can sometimes present injuries that have lasting consequences on their mood, mental processes and behaviour.

Chronic neurobehavioral sequelae from IPV-BI are associated with neuroinflammation and impaired neuroplasticity, and effective treatment options are scarce, particularly in the context of IPV.

Common types of injuries observed in IPV victims who are periodically attacked physically include mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBI) and disruptions in the flow of blood or oxygen to the brain emerging from non-fatal strangulation (NFS). Both these have been linked to inflammation in the brain and a hindered ability to form new connections between neurons or change older connections (i.e., neuroplasticity).

Researchers recently carried out a study involving rats aimed at assessing the potential of the psychedelic compound psilocybin  for reversing the chronic effects of IPV-related brain injuries. Their findings, published in Molecular Psychiatry, suggest that psilocybin could in fact reduce inflammation and anxiety, improve memory and facilitate learning following brain injuries caused by repeated physical trauma.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 23 hours ago

Frozen RNA survived 50,000 years
Researchers have found the oldest RNA molecules to date in mummified woolly mammoth tissue. RNA is a fragile molecule, which makes intact ancient samples few and far between. But such samples are sought after because analysing ancient RNA could shed light on the gene activity of extinct animals. Scientists used enzymes to convert RNA in the mammoth tissue to DNA, and then reverse-engineered the original RNA sequences. This technique recovered fragments of RNA from three samples, dated to between 39,000 and 52,000 years old.

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)01231-0?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867425012310%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

https://www.science.org/content/article/forty-thousand-year-old-mam...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 23 hours ago

Learning to see after being born blind: Brain imaging study highlights infant adaptability

Some babies are born with early blindness due to dense bilateral congenital cataracts, requiring surgery to restore their sight. This period of several months without vision can leave a lasting mark on how the brain processes visual details, but surprisingly little on the recognition of faces, objects, or words. This is the main finding of an international study conducted by neuroscientist.

Using brain imaging, the researchers compared adults who had undergone surgery for congenital cataracts as babies with people born with normal vision. The results are striking: in people born with cataracts, the area of the brain that analyzes small visual details (contours, contrasts, etc.) retains a lasting alteration from this early blindness.

On the other hand, the more advanced regions of the visual brain, responsible for recognizing faces, objects, and words, function almost normally. These "biological" results have been validated by computer models involving artificial neural networks. This distinction between altered and preserved areas of the brain paves the way for new treatments. In the future, clinicians may be able to offer visual therapies that are better tailored to each patient.

Babies' brains are highly adaptable . Even if vision is lacking at the very beginning of life, the brain can adapt and learn to recognize the world around it even on the basis of degraded information.

These findings also challenge the idea of a single "critical period" for visual development. Some areas of the brain are more vulnerable to early vision loss, while others retain a surprising capacity for recovery. The brain is both fragile and resilient. Early experiences matter, but they don't determine everything.

Impact of a transient neonatal visual deprivation on the development of the ventral occipito-temporal cortex in humans, Nature Communications (2025).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65468-7#:~:text=We%20sho...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 23 hours ago

New study identifies part of brain animals use to make inferences

Animals survive in changing and unpredictable environments by not merely responding to new circumstances, but also, like humans, by forming inferences about their surroundings—for instance, squirrels understand that certain bird noises don't signal the presence of a predator, so they won't seek shelter when they later hear these same sounds. But less clear is how the brain works to create these inferences.

In a study published in the journal Neuron, a team of  researchers identified a particular part of the brain that serves as an "inference engine." The region, the orbitofrontal  cortex (OFC), allows animals to update their understanding of their surroundings based on changing circumstances.

To survive, animals cannot simply react to their surroundings. They must generalize and make inferences—a cognitive process that is among the most vital and complicated operations that nervous systems perform. These findings advance our knowledge of how the brain works in applying what we've learned.

The scientists add that the results offer promise for better understanding the nature of neuropsychiatric disorders, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, in which our ability to make inferences is diminished.

In the experiments conducted when the brain's OFC was disrupted, the trained rats could no longer update their understanding of what the other available rewards might be—specifically, they couldn't make distinctions among hidden states.

These results, based on recordings of more than 10,000 neurons, suggest that the OFC is directly involved in helping the brain make inferences in changing situations.

 The orbitofrontal cortex updates beliefs for state inference, Neuron (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2025.10.024. www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(25)00805-0

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