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We've all heard the phrase that time flies by as we are having fun. Our perception of time is organic, it is constantly changing and shifting. According to psychologist Claudia Hammond, " the sensation that time speeds up as you get older is one of the biggest mysteries of the experience of time." But there has been new research undertaken by Adrian Bejan , a researcher from Duke University that blames this temporal discrepancy on the fact that the speed at which images are obtained and processed by the human brain decreases as we age. As webs of neurons mature, they degrade, giving more resistance to the flow of electrical signals.  Bejan,  in his latest paper, examines the mechanics of the human mind and relates physics principles to our changing mental perception as we age. The concept of time represents 'percieved' changes in mental stimuli, it is all about what we can see. As the physical mental-image processing time and the rapidity of images we take i...

Ivermectin is a medication used to treat parasitic infections typically in veterinary. They belong to a class of drugs known as "anthelmintics" where they stun or kill the parasite without causing significant damage to the host. One works by affecting the nervous system of the parasite, which results in muscle paralysis, or it can affect uptake of sodium ions resulting in the affection of glucose (due to co-transport mechanisms being inhibited). Recently, a research team from  Colorado State University  found that this drug can also poison mosquitos when they feed on human blood - introductory trials have shown that cases of malaria were reduced among children in rural Burkina Faso by 20 percent with no harmful side effects (but surveying only went up til 18 months, so we cannot say there are 0 side effects on humans). Malaria is caused by  Plasmodium  parasites that are spread via infected mosquitos (they are known as transmission vectors). It isn't the mosqu...

Why do we sleep? Why do we waste about a third of our lives sleeping, leaving ourselves vulnerable and defenceless. What makes sleep that important that natural selection has decided that the benefits of sleep outweigh its risks? Most of these questions still remain a mystery, but slowly and surely as we develop in the field of neuroscience, the answers are slowly unravelling. Sleep is regulated by circadian and homeostatic processes. Several mechanisms can explain the roles of sleep, ranging from macromolecule (proteins, lipids, polysaccharides, nucleic acids etc.) biosynthesis, energy conservation, and metabolite clearance, to synaptic plasticity and memory consolidation. However, why sleep has evolved and which fundamental ancestral functions it regulates, remain enigmatic.            D. Zada,  I. Bronshtein,  T. Lerer-Goldshtein,  Y. Garini &  L. Appelbaum 3D time-lapse imaging was used in living zebrafish (the genome of z...