Unraveling DNA: The Legacy of Photo 51 and Watson-Crick Model In the history of science, few images have had as profound an impact as Photo 51. This iconic photograph, taken by British biophysicist Rosalind Franklin in 1952, played a pivotal role in deciphering the structure of DNA, the molecule of life. The story of Photo…
Exploring DNA: The Molecule That Holds Life’s Secrets DNA, the magnificent molecule that holds the secrets of life, has fascinated scientists and researchers for centuries. Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is the fundamental building block of all living organisms, shaping our traits, behaviors, and even our susceptibility to diseases. In this blog post, we will embark…
YOUNG & OLD Brain scans reveal the different ways young and old brains process information. When young and old test subjects look at pictures, the young brains experience most activity in the right hemisphere, in a region known as the right visual cortex. Older brains activate the visual cortices of the right and left hemispheres…
CHANGES IN PERFORMANCE Nevertheless, some decline in brain function is inevitable as we age. The first system to show its age is memory. Brains begin requiring more time to learn and store information in late middle age. At the same time, the prefrontal cortex experiences a drop in its ability to hold information in so…
A MATURE VISION SHE WAS BORN on a New York farm before the Civil War, when high technology meant steam railroad engines and telegraph lines. By the time of her death, America had sent rockets into space. In between those events, Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses learned to adapt, not only with the changing times…
EMOTIONAL CONTROL Further research indicated a difference between adults and children in their ability to lessen emotional responses. Mario Beauregard of the University of Montreal demonstrated the importance of age in emotional control with a two-part experiment. In the first part, he performed fMRIs on women between ages twenty and thirty, and on girls between…
EMOTIONAL APPRAISALS [ MATURITY ] The mature brain has the ability not only to register emotions but also to reappraise them before taking action. Adults, unlike children and adolescents, can mentally detach themselves from the emotions they experience, label them, and place them in context-in short, realize what they feel, why they feel it, and…
MATURITY – FINDING BALANCE AS THE BRAIN AGES AFTER ADOLESCENCE, the brain transitions into adulthood. A fully functioning prefrontal cortex is the highest expression of the human brain. The balance of reason and emotion marks the emergence of the adult brain. Only in functional adulthood does society expect a person to have the ability to…
JOHN NASH’S LONG JOURNEY ECONOMIST and mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., started hearing things when he was young. He became convinced that aliens were communicating through the New York Times, and he rambled through Europe in a vague quest of becoming a refugee. At Princeton University he scribbled late into the night on blackboards, earning…
SCHIZOPHRENIA – RESEARCH & TREATMENT [ WAVES OF CHANGES ] RESEARCH & TREATMENT Research for treatment and a future cure focuses on imbalances of dopamine and other neurotransmitters in the brain’s neural networks. In particular, the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate is believed to play a significant role in schizophrenic episodes. Imbalances damage brain cells, and the…