Recent news from The Johns Hopkins University
This section contains regularly updated highlights of the news from around The Johns Hopkins
University. Links to the complete news reports from the nine schools,
the Applied Physics Laboratory and other centers and institutes are to
the left, as are links to help news media contact the Johns Hopkins
communications offices.
You’re about to drive through an intersection when the light suddenly turns red. But you’re able to slam on the brakes, just in time.
Johns Hopkins University researchers, working with scientists at the National Institute on Aging, have revealed the precise nerve cells that allow the brain to make this type of split-second change of course. In the latest issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, the team shows that these feats of self control happen when neurons in the basal forebrain are silenced.
September 17, 2015 Tags: aging, Alzheimer's disease, brain science, Johns Hopkins University, Michela Gallagher, Nature Neuroscience, neuroscience, Parkinson's disease
| Category: Natural Sciences
We run our modern lives largely by the clock, from the alarms that startle us out of our slumbers and herald each new workday to the watches and clocks that remind us when it’s time for meals, after-school pick-up and the like. In addition to those ubiquitous timekeepers, though, we have internal “clocks” that are part of our biological machinery and which help set our circadian rhythms, regulating everything from our sleep-wake cycles to our appetites and hormone levels. Light coming into our brains via our eyes set those clocks, though no one is sure exactly how this happens. Johns Hopkins biologist Samer Hattar, in collaboration with scientists at the University of Southern California and Cornell University, however, has unlocked part of that mystery recently in a study that found that rod cells – one of three kinds of exquisitely photosensitive cells found in the retina of the eye – are the only ones responsible for “setting” those clocks in low light conditions. What’s more, the study found that rods – which take their name from their cylindrical shape – also contribute (along with cones and other retinal cells) to setting internal clocks in bright light conditions. The study appeared in a recent issue of Nature Neuroscience.
September 13, 2010 Tags: circadian rhythms, Cornell University, Department of Biology, insomnia, internal clocks, Johns Hopkins University, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Nature Neuroscience, neuroscience, nursing home patients, photoreceptors, rods and cones, Samer Hattar, sleep disturbances, University of Southern California
| Category: Uncategorized