- AskScience AMA Series: I’m Dheeraj Roy, a neuroscientist studying what happens to lost memories in early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Are these memories erased or do they exist but cannot be found? AMA!
- Can metal shatter if cold enough?
- If I try to listen to a podcast while reading a book am I strengthening any skills or just making it harder to accomplish both tasks?
- What is plasma and how is it able to be used for so many different things?
- Is the deep ocean floor littered with the bones of fish and mammals which have died over the years?
- What happens when two event horizons intersect?
- What is it about nitrates that make them such good explosives?
- Does potential energy distort spacetime? Where is it 'located'?
- Does carbon dioxide gas scatter light in the visible spectrum?
- does a black hole at the center of a galaxy help stabilize it gravitationally?
- What is our current best guess of the topology of the universe?
- If the EM field is a tensor field, then why are photons vector bosons?
- What did the Wow! Signal actually contain?
- When we see a bright light in our dreams, do our pupils contract?
| Posted: 17 Mar 2016 04:25 AM PDT Hi Reddit! My research is about what happens to our memories when we cannot remember. When we experience memory loss, does it mean that these memories have been erased? Could it be that some memories exist in our brains but we are unable to find and recall them? These questions led me to study memory loss in Alzheimer's disease (AD). In addition to the impact AD has on our community, watching my own grandmother gradually forget drives me to the laboratory everyday with the hope that someday we will be able to help AD patients remember. To study memory brain structures affected by AD, I use animal models that closely mimic the human condition. From patients, we know that initial stages of AD (known as "early AD") are diagnosed when consecutive memory tests result in extremely poor performance. In particular, early AD patients seem to lose memories of events/episodes such as birthday parties, summer vacations with the family, high school reunions, etc. It has been assumed that early AD patients lose critical memory information and therefore cannot remember. My recent work (link to nature study: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature17172) using animal models challenges this widely held assumption. Not only did we find that early AD mice still stored the supposedly lost memories, but we found a way to bring these memories back. Given this work, I believe that memory loss in early stages of AD is because patients are unable find and retrieve the information, rather than a permanent loss of memory information. Even though this particular work was done using animal models, I have hope that in the future we can learn more about retrieving lost memories in early AD patients. For a perspective on my recent work by expert memory researchers, go here (link to nature news and views: I will share a link on Wed, 3/16 at 2 PM EST). If you are interested in some of my previous research that led to the study of memory loss in early AD, go here (link to science study: http://classic.sciencemag.org/content/348/6238/1007.abstract). I would love to continue discussing the future of memory research on Twitter, follow me @dheerajroy7 (link to twitter account: https://twitter.com/dheerajroy7). If you don't have access to any of my research articles, email me (d_roy@mit.edu) and I will try to help ☺! I am very excited to talk about memory loss and Alzheimer's disease with the Reddit community because I learn so much through your insightful questions and comments. I will be back at 1 PM EST to answer all questions. In advance, I want to thank the entire community for allowing me to share my work! [link] [comments]  |
| Can metal shatter if cold enough? Posted: 16 Mar 2016 08:28 PM PDT Like in the movies, someone freezes a lock and breaks it, or Mr. Freeze freezing steel doors and driving through them? What real life effect does extreme cols have on metal? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 16 Mar 2016 04:46 PM PDT So I'm doing homework which requires me to read a few short stories and I want to listen to a podcast because it's entertaining. It's hard but possible to pay attention to both of them at the same time, and although it's frustrating it made me wonder if I can strengthen multi-tasking skills or listening skills or something by doing it. [link] [comments]  |
| What is plasma and how is it able to be used for so many different things? Posted: 17 Mar 2016 05:58 AM PDT I just saw a bunch of videos on plasma, such as a plasma lighter and a plasma speaker, and I'm really curious on what plasma actually is and how it is able to be used so diversely. [link] [comments]  |
| Is the deep ocean floor littered with the bones of fish and mammals which have died over the years? Posted: 16 Mar 2016 10:28 AM PDT Do bones dissolve in the ocean, or do they sink to the bottom and stay there until something covers them up? [link] [comments]  |
| What happens when two event horizons intersect? Posted: 16 Mar 2016 08:23 PM PDT I'm thinking about what would happen when two black holes collide. Supposedly, once matter crosses the event horizon it can never go fast enough to escape the gravity of the singularity at the center. So what happens to matter that is caught inside the boundaries of two interesting event horizons? Does it stand still? Does it gravitate towards the more massive singularity, even if that means escaping the other black hole's event horizon? That should not be possible, right? [link] [comments]  |
| What is it about nitrates that make them such good explosives? Posted: 16 Mar 2016 06:15 PM PDT Other -ates: carbonates, sulfates, phosphates, etc. don't seem to be used very much with explosives. What's special about nitrates that cause such a violent reaction? [link] [comments]  |
| Does potential energy distort spacetime? Where is it 'located'? Posted: 16 Mar 2016 05:51 PM PDT |
| Does carbon dioxide gas scatter light in the visible spectrum? Posted: 16 Mar 2016 11:10 PM PDT In a broader sense, is there a way to predict/calculate what color a gas will scatter and absorb based on its molecular makeup, or is that something that needs to be determined experimentally? [link] [comments]  |
| does a black hole at the center of a galaxy help stabilize it gravitationally? Posted: 16 Mar 2016 01:58 PM PDT I was just reading about the mergers of super massive black holes and i'm wondering what the role of the black hole at the center of a galaxy plays. Does it play a role in gravitational stability of the galaxy as a whole? [link] [comments]  |
| What is our current best guess of the topology of the universe? Posted: 16 Mar 2016 11:44 PM PDT |
| If the EM field is a tensor field, then why are photons vector bosons? Posted: 16 Mar 2016 02:48 PM PDT Furthermore, why is this not the case for gravitons? [link] [comments]  |
| What did the Wow! Signal actually contain? Posted: 15 Mar 2016 01:45 AM PDT I'm having trouble understanding this, and what I've read hasn't been very enlightening. If we actually intercepted some sort of signal, what was that signal? Was it a message? How can we call something a signal without having idea of what the signal was? Secondly, what are the actual opinions of the Wow! Signal? Popular culture aside, is the signal actually considered to be nonhuman, or is it regarded by the scientific community to most likely be man made? Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| When we see a bright light in our dreams, do our pupils contract? Posted: 16 Mar 2016 03:52 AM PDT Does the size of the pupil change when we are sleeping according to the amount of light in our dream? [link] [comments]  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from AskScience: Got Questions? Get Answers.. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
No comments:
Post a Comment