Imma Perfetto
Cosmos science journalist
High-intensity interval training boosts brains for years
An Australian longitudinal study has found high-intensity interval training (HIIT) improves brain function in older adults, for up to 5 years.
It is the first study of its kind to show exercise can boost cognition in healthy older adults, not just delay cognitive decline.
“6 months of high-intensity interval training is enough to flick the switch,” says Perry Bartlett, Emeritus Professor from the University of Queensland’s Brain Institute, who co-led the research published in the journal Aging and Disease.
“In earlier pre-clinical work, we discovered exercise can activate stem cells and increase the production of neurons in the hippocampus, improving cognition.
“In this study, a large cohort of healthy 65 to 85-year-old volunteers joined a 6-month exercise program, did biomarker and cognition testing and had high-resolution brain scans.
“We followed up with them 5 years after the program and incredibly they still had improved cognition, even if they hadn’t kept up with the exercises.”
Ancient temple and theatre discovered in Peru
Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of what appears to be a 4,000-year-old temple and theatre in coastal Peru.
It was constructed by an unknown people long before the Inca and their predecessors, including the Moche and Nazca cultures.
“This discovery tells us about the early origins of religion in Peru,” says Muro Ynoñán, a research scientist in the Negaunee Integrative Research Center at the Field Museum in the US.
“We still know very little about how and under which circumstances complex belief systems emerged in the Andes, and now we have evidence about some of the earliest religious spaces that people were creating in this part of the world.”
Dog-sized dinosaur lived underground
A newly found dinosaur, from the Mussentuchit Member (a distinct bed) of the Cedar Mountain Formation in the US state of Utah, probably dwelled in underground burrows at least some of the time.
Named Fona herzogae, the small-bodied, plant-eating dinosaur lived on a large floodplain ecosystem during the mid-Cretaceous period about 99 million years ago.
Small bones on the surface of floodplains often scatter, rot away, or become scavenged before burial and fossilisation. But this hasn’t been the case for F. herzogae.
“The best explanation for why we find so many of them, and recover them in small bundles of multiple individuals, is that they were living at least part of the time underground,” says, Lindsay Zanno, North Carolina State University professor and head of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, who co-authored the paper in the journal The Anatomical Record.
“Essentially, Fona did the hard work for us, by burying itself all over this area.”
It shares anatomical features with animals known for digging or burrowing, such as bicep muscles; strong muscle attachment points on the hips and legs; fused bones along the pelvis; and hindlimbs proportionally larger than the forelimbs.
Making lab-grown meat tastier
Cultured meat is emerging as a sustainable way to provide animal protein.
Now, researchers have designed a method that could help lab-grown meat better mimic the taste of conventional meat.
According to the new study in Nature Communications a meaty flavour compound can be incorporated into a gelatin-based hydrogel.
This temperature-responsive scaffold remains stable during the cell culture period but releases the flavour compounds after reaching cooking temperatures above 150 °C, mimicking the Maillard reaction.
