TheRainbowegoSweet007
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Scientists Debunk 100-Year-Old Belief About Brain Cells, Rewriting Textbooks
https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-debunk-100-year-old-belief-about-brain-cells-rewriting-textbooks/
NM156
Well, now Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama will have to update their 1955 text books to 1958!
RichardPenne
Similar to the large intestine...which would explain some of the shit that comes out of people's mouths.
WackyWavingInflatableArmFlailingTubman
Yea but it is not in the Bible so check mate ATHEIST
cousteau
NO. No. I already have made my mind of what a neuron looks like and I refuse to change it! Same with feathered dinosaurs and barred milky way galaxy. ✊☁️
SpicyGoober
Well yeah..
ReadMyLeaders
I thought we always knew axons were bumpy. They have myelin sheaths.
ArchaeoEejit
https://media4.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPWE1NzM3M2U1N25nNGI3NGhhcHZtaTd6NW10ZmVqenpvdHd6MjBuaXJnbDY3cXJvZyZlcD12MV9naWZzX3NlYXJjaCZjdD1n/L3X9GvVhP1nY23Ah6u/200w.webp
Urgalicity
How does this effect treatments or understanding how the brain works? It's cool, but I don't understand it's applications. Other than diagnostic images?
yqpqfrdp625772
Well, as far as anything new is concerned: nothing. This is not new. You’re right in one respect: the myelin sheath is a lipid dense structure that you can tag with a fat soluble florescent dye and the dye will propagate along the nerve pathway, so it’s helpful for staining/tracing nerve pathways. I didn’t do any in vivo work, but you might possibly be able to get a radioisotope that’s in a fat soluble molecule; alas I don’t have any first hand experience with that so I cant say with authority.
RichardPenne
So, for proper brain firing, more cholesterol and less sugar? Wow....I've really been fucking that up.
HogWashDiddler
Very cool.
huffnpuff72
Debunking? No. Its science and there has been a new discovery that changes what we thought. That is normal science, we learn and adjust our learning. Save debunking for conspiracy theories.
Goldensands
Glad to see this was stated. Absolutely, yes.
BioDatum
Here here!
- a molecular biologist who hates sensational spins on science news
Pulsahr
Science: hmmm we were wrong before, here are the evidence and the updated knowledge.
Religion: we were always right, don't question it. Ever.
mjperk
Didn't read the article but given that microscopes and other imagining techniques have existed for a long while now, how are they just figuring this out? Slice a brain. Put under a microscope. Boom. Figured out. I'm guessing it's not this simple but it seems like it should be just to tell their shape.
vorodar
> To capture these details, the team used high-pressure freezing electron
microscopy, a technique that preserves cellular structures more accurately
than standard preparation methods.
> "To see nanoscale structures with standard electron microscopy, we fix and
dehydrate the tissues, but freezing them retains their shape - similar to
freezing a grape rather than dehydrating it into a raisin," says Watanabe.
vorodar
From the article. So it seems more involve than looking at it with a microscope. First problem is the nanoscale. Then apparently they had to freeze the thing they are looking at.
mjperk
Nanoscale isn't hard. We've done that for decades. I can do it at work, actually. The freezing thing is novel I guess. But it doesn't exactly seem like a real amazingly innovative concept. We freeze, dehydrate, pressurize, etc. stuff all the time. Seems straightforward relatively speaking to current science and capability. I guess the magic is in putting it all together. I get that I'm oversimplifying but I'm just more surprised than anything else that they're just figuring out this technique.
yqpqfrdp625772
This is not new. That’s the myelin sheath. The effect of not getting enough fat in your diet upon this structure and the degradation in fxn has been known for a long time. This is not rewriting textbooks.
xackness
Yeah but I thought they specifically said the mouse neurons "all lack myelin", and so I am further confused
vonbaronhans
yeah that's exactly what I thought. "Typically depicted as uniform width tubes" is nonsense. Even when I was in undergrad (quite a while ago), we knew about myelin sheaths.
circlebreaker
cousteau
I vaguely remember watching a movie about this, and how giving a kid some sort of oil made him better. (No idea how realistic that movie was.)
yqpqfrdp625772
For the down voters: we’ve known exactly what it looks like for more than 50 years (thank you scanning electron microscopes!), and we’ve known the sheath exists for hundreds of years. This article is a monument to the decay in science journalism, scientific journals, and academia’s broader publishing myopathy.
nadorou
Honestly it makes me feel like somebody fed the image into a LLM and asked it to spit out a "ground breaking discovery" article to go along with it. Super weird.
tapwatermapdaughter
Aren’t those just Schwann cells?
SimianSeminar
STOP LOOKIING AT ME SCHWANN
DeadWhiteMale
Yep. The image looks just like the ones in textbooks for the last 50 years.
Acquiredtaste
Revolutionary! Rewrite the textbooks and put a portrait of the big leader on the cover!
revasseur
And Schwann cells were discovered nearly 200 years ago!
springbreak3003
i thought the same thing… isn’t that just myelination?
sometimesarobot
Neat. I wonder what the little bloops are for. Rest stops?
revasseur
They cause the signal to jump from node to node instead of sliding down the axon, which makes the signal travel much farther and faster. Sort of like the difference between rolling a ping pong ball down a hallway (UNmyelinated axon) vs rolling it past a line of people who each give it a whack as it goes by (myelinated axon). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltatory_conduction
sometimesarobot
Ahh, I understand this one
yqpqfrdp625772
Useful for propagating signal quickly. At each node of ranvier (at least I think that’s what you mean by “bloop”; the “dips” in the sheath” and not the “pearls” aka Schwann cells) the signal is recharged (the dips exist the facilitate ion xfer) keeping the action potential high along the full length of the axon.
SamaelQliphoth
So... like transformers along a power line?
yqpqfrdp625772
Transformers on power lines are for turning high voltage (relatively) low amperage into higher amperage lower voltage current (or possibly vice versa, I’m not a line tech, only learned about xformers in physics). That’s not what’s happening here. The Schwann cells act as insulation, but because it’s inside a wet, conductive body, they can only do so much. There’s still loss. In this case they’re “recharging” the signal, not just converting voltage to amperage.