Long working hours may alter the structure of the brain, particularly the areas associated with emotional regulation and executive function, such as working memory and problem solving, suggest the findings of preliminary research, published online in Occupational & Environmental Medicine. Ultimately, overwork may induce neuroadaptive changes that might affect cognitive and emotional health, say the researchers.

Osteoarthritis does not arise from wear and tear, that’s a persistent misconception. So what causes this condition, which affects 595 million people worldwide? Peter van der Kraan of Radboud university medical center searches for answers in evolution. He suspects that misbehaving cartilage cells, which are very useful early in life, turn against us later on.

A new study has identified for the first time signatures of sleep in the honey bee brain, showing remarkable parallels with sleep in humans and other vertebrates. It combined advanced optical brain imaging, machine learning analysis, and computational neural modelling to study how sleep affects their sensory brain networks, particularly the antennal lobes, the bees' primary olfactory centers. Sleep science has experienced strong growth as researchers worldwide attempt to unravel the evolutionary origins and cognitive functions of sleep. But until now, invertebrate sleep mechanisms at the neuronal level remained poorly understood. This study explores this new territory, offering the first network-level brain imaging during sleep in insects. Honey bees provide an opportunity to study sleep at single-neuron resolution, offering insights impossible to achieve in humans. The parallels identified between bee and human sleep may inspire future research on sleep function in bees, with potential applications in the study of memory consolidation and sleep disorders.

Researchers at UCL and the Francis Crick Institute have, for the first time, identified the origin of cardiac cells using 3D images of a heart forming in real-time, inside a living mouse embryo.