Five ways the brain can age: 50,000 scans reveal possible patterns of damage

Hello Nature readers,
Today we hear that video games helped people’s mental wellbeing during the pandemic, discover five ways ageing affects the brain and learn how ‘green’ electricity from wood might harm the planet — and people.

Gaming helped people during pandemic

Playing video games for a couple of hours a day can improve mental health, according to a study in Japan. The research relied on a natural experiment that arose when the opportunity to buy gaming consoles, which were in short supply, was allocated by a lottery during the COVID pandemic. Of the more than 8,000 people who entered the lottery, those who ended up with a console had increased life satisfaction and reduced psychological distress. But whether these findings apply more broadly remains to be seen.

Five ways the brain can age

An analysis of almost 50,000 brain scans has revealed five distinct patterns of brain atrophy associated with ageing and neurodegenerative disease. The analysis has also linked the patterns to lifestyle factors such as smoking and alcohol consumption, as well as to genetic and blood-based markers associated with health status and disease risk. The work is a “methodological tour de force”, says gerontologist Andrei Irimia. “We knew that brain anatomy changes with ageing and disease. But our ability to grasp this complex interaction was far more modest.”

There is a black market in fake citations

Researchers went undercover to confirm what many research-integrity sleuths have long suspected: there is a black market for fake citations used to pad scientists’ Google Scholar profiles. The investigators paid US$300 to a firm that sold them 50 citations from studies in 22 journals — 14 of which are indexed in the scholarly database Scopus. “When a manuscript acquires hundreds of citations within days of publication, or when a scientist has an abrupt and large rise in citations, you know something is wrong,” says computer scientist Yasir Zaki, who took part in the sting operation.

Wood pellets might not be so green

Factories are popping up across the United States to manufacture wood pellets: solid biomass that can be burned to produce electricity in the belief that it is carbon neutral. But an expanding body of research shows that burning wood pellets to generate electricity often emits huge amounts of carbon — even more than burning coal does. There are signs that high-quality wood is being fed into the machines, rather than waste wood, as companies claim. And there are concerns about the effects of wood-pellet facilities on the health of people living nearby.

Bias belittles female-dominated fields

Evidence is building that whole research fields might be prone to gender bias. “People just believe that there are some disciplines that are better than others,” says mathematician Alex James, who led one of the latest studies on the phenomenon. “And it turns out that ones that we think are a bit rubbish are all full of women.” Her study found that the more women there were in a field, the lower the overall grant-application success rate and evaluation of researcher quality.

‘I didn’t feel like shutting up’

Last month, UK researchers welcomed the appointment of one of their own as science minister: clinical researcher Patrick Vallance, who gained a high profile for his sober TV appearances as the government’s chief scientific adviser during the COVID pandemic. Five weeks into the job, Nature asked him about the challenges ahead of him — and why, as a non-politician, he took the job in the first place. “It seems like if you’re given an opportunity to do something to make a difference, and you say no, then you should shut up,” he says. “And I didn’t feel like shutting up.”