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Many daily functions require us to hold the information of events that happen for a sufficient period time (e.g. remember where the car is parked for a few hours). However, our ability of holding spatial memory declines with age. Cognitive ageing imposes negative impacts on the life quality in our later life. Facing a rapidly ageing population, such impacts extend from the individual to the families and the society as a whole. If we have a better understanding on how the memory decline occurs, we are in a stronger position to provide strategies to improve our memory retention, which will lead to a cognitively healthier society. To understand how daily memory decays naturally over time, we propose to model this in rodents. This is because they provide invaluable opportunities to understand the brain mechanisms, to control the environmental factors, and to draw unconfounded causative conclusions. Indeed, using this model we know that memory formation and maintenance occurs in multi-phases. As we encounter an event in a place we 'encode' the experience. It undergoes a biological process in the brain to 'consolidate' it so we remember it later. As we 'retrieve' that information some time later, the memory undergoes another process in the brain to 'reconsolidate' and we can remember it for longer. Importantly, we have identified a time window around the spatial memory encoding, during which we can introduce a novel event to make the memory last longer. This method of using novelty as a memory-facilitating event has so far only been proven to work in young animals. The first aim will determine whether the same strategy helps middle-aged and older animals. We will also explore more effective strategies to make memories last in older animals. It will also allow us to know whether the encoding and consolidation processes are differentially affected at different stages of ageing. In real life, we do not always have the chance to target the encoding and consolidation process as the event happens. It therefore would be beneficial if we can target the reconsolidation process during the time window of memory retrieval to make the memory last. Hence, the second aim of the study is to establish whether introducing a novel event around memory retrieval can subsequently make the memory last longer. We will examine whether this is an effective approach to make memory last in older animals. While the first 2 studies provide behavioural strategies to improve the longevity of memory at different ages, at present we do not know how the memory-encoding and memory-facilitating events interact at the cellular level in the brain. Previous research has pinpointed a key brain area, called the hippocampus that is crucial for linking events and place and form an episodic or associative memory. Previous theories also hypothesize that the cellular networks activated by the memory-encoding and memory-facilitating events are overlapping in the hippocampus that interactively contribute to longer-lasting memory. To visualise the cellular activities for these two events, we will mark the active cells with two fluorescence-labelled genes that can be detected by confocal microscopes. This technique has previously been established and will be carried out with our collaborator in Japan. Together, this project will allow us to establish behavioural methods to improve memory so that they last longer in old animals and characterise the underpinning encoding or consolidation process that is affected by ageing. We will also understand the cellular mechanism for the facilitation of memory persistence to occur. The behavioural strategy that we use in this project is non-invasive and benign, and therefore can be translated to human studies in the near future through cross-discipline collaborations. Such knowledge can ultimately improve cognitive ageing in the society.

Japan

In superconductors, there exist vortices invisible to the human eye. These are vortices of electric current that swirl like miniature hurricanes. Although, their size may not exceed a biological cell, onset of such miniature hurricanes is damaging for superconductivity, just like usual hurricanes in the atmosphere. Luckily, unlike these monsters, Josephson vortices are tame and easy to restrain. Vortices can be trapped between two superconducting plates and may never leave the system, except through a boundary. In this way, we may compel them to generate Terahertz waves needed for medical screening, use for transmission of information and even utilize in future digital electronics. Josephson vortices exist on the border of two superconducting metals separated by a thin insulating layer -- sandwiches called Josephson junctions. The electrical current flowing through the junction may generate vortices similar to hurricanes seen in nature. Each vortex consists of magnetic flux trapped by electrons whirling around. Sometimes Josephson vortices are called fluxons. Fluxons may travel faster-than-light and possess many intriguing properties of interest to the scientific community. Recently we have demonstrated that a single vortex can be cloned / cut in pieces, each representing an individual vortex (Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 017004). This phenomenon has no analogy in conventional electronics or engineering sciences, but the closest analogy, surprisingly, comes from biology. The vortex is cloned in the same way a biological cell reproduces itself. The effect allows constructing novel devices that have never existed before. The new devices fall into three themes of the proposed project: (i) Effective sources of Terahertz radiation (ii) Digital superconducting electronics (iii) Magnetic sensors.Theme (i) is devoted to the question as how to generate Terahertz (THz) waves utilizing the recently discovered properties of fluxons. Currently there is a great need for reliable sources of THz radiation. This is an unexplored region of the electromagnetic spectrum with wavelengths between 30 micron and 1 mm. Similar to X-rays, THz waves may penetrate bodies, clothes, packaging and even walls. However, because of their non-ionizing properties, Terahertz waves are harmless to living organisms, unlike X-rays. This is very important for building new types of absolutely safe and non-invasive imaging systems for medical diagnostics, health monitoring and security screening. Because plastics and cardboard are transparent to terahertz radiation, it can be also used for quality control and inspection of packaged objects. Among other applications are astronomical instruments, environmental monitoring, telecommunications, biological and chemical identification.Theme (ii) is focused on digital applications. As Josephson vortices may propagate at the speed of light, they can be effectively used to transmit and process information. Electronic components made of superconductors offer great benefit compared to semiconductor counterparts. Indeed, with the use of superconductors one can achieve very small energy losses, low power consumption and reduced noise. Novel superconducting electronics can be integrated in modern supercomputers that will be utilized for solving all kinds of actual scientific problems. Theme (iii) is devoted to development of novel magnetic sensors. First of all, new magnetometers can be utilized for medical purposes. They are expected to be more efficient than contemporary SQUID magnetometers because of their fast operation.

Japan