The 23rd national festival for honoring exemplary researchers and technologists was held in the presence of science minister Mohammad-Ali Zolfigol, ISNA reported.

The selected individuals were mainly active in the fields of biology and biochemistry, physics, law, mathematics, economy, electronics, watershed management, architecture, sports, and nuclear engineering.

Scientific growth

A review of Scopus global ranking in terms of the normalized citation index over the past 10 years shows that Iran has moved up to 16th place in 2020 from 22nd in 2011.

Studies show that in 2021, the number of Iranian scientific articles indexed by the Scopus International Citation Database has reached 77,351. This figure was equal to 71,971 in 2020 and 64,988 in 2019.

The head of Iran Small Industries and Industrial Parks Organization has said 40 science and technology parks will be established across the country over the next five years.The 2021 data have not been yet completed and the mentioned figure will increase again. While scientific articles and the latest research findings of Iranian researchers in 2019 received about 0.08 percent more than the international average citation, in 2020, it has increased to 14 percent.

The head of Iran Small Industries and Industrial Parks Organization (ISIPO) has announced the decision for establishing 40 science and technology parks across the country over the next five years, ISNA reported.

Ali Rasoulian said the locations for the mentioned parks have been determined in various provinces and the necessary coordination has been done with related government entities in the target cities.

Over 7,000 knowledge-based and 1,600 creative companies have so far been registered and started operations in the country.

The fields of biotechnology, agriculture, food industries, chemical technologies aircraft maintenance, steel, gas, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment and medicine, oil, electronics and telecommunications, information technology, and computer software are among the sectors in which researchers in technology companies are working.

Today, the country’s knowledge-based ecosystem accounts for more than 3 percent of the GDP. And the figure is projected to reach 5 percent, however, the main goal is to step toward a 10 percent share in GDP, the former vice president for science and technology Sourena Sattari said in February.

The share of knowledge-based companies in the country’s economy has exceeded 9 quadrillion rials (about $34 billion), and since 2019, it has experienced a growth of more than 450 percent, he stated.

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A team led by neuroscientist Michele Bellesi from the Marche Polytechnic University in Italy examined the mammalian brain’s response to poor sleeping habits, and found a bizarre similarity between the well-rested and sleepless mice.

Like the cells elsewhere in your body, the neurons in your brain are being constantly refreshed by two different types of glial cell – support cells that are often called the glue of the nervous system, Science Alert reported.

The microglial cells are responsible for clearing out old and worn out cells via a process called phagocytosis – meaning “to devour” in Greek.

The astrocytes’ job is to prune unnecessary synapses (connections) in the brain to refresh and reshape its wiring.

We’ve known that this process occurs when we sleep to clear away the neurological wear and tear of the day, but now it appears that the same thing happens when we start to lose sleep.

But rather than being a good thing, the brain goes overboard with the clearing, and starts to harm itself instead.

Think of it like the garbage being cleared out while you’re asleep, versus someone coming into your house after several sleepless nights and indiscriminately tossing out your television, fridge, and family dog.

“We show for the first time that portions of synapses are literally eaten by astrocytes because of sleep loss,” Bellesi told Andy Coghlan at New Scientist.

To figure this out, the researchers imaged the brains of four groups of mice:

one group was left to sleep for 6 to 8 hours (well-rested)

another was periodically woken up from sleep (spontaneously awake)

a third group was kept awake for an extra 8 hours (sleep-deprived)

And a final group was kept awake for five days straight (chronically sleep-deprived).

When the researchers compared the activity of the astrocytes across the four groups, they identified it in 5.7 percent of the synapses in the well-rested mouse brains, and 7.3 of the spontaneously awake mouse brains.

In the sleep-deprived and chronically sleep-deprived mice, they noticed something different: the astrocytes had increased their activity to actually eating parts of the synapses like microglial cells eat waste – a process known as astrocytic phagocytosis.

In the sleep-deprived mouse brains, the astrocytes were found to be active across 8.4 percent of the synapses, and in the chronically sleep-deprived mice, a whopping 13.5 percent of their synapses showed astrocyte activity.

As Bellesi told New Scientist, most of the synapses that were getting eaten in the two groups of sleep-deprived mice were the largest ones, which tend to be the oldest and most heavily used – “like old pieces of furniture” – which is probably a good thing.

But when the team checked the activity of the microglial cells across the four groups, they found that it had also ramped up in the chronically sleep-deprived group.

And that’s a worry, because unbridled microglial activity has been linked to brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and other forms of neurodegeneration.

“We find that astrocytic phagocytosis, mainly of presynaptic elements in large synapses, occurs after both acute and chronic sleep loss, but not after spontaneous wake, suggesting that it may promote the housekeeping and recycling of worn components of heavily used, strong synapses,” the researchers report.

“By contrast, only chronic sleep loss activates microglia cells and promotes their phagocytic activity … suggesting that extended sleep disruption may prime microglia and perhaps predispose the brain to other forms of insult.”

Many questions remain, such as if this process is replicated in human brains, and if catching up on sleep can reverse the damage.

But the fact that Alzheimer’s deaths have increased by an incredible 50 percent since 1999, together with the struggle that many of us have in getting a good night’s sleep, means this is something we need to get to the bottom of – and fast.

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Sleeping time is sometimes considered unproductive time. This raises the question whether the time spent asleep could be used more productively — e.g. for learning a new language? To date sleep research focused on the stabilization and strengthening (consolidation) of memories that had been formed during preceding wakefulness. However, learning during sleep has rarely been examined. There is considerable evidence for wake-learned information undergoing a recapitulation by replay in the sleeping brain. The replay during sleep strengthens the still fragile memory traces und embeds the newly acquired information in the preexisting store of knowledge, Science Daily reported.

If re-play during sleep improves the storage of wake-learned information, then first-play — i.e., the initial processing of new information — should also be feasible during sleep, potentially carving out a memory trace that lasts into wakefulness. This was the research question of Katharina Henke, Marc Züst und Simon Ruch of the Institute of Psychology and of the Interfaculty Research Cooperation “Decoding Sleep” at the University of Bern, Switzerland. These investigators now showed for the first time that new foreign words and their translation words could be associated during a midday nap with associations stored into wakefulness. Following waking, participants could reactivate the sleep-formed associations to access word meanings when represented with the formerly sleep-played foreign words. The hippocampus, a brain structure essential for wake associative learning, also supported the retrieval of sleep-formed associations. The results of this experiment are published open access in the scientific journal Current Biology.

The brain cells’ active states are central for sleep-learning

The research group of Katharina Henke examined whether a sleeping person is able to form new semantic associations between played foreign words and translation words during the brain cells’ active states, the so-called “Up-states.” When we reach deep sleep stages, our brain cells progressively coordinate their activity. During deep sleep, the brain cells are commonly active for a brief period of time before they jointly enter into a state of brief inactivity. The active state is called “Up-state” and the inactive state “Down-state.” The two states alternate about every half-second.

Semantic associations between sleep-played words of an artificial language and their German translations words were only encoded and stored, if the second word of a pair was repeatedly (2, 3 or 4 times) played during an Up-state. E.g., when a sleeping person heard the word pairs “tofer = key” and “guga = elephant,” then after waking they were able to categorize with a better-than-chance accuracy whether the sleep-played foreign words denominated something large (“Guga”) or small (“Tofer”). “It was interesting that language areas of the brain and the hippocampus — the brain’s essential memory hub — were activated during the wake retrieval of sleep-learned vocabulary because these brain structures normally mediate wake learning of new vocabulary,” says Marc Züst, co-first-author of this paper. “These brain structures appear to mediate memory formation independently of the prevailing state of consciousness — unconscious during deep sleep, conscious during wakefulness.”

Memory formation does not require consciousness

Besides its practical relevance, this new evidence for sleep-learning challenges current theories of sleep and theories of memory. The notion of sleep as an encapsulated mental state, in which we are detached from the physical environment is no longer tenable. “We could disprove that sophisticated learning be impossible during deep sleep,” says Simon Ruch, co-first-author. The current results underscore a new theoretical notion of the relationship between memory and consciousness that Katharina Henke published in 2010 (Nature Reviews Neuroscience). “In how far and with what consequences deep sleep can be utilized for the acquisition of new information will be a topic of research in upcoming years,” says Katharina Henke.

Decoding sleep

The research group of Katharina Henke is part of the Interfaculty Research Cooperation “Decoding Sleep: From Neurons to Health & Mind” (IRC). Decoding Sleep is a large, interdisciplinary research project that is financed by the University of Bern, Switzerland. Thirteen research groups in medicine, biology, psychology, and informatics are part of the IRC. The aim of these research groups is to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms involved in sleep, consciousness, and cognition.

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Researchers at Rutgers University-New Brunswick have developed a smart wristband that uses a biosensor technology to monitor personal health conditions.

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