Kepentingan makanan kepada fungsi otak

Kompelks nyer dia dan sayangilah

Nutrien atau zat-zat yang didapati daripada makanan mempengaruhi fungsi otak dan juga kecerdasan otak seseorang. Dalam erti kata lain, otak kita membangun dan boleh berfungsi dengan menggunakan sumber-sumber protein, asid amino, lemak, karbohidrat, vitamin dan garam galian yang diperolehi daripada makanan yang dimakan.

Protein

Dari protein, otak menghasilkan bahan-bahan neurotransmitter untuk membolehkan sel otak menghantar maklumat dari satu sel kepada satu sel yang lain. Dari protein juga terhasilnya enzim-enzim untuk pelbagai fungsi penting sel. Dari protein juga terhasilnya kimia-kimia hormon sex,hormon tirod dan lain-lain. Malah 65% daripada bahan pembinaan sel tubuh dan otak adalah terdiri daripada protein.

Lemak

Dari lemak pula kita memperolehi bahan-bahan asas untuk membina dinding sel (membran sel). Jika lemah dinding maka lemahlah sel, termasuk sel otak. Oleh itu lemak adalah penting untuk otak.

Glukos

Sejumlah besar glukos diperolehi daripada karbohidrat. Glukos ini merupakan sumber tenaga yang terpenting untuk membolehkan otak berfungsi.

Garam galian

Garam galian seperti magnesium, kalsium, sodium, potassium dan selenium adalah amat penting untuk membolehkan sel berhubung antara satu sama lain dengan sempurna. Galian-galian ini merupakan faktor pembantu dalam fungsi enzim.

Vitamin

Vitamin adalah juga faktor pembantu yang penting untuk menghasilkan bahan-bahan penting untuk fungsi otak. Vitamin juga mempertahankan oksigen yang penting untuk fungsi otak.

Fungsi Otak

Alien Planet

This artist’s impression shows the disc around the young star T Cha. Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope this disc has been found to be in two parts, a narrow ring close to the star and the remainder of the disc material much further out. A companion object, seen in the foreground, has been detected in the gap in the disc that may be either a brown dwarf or a large planet. The inner dust disc is lost in the glare of the star on this picture. ESO/L. Calçada  View full size image

Researchers may have spotted a new alien planet coalescing out of the dusty disk surrounding a young star — an observation that, if confirmed, would be a cosmic first. 

The international team of astronomers was studying the disk of dust and gas around a nearby star called T Chamaeleontis (T Cha for short) when it made the potential find. This disk has a large gap, and in two new studies the researchers report the likely cause: a companion object, one that could be a newly born alien planet.

If this turns out to be the case, it would be the first time a coalescing planet has been detected in such a young disk, researchers said.

"To our knowledge, this is the first time we have a fairly complete picture of a peculiar system like this, on different spatial scales, from the innermost regions to the detection of a companion within the gap," said Nuria Huelamo of the European Space Astronomy Center's Astrobiology Center in Spain, lead author of one of the studies.

Peering at a young star

T Cha is a relatively faint star found in the southern constellation Chamaeleon, about 350 light-years from Earth. The star is like our own sun in a number of ways, researchers said, but it is just 7 million years old or so, compared to the sun's age of 4.5 billion years.

T Cha is so young that a disk of gas and dust — the stuff that planets are made of — still hugs it. The researchers used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, on a mountaintop in northern Chile, to study and characterize the disk and its prominent gap.

The astronomers found that a narrow dusty ring sits about 12.4 million miles (20 million kilometers) from T Cha. Beyond this ring, the gap — a region devoid of dust and gas — stretches out to about 680 million miles (1.1 billion km) from the star.

"For us, the gap in the dust disk around T Cha was a smoking gun, and we asked ourselves: Could we be witnessing a companion digging a gap inside its protoplanetary disk?" Huelamo said in a statement.

Finding the companion

Careful observation and analysis confirmed the researchers' suspicions. They picked up a clear signature of an object sitting in the disk's gap, about 620 million miles (1 billion km) from T Cha — a little farther out than Jupiter is within our own solar system. 

The object is much smaller than T Cha, though researchers said they aren't yet able to pin down its precise size.

The object may be a planet, or it may be a brown dwarf — a curious body that falls between planets and stars in temperature and mass. It's too soon to tell, researchers said. The team plans to observe the object again in a month, at which time things could start to get a little clearer.

Either way, the find marks the first time a body like this has been discovered in such a young protoplanetary disk.

"We plan to obtain observations in different filters, which will hopefully help us to understand the nature of the object," said Johan Olofsson of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, lead author of the second study. Both papers are being published by the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Whatever the newly discovered object turns out to be, such finds could help astronomers improve their planet-formation models. In the meantime, Huelamo and Olofsson said, these models need to be pushed further — to simulate how quickly disk gaps such as T Cha's open up and how the mass and orbital characteristics of companion bodies affect them, for example.

In the very near future, Olofsson said, "we will be able to test all these questions, and we can hope to understand more and more about planet formation."

You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter: @michaeldwall.

This story was provided by SPACE.com, a sister site to LiveScience.

You're tired. You could put your head down on a desk right now and fall asleep immediately. You went to bed late last night, had trouble falling asleep and woke up too early. And let's not kid ourselves: Tonight will be the same unless … well, read on.

This is the classic not-so-shut-eye experience of many Americans who think they are sleep-deprived and possibly need pills or other treatment to fix their insomnia, teeth grinding, jet lag, restless or jerky legs, snoring, sleepwalking and so forth.

Reality is quite different.

For instance, insomnia is said to be the most common sleep disorder, but these dissatisfying sleep experiences only get in the way of daily activities for 10 percent of us, according to the National Institutes of Health. And in almost half of those cases, the real underlying problem is illness (often mental) or the effects of a substance, like coffee or medication.

Here are five recent findings that might help you rest easier:

1. We sleep better than we think we do

For most of us, sleep deprivation is a myth. We're not zombies. The non-profit National Sleep Foundation (which takes money from the sleep-aid industry, including drug companies that make sleeping pills) says the average U.S. resident gets 7 hours a night and that's not enough, but a University of Maryland study earlier this year shows we typically get 8 hours and are doing fine. In fact, Americans get just as much sleep nowadays as they did 40 years ago, the study found.

2. We need less sleep as we age

We'll die without sleep. The details are sketchy, but research suggests it's a time when we restore vital biological processes and also sort and cement memories. Last year, the World Health Organization determined that nightshift work, which can lead to sleep troubles, is a probable human carcinogen. On the upside, the latest research suggests we need less of it as we get older.

3. You can sleep like a baby (or Thomas Edison)

Multiple, shorter sleep sessions nightly, rather than one long one, are an option. So-calledpolyphasic sleep is seen in babies, the elderly and other animals (and Thomas Edison reportedly slept this way). For the rest of us, it is more realistic and healthy to sleep at night as best we can and then take naps as needed. EEGs show that we are biphasic sleepers with two alertness dips — one at night time and one mid-day. So talk to HR about setting up a nap room, like they have for NASA's Phoenix mission team members.

4. Animals exhibit a range of sleep habits

The three-toed sloth sleeps 9.6 hours nightly. But newborn dolphins and killer whales can forgo sleeping for their entire first month. However, the latter extreme is not recommended for humans. We grow irritable and lose our ability to focus and make decisions after even one night of missed sleep, and that can lead to serious accidents driving and using other machinery.

5. Get used to being tired, hit the desk

The bottom line is that a good night's sleep is within the reach of most of us if we follow common-sense guidelines for sleep hygiene:

• Go to bed at the same time nightly.
• Set aside enough time to hit that golden 7 hours of sleep.
• Refrain from caffeine, heavy or spicy foods, and alcohol and other optional medications that might keep you awake, four to six hours before bed-time.
• Have a pre-sleep routine so you wind down before you hop in.
• Block out distracting lights and noises.
• Only engage in sleep and sex in bed (no TV-watching, reading or eating).
• Exercise regularly but not right before bed.

But you already know all this and you don't do it. So your realistic plan might be to surrender to the mid-day desk nap.

Fakta Tidur

•  kajian menunujukkan bahawa masalah sukar menumpukan perhatian  kelembapan otak ada kaitannya dengan faktor tidur
• tidur amat penting bagi melancarkan proses metabolisme karbohidrat di dalam badan
• melalui proses ini seseorang mengeluarkan hormon pertumbuhan yang berfungsi untuk membaiki sel-sel yang rosak 
• tidur yang cukup mampu meningkatkan keupayaan untuk belajar && membantu daam memelihara daya ingatan seseorang
• proses penyimpanan maklumat di dalam otak juga berlaku semasa tidur
• kurang tidur menyebabkan tumpuan seseorang dalam membuat keputusan && perancangan terjejas
• menurut kajian : kebanyaka kemalangan yang berllaku di tempat kerja mahupun jalan raya ada kaitannya dengan tumpuan yang terganggu akibat faktor kurang tidur 
• tidur memantapkan sistem ketahanan dalam badan seseorang
• kerana seseorang yang kurang tidur drpd biasa akan mengalami tekanan && melemahkan ketahanan badan hingga menyebabkab mudah dijangkiti penyakit -.-
• menurut pakar : badan kita mempunyai pusingan biologi yang tetap 
• pusingan biologi ini aktif pada waktu siang && kurang aktif pada malam hari 
• oleh itu bagi memulihkan biologi dlm badan , kita perlukan tidur yang cukup -.-
• tidur yang tidak mencukupi akan menjejaskan pusingan biologi seseorang
• amalan tidur di siang hari dapat menyegarkan tubuh
• sekali gus dapat meningkatkan produktiviti
• kajian juga menunjukkan bahawa tidur secara rutin selam 30 min pada waktu tengah hari dapat mengurangkan sakit jantung
• namun seseorang tidak digalakka tidur selepas matahari terbit dan pada waktu lewat petang
• kerana menurut pakar , tidur pada waktu2 tersebut boleh menjejaskan kesihatan 

Enjoy it