Welcome to another edition of CoolFacts.

CoolFact number one is about how your brain cells transfer mitochondria to one another.

And if your brand new to this stuff, mitochondria are not the power plants in your cells.

They're actually the environmental sensors that then are manufacturing plants that can

make power, they can make inflammatory cytokines, they can make sex hormones.

Basically, they look, they decide and they make electricity or something else good or bad.

What we've discovered is that when you experience a brain injury, like a stroke or a traumatic

brain injury, mitochondria in your brain cells get damaged because there's a storm of

free radicals.

And that makes the damage even worse because already healthy mitochondria contain a free

radical fighting enzyme called SOD.

And they also contain a really neat peptide called humanin.

And well, they need to be able to make those, but since they just took a hit, because

the guy next to them took a hit, you can see how this creates waves of damage in the

brain.

This is a bad thing even if you just headed a really hard shot in a soccer game.

But what would happen if healthy mitochondria from nearby cells could jump into those damage

cells to clean up the shop, to stop the damage from progressing?

Turns out that's what's going on.

In mice, researchers were able to inject healthy mitochondria directly into the brains of

animals with experimental brain damage.

And magically, those mitochondria leapt right in and started transferring their antioxidants.

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