This week from Reuters:

Just a modest amount of mental stimulation can go a long way toward warding off Alzheimer's disease, according to researchers who created mice genetically modified to get a condition similar to it.

Researchers at the University of California-Irvine studied hundreds of mice altered to make them develop abnormalities known as plaques and tangles in brain tissue that are considered hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease in people.

And further:

"The remarkable thing was that just by learning infrequently, they still had a very dramatic effect on the Alzheimer's disease pathology," said Kim Green, one of the researchers.

Read the complete article here.