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A decade from now, memory-boosting implants could be available commercially, but at what risk?

Researchers have shown that a type of magnetic resonance imaging—called neuromelanin-sensitive MRI (NM-MRI)—is a potential biomarker for psychosis. NM-MRI signal was found to be a marker of dopamine function in people with schizophrenia and an indicator of the severity of psychotic symptoms in people with this mental illness. The study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health, appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

“Disturbances affecting the neurotransmitter dopamine are associated with a host of mental and neurological disorders, such as schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease,” said Joshua A. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., director of NIMH. “Because of the role dopamine plays in these disorders, the ability to measure dopamine activity is critical for furthering our understanding of these disorders, including how to best diagnose and treat them.”

Neuromelanin is a dark pigment created within dopamine neurons of the midbrain—particularly in the substantia nigra, a brain area that plays a role in reward and movement. Neuromelanin accumulates over the lifespan and is only cleared away from cells following cell death, as occurs in neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. Researchers have found that NM-MRI signal is lower in the substantia nigra of people with Parkinson’s disease, reflecting the cell death that occurs in these patients.

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Summary: Researchers have identified a previously unknown form of neural communication. They report the findings could help better the understanding of neural activity associated with specific brain processing and neurological disorders.

Source: Case Western Reserve University.

Biomedical engineering researchers at Case Western Reserve University say they have identified a previously unidentified form of neural communication, a discovery that could help scientists better understand neural activity surrounding specific brain processes and brain disorders.

Circa 2015

The first successful vaccination of deer against chronic wasting disease is reported in the journal Vaccine, (Vaccine 2015;38:726–33), posted online in advance of print Dec. 21, 2014.

Researchers say the breakthrough may not only protect U.S. livestock against CWD but may also shed new light on human diseases suspected of being caused by prion infections, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, kuru, familial insomnia, and variably protease-sensitive prionopathy. Some studies also have associated prionlike infections with Alzheimer’s disease.

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It is the first such research to be undertaken at the university.

IBRO is the global federation of neuroscience organizations that aims to promote and support neuroscience around the world through training, teaching, collaborative research, outreach and advocacy.

The research will be carried out at Sahu’s Cell Biology and Molecular metabolism lab at the Vikram Sarabhai Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology, which is headed by Professor Sarita Gupta.

Continue reading “Ahmedabad: MSU researcher gets global grant for vesicular trafficking study” »

Most people have at some point echoed Macbeth’s complaint about the loss of “sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care”. Sleep disorders, such as obstructive sleep apnoea (when breathing temporarily stops, causing both sleep disruption and lack of oxygen in blood) and sleep deprivation, have been associated with an increased risk of atherosclerosis and its harmful cardiovascular effects^,. Atherosclerosis is characterized by the formation of ‘plaques’ in arteries, as white blood cells enter the artery wall, take up cholesterol and other substances from the blood and trigger an inflammatory response. However, the mechanisms linking sleep disruption and atherosclerosis have been largely unknown. Writing in Nature, McAlpine et al. show that persistent sleep disruption causes the brain to signal the bone marrow to increase the production of white blood cells.

McAlpine et al. studied mice that were prone to developing atherosclerosis. The authors induced sleep fragmentation by moving a bar intermittently across the bottom of the animals’ cages during their sleep period (Fig. 1), and compared these animals with animals that slept normally. They found that mice with sleep fragmentation had more-severe atherosclerosis, which was paralleled by increases in the production of white blood cells in the bone marrow and in the numbers of monocytes and neutrophils — two types of white blood cell — in the blood. These effects were absent if the bar was moved when the mice were fully awake. Stress activates the sympathetic nervous system (which is associated with the ‘fight-or-flight’ response), and such activation increases the production of white blood cells and atherosclerosis in other experimental settings. However, the authors did not find evidence for a role of sympathetic activation in their setting.

Scientists think they’ve identified a previously unknown form of neural communication that self-propagates across brain tissue, and can leap wirelessly from neurons in one section of brain tissue to another – even if they’ve been surgically severed.

The discovery offers some radical new insights about the way neurons might be talking to one another, via a mysterious process unrelated to conventionally understood mechanisms, such as synaptic transmission, axonal transport, and gap junction connections.

“We don’t know yet the ‘So what?’ part of this discovery entirely,” says neural and biomedical engineer Dominique Durand from Case Western Reserve University.

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Deep-learning neural networks have come a long way in the past several years—we now have systems that are capable of beating people at complex games such as shogi, Go and chess. But is the progress of such systems limited by their basic architecture? Shimon Ullman, with the Weizmann Institute of Science, addresses this question in a Perspectives piece in the journal Science and suggests some ways computer scientists might reach beyond simple AI systems to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems.

Deep learning networks are able to learn because they have been programmed to create artificial neurons and the connections between them. As they encounter new data, new neurons and communication paths between them are formed—very much like the way the human brain operates. But such systems require extensive training (and a feedback system) before they are able to do anything useful, which stands in stark contrast to the way that humans learn. We do not need to watch thousands of people in action to learn to follow someone’s gaze, for example, or to figure out that a smile is something positive.

Ullman suggests this is because humans are born with what he describes as preexisting network structures that are encoded into our neural circuitry. Such structures, he explains, provide growing infants with an understanding of the physical world in which they exist—a base upon which they can build more complex structures that lead to general intelligence. If computers had similar structures, they, too, might develop physical and social skills without the need for thousands of examples.

There are a lot of people who like to claim themselves as “supremely logical.” The ones who insist that their every thought is controlled by reason and not emotions. Of course, this is incorrect. Outside of people with certain kinds of brain damage, people are not logical beings. Especially since there’s no definition of logic that fits the definition of what lot’s of people refer to as logic.

Why so many men online love to use “logic” to win an argument, and then disappear before they can find out they’re wrong.