Neuroscience – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Jul 12
2019

Yale researchers revive cells in dead pig brains

YaleNew

In a stunning scientific breakthrough, Yale School of Medicine researchers restored brain activity in pigs that had died hours before. The finding could revolutionize the neuroscience field and how scientists conceive the boundaries between life and death.

By circulating a cocktail of cell-rejuvenating compounds throughout the pigs’ brains, the researchers prevented tissue decomposition and restored some cell function. If replicated, their technique could be used as a model for drug testing and has implications for how scientists understand brain plasticity after traumatic events such as strokes.

Jul 11
2019

Brain-eating amoeba found in Louisiana drinking water again

They are found in many freshwater lakes.

A potentially deadly brain-eating amoeba has been detected in a Louisiana neighborhood’s drinking water — the third time the terrifying discovery has been made in the same parish since 2015, reports said.

Naegleria fowleri, which causes fatal brain swelling and tissue destruction, was found over the weekend in Terrebonne Parish, deep in the Louisiana bayou about an hour south of New Orleans, WWL-TV reported.

Jul 11
2019

Allen Brain Explorer

The Allen Brain Explorer (beta) is an application that allows users to browse multimodal datasets in an annotated 3D spatial framework. This new application is an integrated web-based navigator, allowing users to explore the Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas projection data and Allen Reference Atlas (ARA) in a standardized coordinate space.

The Brain Explorer 2 software is a desktop application for viewing the Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas projection data and the Allen Mouse Brain Atlas gene expression data in the framework of the Allen Reference Atlas (ARA). This downloadable software will be discontinued in 2019, as improved functionality and new features will be available via the integrated web-based platform. Updates to this software will be discontinued after that time.

Jul 11
2019

Autism mutations — Autism mutations may alter gut function, microbiome

Mutations in the autism gene NLGN3 may alter the gut nervous system of mice.

Jul 11
2019

A Special Class of Proteins Offers Promising Targets for Drugs for Cancer and Alzheimer’s

New possibilities for treating cancer and other ills.

By Elizabeth O’Day on July 1, 2019

Jul 10
2019

A 100-hour MRI scan captured the most detailed look yet at a whole human brain

Researchers report ultraprecise imaging of a postmortem human brain.

Jul 10
2019

Gut worms were once a cause of disease, now they are a cure Essays

We need worms

You might think they are disgusting. But our war against intestinal worms has damaged our immune systems and mental health.

William Parker

Jul 9
2019

Neuroscience and artificial intelligence can help improve each other

Despite their names, artificial intelligence technologies and their component systems, such as artificial neural networks, don’t have much to do with real brain science. I’m a professor of bioengineering and neurosciences interested in understanding how the brain works as a system – and how we can use that knowledge to design and engineer new machine learning models.

In recent decades, brain researchers have learned a huge amount about the physical connections in the brain and about how the nervous system routes information and processes it. But there is still a vast amount yet to be discovered.

At the same time, computer algorithms, software and hardware advances have brought machine learning to previously unimagined levels of achievement. I and other researchers in the field, including a number of its leaders, have a growing sense that finding out more about how the brain processes information could help programmers translate the concepts of thinking from the wet and squishy world of biology into all-new forms of machine learning in the digital world.

Jul 8
2019

New research sheds light on a possible cause of autism: processed foods

The more we learn about the microbiome, the more the pieces are fitting together.

Jul 8
2019

Important results for brain machine interfaces

Data from Mental Work project, conducted as an experimental artwork at EPFL’s Artlab, indicates that BMI is robust and accessible to the general public, spurring new research collaborations in Switzerland on user experience.

Brain-machine interfaces are rarely found outside of medical clinics, where the disabled receive hours or days of training in order to operate wheelchairs with their minds. Now the largest-ever BMI experiment Mental Work, conducted as an experimental artwork at EPFL’s Artlab, has provided preliminary evidence that training time can be shortened, the use of dry electrodes are a robust solution for public BMI and that user performance tends to improve within a relatively short period of time. The still-to-be-published results suggest that BMI may soon reach a much larger and more diverse population. A new collaboration between the Foundation Campus Biotech Geneva, the EPFL and the HEIG-VD in Yverdon will build on the promising results will build on the promising results of Mental Work to further develop user-friendly and publicly accessible interfaces to interact with the physical and digital world using only one’s mind.

“This is the first demonstration that installation art can be used as an experimental platform for breakthrough science,” says Jonathon Keats, the artist and experimental philosopher who conceptualized Mental Work.