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Category: neuroscience – Page 1,215

3D printing in gel shows how scientists could print human organs

While scientists have had success in the past printing structures like “bionic ears,” a clear path to making functional internal organs and tissue hasn’t really emerged. However, researchers at the University of Florida in Gainesville have developed a way of printing complex objects in gel, a method that could help pave the way to 3D-printed organs in the future.

The hard thing about printing intricate organic structures like blood vessels and complicated organs is that they collapse under their own weight before they solidify. The gel here, which is made of an acrylic acid polymer, acts as a scaffold to hold the structure in place during the printing process. That approach has already allowed the team to print with organic materials — and even make a replica of a human brain.

Printing in gel isn’t an entirely new idea. And, of course, the method isn’t perfect. For one thing, using inorganic gel as a scaffold can’t keep organic tissue alive. For another, printing very small objects could lead to some particles slipping through the material. However, it’s certainly a solid step forward on the way to printing organs for patients in need someday.

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First brain-to-brain ‘telepathy’ communication via the Internet

University of Washington graduate student Jose Ceballos wears an electroencephalography (EEG) cap that records brain activity and sends a response to a second participant over the Internet (credit: University of Washington)

The first brain-to-brain telepathy-like communication between two participants via the Internet has been performed by University of Washington researchers.

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Watch: Paralysed man walks again via brain waves rerouted to his legs

A paraplegic man who was paralysed for five years has walked again on his own two feet, thanks to a new kind of brain-computer interface that can reroute his thoughts to his legs, bypassing his spinal cord entirely.

The anonymous man, who experiences complete paralysis in both legs due to a severe spinal cord injury (SCI), is the first such patient to demonstrate that brain-controlled overground walking after paraplegia due to SCI is feasible.

“Even after years of paralysis, the brain can still generate robust brain waves that can be harnessed to enable basic walking,” one of the researchers, Zoran Nenadic from the University of California, Irvine in the US, said in a press release. “We showed that you can restore intuitive, brain-controlled walking after a complete spinal cord injury.”

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Brain-computer link enables paralyzed California man to walk

By Steve Gorman LOS ANGELES (Reuters) — A brain-to-computer technology that can translate thoughts into leg movements has enabled a man paralyzed from the waist down by a spinal cord injury to become the first such patient to walk without the use of robotics, doctors in Southern California reported on Wednesday. The slow, halting first steps of the 28-year-old paraplegic were documented in a preliminary study published in the British-based Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, along with a YouTube video. The feat was accomplished using a system allowing the brain to bypass the injured spinal cord and instead send messages through a computer algorithm to electrodes placed around the patient’s knees to trigger controlled leg muscle movements.

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Losing Your Mind? Great Thinkers on the Brain

Aristotle is frequently regarded as one of the greatest thinkers of antiquity. So why didn’t he think much of his brain?

In this brief history of the brain, the GPA explores what the great minds of the past thought about thought. And we discover that questions that seem to have obvious answers today were anything but self-evident for the individuals that first tackled them. And that conversely, sometimes the facts which we simply accept to be true can be blinding, preventing us from making deeper discoveries about our our world and ourselves.

Hooked-up human brains play telepathic ‘20 Questions’

“For the experiment, pairs of people played the well-known question-and-answer game “20 Questions”, but were located in two rooms a mile apart and hooked up to a brain-reading system. The person answering “yes” or “no” was connected to an ECG machine, which records electrical brain activity. The person guessing had a transcranial magnetic stimulation coil behind their head — a non-invasive tool that stimulates small areas of the brain”

Two human brains have successfully played “20 Questions”, showing for the first time that it is possible for two brains to share thoughts.

“This is the most complex brain-to-brain experiment, I think, that’s been done to date in humans,” said Andrea Stocco, lead author of the study, from the Institute of Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington.

For the experiment, pairs of people played the well-known question-and-answer game “20 Questions”, but were located in two rooms a mile apart and hooked up to a brain-reading system. The person answering “yes” or “no” was connected to an ECG machine, which records electrical brain activity. The person guessing had a transcranial magnetic stimulation coil behind their head — a non-invasive tool that stimulates small areas of the brain and has been used to treat depression and addiction.

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