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Category: neuroscience – Page 1,314

US military proposes secure, self-destructing messaging app

Military’s new Mission Impossible style messaging.

The U.S. military needs new messaging technology that’s ultra-secure and self-destructs. Sound familiar?

Think SnapChat. That’s an important part of what the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is aiming to do via a request for proposals posted on a DOD Web page. In Phase III of the project, DARPA says it requires “a secure messaging system that can provide… one time eyes only messages,” among a host of other features. Similarly, SnapChat allows a message to be viewed for a short length of time (1 to 10 seconds) before it becomes inaccessible, the primary reason it has become such a popular messaging platform.

Beyond this, the larger objective for the military is to meet a “critical DoD need to develop a secure messaging and transaction platform.” The DARPA request for proposals is aimed at building a messaging platform that the military could use for secure communication ranging from procurement to intelligence.

Scientists turn skin cells into heart and brain cells using only drugs — no stem cells required

Neurons created from chemically induced neural stem cells. The cells were created from skin cells that were reprogrammed into neural stem cells using a cocktail of only nine chemicals. This is the first time cellular reprogramming has been accomplished without adding external genes to the cells. (credit: Mingliang Zhang, PhD, Gladstone Institutes)

Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have used chemicals to transform skin cells into heart cells and brain cells, instead of adding external genes — making this accomplishment a breakthrough, according to the scientists.

The research lays the groundwork for one day being able to regenerate lost or damaged cells directly with pharmaceutical drugs — a more efficient and reliable method to reprogram cells and one that avoids medical concerns surrounding genetic engineering.

New Brain Map Shows Where Words Are Stored Inside Your Head

New keys unlock how words are stored in our brains.

Researchers have created a new map of the human brain which shows where we organize words depending on their meaning—and it could help us read minds more accurately than ever.

Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, have published an interactive version of the map online. It allows you to explore the whole brain, clicking around to see where different types of words—from social and spatial, to violent and visual—are stored.

The team constructed the maps by playing seven different participants a two-hour chunk of The Moth Radio Hour while scanning their brains using functional MRI. The brain scans showed how the oxygen levels in blood across the brain changed, and this data was then used as a measure of how active a particular part of the brain was.

Brain’s ‘thesaurus’ mapped to help decode inner thoughts

What if a map of the brain could help us decode people’s inner thoughts?

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have taken a step in that direction by building a “semantic atlas” that shows in vivid colors and multiple dimensions how the organizes language. The atlas identifies brain areas that respond to words that have similar meanings.

The findings, to be published April 28, 2016 in the journal Nature, are based on a brain imaging study that recorded neural activity while study volunteers listened to stories from the “Moth Radio Hour.” They show that at least one-third of the brain’s cerebral cortex, including areas dedicated to high-level cognition, is involved in language processing.

Why precision medicine is important for our future

We definitely need precision medicine. If you don’t believe it is worth that; then I have a few widows & widowers who you should speak to; I have parents that you should speak with; I have a list of sisters & brothers that you should speak with; and I have many many friends (including me) that you should speak with about how we miss those we love because things like precision medicine wasn’t available and could have saved their lives.

Precision medicine is the theme for the 10th annual symposium of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Nano Biotechnology, Friday, April 29, 2016 at 9 a.m. in the Owens Auditorium at the School of Medicine. This year’s event is cohosted by Johns Hopkins Individualized Health Initiative (also known as Hopkins in Health) and features several in Health affiliated speakers.

By developing treatments that overcome the limitations of the one-size-fits-all mindset, precision medicine will more effectively prevent and thwart disease. Driven by data provided from sources such as electronic medical records, public health investigations, clinical studies, and from patients themselves through new point-of-care assays, wearable sensors and smartphone apps, precision medicine will become the gold standard of care in the not-so-distant future. Before long, we will be able to treat and also prevent diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, and cancer with regimes that are tailor-made for the individual.

Hopkins in Health is a signature initiative of Johns Hopkins University’s $4.5 billion Rising to the Challenge campaign is a collaboration among three institutions: the University, the Johns Hopkins Health System, and the Applied Physics Laboratory. These in Health researchers combine clinical, genetic, lifestyle, and other data sources to create innovative tools intended to improve decision-making in the prevention and treatment of a range of conditions, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disorders, and infectious disease. The goal is to “provide the right care to the right person at the right time.”

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