Are you impressed when NASA manages to calculate the time and speed of a rocket’s trajectory? A new study from the University of Oslo shows that…
The cerebellum is known primarily for regulation of movement. Researchers at the University of Basel have now discovered that the cerebellum also plays an important role…
Summary: Administering a chemical compound called synthetic retinoids to the retina helped restore brain networks associated with vision and prompted the growth of two times more neurons, effectively restoring vision in adult mouse models of the genetic visual disorder LCA.
Source: UC Irvine.
A discovery about how some visually impaired adults could start to see offers a new vision of the brain’s possibilities.
Research into dopamine-producing cells and rogue proteins among efforts to find far-reaching treatment.
An evolutionary approach to consciousness can resolve the ‘hard problem’ – with radical implications for animal sentience by Nicholas Humphrey + BIO.
Summary: Brain organoids are helping researchers map the molecular, genetic, and structural changes that occur during brain development.
Source: ETH Zurich.
The human brain is probably the most complex organ in the entire living world and has long been an object of fascination for researchers. However, studying the brain, and especially the genes and molecular switches that regulate and direct its development, is no easy task.
Editing technology is precise and broadly applicable to all tissues and species.
Scientists at Duke University have developed an RNA
Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a polymeric molecule similar to DNA that is essential in various biological roles in coding, decoding, regulation and expression of genes. Both are nucleic acids, but unlike DNA, RNA is single-stranded. An RNA strand has a backbone made of alternating sugar (ribose) and phosphate groups. Attached to each sugar is one of four bases—adenine (A), uracil (U), cytosine ©, or guanine (G). Different types of RNA exist in the cell: messenger RNA (mRNA), ribosomal RNA (rRNA), and transfer RNA (tRNA).
No one imaging mode can catch everything that’s going on inside the brain, since it is such a complex organ. Multiple “brain maps” have emerged over the years, with each focusing on different brain processes, from metabolism to cognitive function. These maps are indeed important, but using them in isolation limits the discoveries scientists can make from them.
More than forty existing brain maps have now been collected in one place by a team from The Neuro. Called neuromaps, the database will help researchers find correlations between patterns across different brain regions, modalities, spatial scales, and brain functions. To assist researchers in differentiating between a relevant association and a random pattern, it offers a standardized space to see each map in comparison to one another and evaluates the statistical significance of these comparisons. Additionally, the neuromaps database helps standardize the code across maps, to improve reproducibility of results.
