Summary: The Mini2P microscope can be used to record brain activity in live, freely moving mice.
Source: NTNU
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, established by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, has awarded a grant of between NOK 5–6 million (approx $500 000-$60000 USD) to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience.
MIT neuroscientists have found that the adult brain is filled with millions of “silent synapses” — immature connections between neurons that are not active until they are needed to help create new memories.
It was previously believed that silent synapses only existed during early development, playing a role in helping the brain learn new information encountered in early life. However, the new MIT
MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances. Their stated goal is to make a better world through education, research, and innovation.
According to recent research individuals who use statins, a class of drugs that decrease cholesterol levels may have a decreased risk of an intracerebral hemorrhage. Intracerebral hemorrhage is a type of stroke caused by bleeding in the brain. The study was recently published in the journal Neurology.
“While statins have been shown to reduce the risk of stroke from blood clots, there has been conflicting research on whether statin use increases or decreases the risk of a person having a first intracerebral hemorrhage,” said study author David Gaist, MD, Ph.D., of the University of Southern Denmark in Odense and a member of the American Academy of Neurology. “For our study, we looked at the lobe and non-lobe areas of the brain to see if the location was a factor for statin use and the risk of a first intracerebral hemorrhage. We found that those who used a statin had a lower risk of this type of bleeding stroke in both areas of the brain. The risk was even lower with long-term statin use.”
The lobe area of the brain includes most of the cerebrum, including the frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes. The non-lobe area primarily includes the basal ganglia, thalamus, cerebellum, and brainstem.
Drs Emmeline Edwards and Wen Chen discuss music-based interventions, their impacts, techniques used to understand them and more!
With so much death all around us, from the pandemic to the war in Ukraine to all the mass shootings, you might wonder what it all means. Queen Elizabeth gone. Betty White gone. And perhaps even a loved one of yours gone. They no longer exist, right? They are just memories, at least from a rational scientific perspective. But what if you’re wrong?
Dr. Caroline Soames-Watkins also believed that the world around her existed as a hard, cold reality ticking away like a clock. Death was a foregone conclusion—until she learned different. Caro, the protagonist of my new novel co-written with award-winning sci-fi author Nancy Kress, also thought she had the world figured out. Not her personal world, which has been upended by controversy, but how the physical world works and how her consciousness operates within it. Broke and without a job, she accepts a job offer from her great-uncle, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who runs a research facility studying the space between biology and consciousness—between the self and what we assume is reality. They are on the verge of a humanity-altering discovery, which throws Caro into danger—love, loss, and death—that she could never have imagined possible.
Observer takes Caro on a mind-expanding journey to the very edge of science, challenging her to think about life and the power of the imagination in startling new ways. The ideas behind Observer are based on real science, starting with the famous two-slit experiments, in which the presence of an observer affects the path taken by a sub-atomic particle, and moves step-by-step into cutting-edge science about quantum entanglement, on-going experiments applying quantum-level physics to the macro-world, the multiverse, and the nature of time and consciousness itself.
The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is a region in the frontal lobe of the brain known to be involved in decision-making and information processing. The lateral part of this brain region, known as the lOFC, has been identified as a particularly salient region for the creation of so-called “cognitive maps.”
Cognitive maps are mental representations of the world that are believed to guide human behavior. While past studies have linked the lOFC to the brain’s use of these maps, it is still unclear whether it creates these maps or merely deploys them when necessary.
Researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Baltimore and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics have recently carried out a study exploring these two hypotheses, with the hope of better understanding the functions of the lOFC. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that the lateral OFC is directly involved in the writing of cognitive maps.
Recent experiments conducted in Boston labs have shown reverse aging results among mice and could show similar results in people.
The combined experiments — which were conducted during a span of 13 years — published Thursday (January 12) in the scientific journal Cell reported that old, blind mice regained eyesight, developed smarter brains and built healthier muscle and kidney tissue, challenging the theory that DNA was the only cause of aging, as it proved that chemical and structural changes to chromatin played a factor without altering genetic code.
The research showed that a breakdown in epigenetic information caused the mice to age and the restoration of the epigenome reversed aging effects.
The concept of emergence is controversial to some — for example Eliezer Yudkowski, who favors reductionism, wrote a critique at Less Wrong (see link below). Do reductionists often dismiss emergence?
Ben formalized emergence in his book ‘The Evolving Mind’ as patterns that appear when you put two or more things together that are not there in any of the individual parts.
Book — ‘The Evolving Mind’: http://www.goertzel.org/books/mind/contents.html http://www.amazon.com/Evolving-Futures-General-Evolution-Stu…atfound-20
Continue reading “Ben Goertzel — Emergence, Reduction & Artificial Intelligence” »
New research in rat models suggests that the delivery of an antibody therapy to the brain via nasal spray may help heal damage induced by stroke.
It goes without saying that if someone has a blood clot in their brain, that clot should be cleared as soon as possible. An experimental new transducer could help, as it uses swirling waves of ultrasound to break up blood clots much faster than existing methods.
Developed by scientists at North Carolina State University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, the device is designed specifically for use on what are known as cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) clots. These form in veins that ordinarily allow blood to drain from the brain. When those veins are blocked, blood pressure in the brain increases, to the point that a potentially lethal or disabling hemorrhage may occur.
Most existing CVST treatments involve using drugs to dissolve the clot. According to the team behind the new study, however, it takes an average of about 29 hours – and never less than 15 hours – for such medications to work. By contrast, the new transducer breaks up the clots in less than 30 minutes.
