Individual human neurons may be far more powerful computing units than previously understood.
Category: neuroscience – Page 36
From molecules to networks, siibra integrates brain data into a unified atlas
In the current issue of the journal Nature Methods, siibra is introduced as a software suite that integrates data from different multimodal sources into a comprehensive atlas of the human brain and makes the data easily accessible—for interactive exploration and automated, reproducible data analyses, simulations and AI applications. siibra is developed by an international team of scientists led by the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1) at Forschungszentrum Jülich.
To better understand the human brain, information from various levels must be integrated, from molecules and cells to their organization and entire networks. A central challenge is that these data are often scattered across sources and organized differently. They originate from methods such as microscopy, MRI and connectivity analysis; exist in formats ranging from images to tables; and rely on different spatial reference systems and conceptual taxonomies.
“Using siibra, we are now able to access and analyze brain data in a structured way from micro-to macrolevels—for more precise neuroscience studies, bio-inspired AI and clinical applications such as deep brain stimulation,” says Dr. Timo Dickscheid, working group leader for “Big Data Analytics.”
High-speed 3D imaging reveals how seizures move through the brain
Seizures can race through the brain in seconds, making them difficult to capture in detail. To overcome this challenge, researchers have developed a new high-resolution light-sheet imaging system that is fast enough to image seizure propagation in the brain of a larval zebrafish in 3D.
“We developed a light-sheet microscope that allows rapid volumetric imaging with real-time correction of aberrations—imperfections in the way a microscope forms an image,” said research team leader Peter Kner from the University of Georgia. “Most imaging of seizure events in zebrafish has only captured 2D images, but our system allows 3D high-resolution imaging over a larger volume than was previously possible.”
In their article published in the journal Biomedical Optics Express, the researchers show that their new microscopy system can capture volumes up to 499 × 499 × 150 microns3 at a rate of four volumes per second with near-diffraction-limited resolution. They used the system to observe how seizures spread through the nervous system in zebrafish larvae, which are commonly used in neuroscience research.
Why some human brains can outlast other soft tissues after death
Why do some brains survive long after death when most other soft tissue decays? That’s the question a research team led by Alexandra Morton-Hayward at the University of Oxford set out to answer.
The brain is one of the first organs to liquefy and decompose after death. Yet in recent decades, archaeologists have recovered more than 4,400 well-preserved human brains dating back 12,000 years. In more than 1,300 cases, the brain was the only soft tissue left inside skeletal remains.
This phenomenon occurs most often in waterlogged, low-oxygen graves, but scientists lacked a clear explanation for how such a fragile organ can sometimes outlast everything else.
Astronomers spot an extremely rare galaxy mega-merger
Scale in the universe is hard to understand from a purely human perspective. Many times, the math just doesn’t sit well with our brains, which evolved to capture and process data about the world around us rather than grok the complexities of stellar dynamics and galaxy mergers. But every once in a while, astronomers find something that, if we can wrap our heads around the numbers, gives a sense of just how big the universe is.
That is precisely what a new paper, available on the arXiv preprint server from a group of astronomers led by Z.L. Wen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, hopes to do when it describes a merger of not one, not two, but six supermassive galaxies and the active dynamics they are subject to.
Admittedly, this paper isn’t the one that originally found the cluster. That was done back in 2018 by several all-sky surveys, including the Two Micron All Sky Survey, WISE and SuperCOSMOS. But it was the first to identify that the cluster contained a group of six merging galaxies at its heart. That tidbit was hidden away in Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Surveys data.