Lifeboat Foundation

Antoine Galand, Director of Technology, GraphWear

Nanotechnology was once the stuff of science fiction, but today the concept of creating devices and machines that are several thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair is a well-established fact. The rise of nanotechnology has already transformed industries ranging from consumer electronics to textile manufacturing and cosmetics by unlocking new materials and processes at the nanoscale. The device you’re reading this on, for example, is only possible because of techniques adopted in the semiconductor industry that enable us to pattern silicon and metals to create the microscopic circuits and switches that are at the heart of modern computers.

One of the most promising applications of our newfound ability to manipulate individual atoms and molecules is in healthcare, where the ability of doctors to treat disease has been hamstrung by relatively blunt “macro” solutions. The human body is a remarkably complex system where, fundamentally, nanoscale processes occurring inside cells are what determine whether we are sick or healthy. If we’re ever going to cure diseases like diabetes, cancer or Alzheimer’s, we need technologies that work at their scale. Although medical nanotechnologies are relatively new, they’re already impacting the way we diagnose, treat and prevent a broad range of diseases.

According to recent research, dementia risk in older persons may be increased by vision issues. According to a recent systematic review and meta-analysis of 16 studies comprising 76,373 individuals, older adults with untreated eyesight problems may have a higher chance of developing dementia. Th.

Heating up Twitter feeds this week was a new commentary about a rarely discussed perspective on autism, talk about the use of optogenetics tools to manipulate ‘presynapses,’ a possible explanation for decision-making differences between the sexes, and a striking illustration of the human brain.

Summary: Researchers reveal how neurons set up and sustain the vital infrastructure that allows for seamless neurotransmission.

Source: picower institute for learning and memory.

The nervous system works because neurons communicate across connections called synapses. They “talk” when calcium ions flow through channels into “active zones” that are loaded with vesicles carrying molecular messages.

Neuroscientist and physician Matthew Schrag found suspect images in dozens of papers involving Alzheimer’s disease, including Western blots (projected in green) measuring a protein linked to cognitive decline in rats.

The Neuro-Network.

𝐁𝐋𝐎𝐓𝐒 𝐎𝐍 𝐀 𝐅𝐈𝐄𝐋𝐃?

Continue reading “Potential fabrication in research images threatens key theory of Alzheimer’s disease” »

To understand the architecture of human language, it is critical to examine diverse languages; however, most cognitive neuroscience research has focused on only a handful of primarily Indo-European languages. Here we report an investigation of the fronto-temporo-parietal language network across 45 languages and establish the robustness to cross-linguistic variation of its topography and key functional properties, including left-lateralization, strong functional integration among its brain regions and functional selectivity for language processing. fMRI reveals similar topography, selectivity and inter-connectedness of language brain areas across 45 languages. These properties may allow the language system to handle the shared features of languages, shaped by biological and cultural evolution.

This network had mostly been studied in English speakers.

Japanese, Italian, Ukrainian, Swahili, Tagalog and dozens of other spoken languages cause the same “universal language network” to light up in the brains of native speakers. This hub of language processing has been studied extensively in English speakers, but now neuroscientists have confirmed that the exact same network is activated in speakers of 45 different languages representing 12 distinct language families.

“This study is very foundational, extending some findings from English to a broad range of languages,” senior author Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of neuroscience at MIT and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, said in a statement (opens in new tab).

I’ve been researching the relationship between brain neurons and nodes in neural networks. Repeatedly it is claimed neurons can do complex information processing that vastly exceeds that of a simple activation function in a neural network.

The resources I’ve read so far suggest nothing fancy is happening with a neuron. The neuron sums the incoming signals from synapses, and then fires when the sum passes a threshold. This is identical to the simple perceptron, the precursor to today’s fancy neural networks. If there is more to a neuron’s operation that this, I am missing it due to lack of familiarity with the neuroscience terminology. I’ve also perused this stack exchange, and haven’t found anything.

If someone could point to a detailed resource that explains the different complex ways a neuron processes the incoming information, in particular what makes a neuron a more sophisticated information processor than a perceptron, I would be grateful.