A chemical reaction with the body’s own sugars turned a gel cocktail into a conducting material inside zebrafish brains, hearts and tail fins.
Category: neuroscience – Page 417
New research may upend our understanding of the brain, showing that travelling waves of neuronal excitation dominate the activity associated with our thoughts and feelings.
But they’re not the only ones. Multiple companies are working on haptic devices, like gloves or vests, to add a sense of touch to virtual experiences. And now, researchers are aiming to integrate a fourth sense: smell.
How much more real might that peaceful meadow feel if you could smell the wildflowers and the damp Earth around you? How might the scent of an ocean breeze amplify a VR experience that takes place on a boat or a beach?
Scents have a powerful effect on the brain, eliciting emotions, memories, and sometimes even fight-or-flight responses. You may feel nostalgic with the cologne or perfume a favorite grandparent wore, comforted by a whiff of a favorite food, or extra-alert to your surroundings if it smells like something’s burning.
By implanting electrodes into the brains of grasshoppers, scientists were able to harness the insects’ sense of smell for the purpose of explosive detection.
Fiber-optic imaging methods enable in vivo imaging deep inside hollow organs or tissues that are otherwise inaccessible to free-space optical techniques, playing a vital role in clinical practice and fundamental research, such as endoscopic diagnosis and deep-brain imaging.
Recently, supervised learning-based fiber-optic imaging methods have gained popularity due to their superior performance in recovering high-fidelity images from fiber-delivered degraded images or even scrambled speckle patterns. Despite their success, these methods are fundamentally limited by their requirements for strictly-paired labeling and large training datasets.
The demanding training data requirements result in time-consuming data acquisition, complicated experimental design, and tedious system calibration processes, making it challenging to satisfy practical application needs.
Deeply fascinating paper wherein Venkataramani et al. describe how synaptic inputs from neurons onto glioma tumor cells induce electrical activity in the tumors and stimulate their growth and invasiveness. This knowledge could lead to new treatments involving inhibition of the synapses onto gliomas which might provide hope for fighting an otherwise largely incurable form of cancer. #neurobiology #oncology #cancer #medicine
Neurons form glutamatergic synapses with glioma cells in mice and humans, and inhibition of AMPA receptors reduces glioma cell invasion and growth.
A man paralyzed by a cycling accident is able to walk again after an experimental operation by neuroscientists and surgeons in Switzerland.
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The psychedelic substances 5-MeO-DMT causes a long-lasting increase in the number of tiny protrusions called dendritic spines in the brain, according to new research published in Neuropsychopharmacology. The study, which was conducted on mice, sheds light on the behavioral and neural mechanisms of 5-MeO-DMT.
Serotonergic psychedelics (such as psilocybin and LSD) have shown promise as potential therapeutics for mental illnesses like depression and anxiety. Short-acting compounds are particularly interesting because they require less dosing time, which could improve patient access to treatment. In humans, 5-MeO-DMT produces a short-lasting experience due to its rapid breakdown in the body.
“My lab started research on psychiatric drugs like ketamine and psychedelics about 10 years ago. We were motivated by how basic science and clinical research can together powerfully move a drug forward to become medicine. Specifically I believe there is a lot of potential for psychedelics as therapeutics, and that drives our interest in this topic,” said study author Alex Kwan (@kwanalexc), an associate professor in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University.
