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Police use drone to find missing person with dementia

The device was equipped with infrared technology.

A police drone equipped with infrared capabilities has risen as a hero in the search for a missing person with dementia that disappeared from a Delta hospital on July 29. Delta is a city located in British Columbia, Canada.

This is according to a report by Global News published on Wednesday.


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New gel destroys brain cancer in 100% of treated mice

Johns Hopkins University (JHU) researchers have developed an experimental brain cancer treatment that not only cured 100% of mice that received it, but also trained their immune systems to fight future cancers.

The challenge: Glioblastoma is a rare but aggressive type of brain cancer — only 5% of patients live for more than five years after they’re diagnosed, and the average survival time is just 12–18 months. It is considered the deadliest kind of cancer.

The standard glioblastoma treatment regimen starts with surgery to remove as much of the tumor as possible. After that, patients typically undergo chemo or radiation therapy to kill lingering cells.

Matters Arising: The Information Theory of Aging Has Not Been Tested

Yang and co-workers state that “using inducible changes to the epigenome, we find that the act of faithful DNA repair advances aging at physiological, cognitive, and molecular levels, including erosion of the epigenetic landscape, cellular exdifferentiation, senescence, and advancement of the DNA methylation clock, which can be reversed by OSK-mediated rejuvenation. These data are consistent with the information theory of aging, which states that a loss of epigenetic information is a reversible cause of aging.” There is extensive evidence that the key reagent, restriction endonuclease I-PpoI, is cytotoxic. Moreover, the corresponding author published two papers—neither cited—showing that I-PpoI targeted to specific cell types causes a p53 response and cell elimination within a month. Despite globally inducing I-PpoI activation for seven times as long as required to induce a progeric effect, no analysis of mice during this critical window was presented. No significant conclusion of Yang was demonstrated.

The Global Workspace Theory of Consciousness

Global Workspace Theory (GWT) can be compared to a theater of mind, in which conscious contents resemble a bright spot on the stage of immediate memory, selected by a spotlight of attention under executive guidance. Only the bright spot is conscious; the rest of the theater is dark and unconscious. GWT has been implemented in a number of explicit and testable global workspace models (GWM’s). These specific GW models suggest that conscious experiences recruit widely distributed brain functions that are mostly unconscious (unreportable). A large body of new findings support that view. For example, brain experiments show that while unconscious visual stimuli evoke high activity in visual cortex, identical conscious stimuli reveal an additional spread of high brain activity to frontal and parietal lobes (Dehaene, 2001). Similar results have been found for hearing, touch, pain, and sensorimotor skills (Baars, 2002). The conscious waking state supports such fast, flexible, and widespread brain interactions, while unconscious states do not (Baars et al, 2004). These findings illustrate the ability of the GW framework to suggest novel and falsifiable hypotheses.

Global Workspace Theory (GWT) and Prefrontal Cortex: Recent Developments

In this work, we provide a brief overview of Global Workspace Theory (GWT), along with recent developments and clarifications of modern neuroscientific evidence. GWT started in the 1980s as a purely psychological theory of conscious cognition, and has become a prominent approach in scientific studies of consciousness (Mashour et al., 2020). Based on today’s far more detailed understanding of the brain, GWT has adapted to new waves of evidence. The brain-based version of GWT is called Global Workspace Dynamics (GWD) (Baars et al., 2013; Baars and Geld, 2019) precisely because the cortex is viewed as a “unified oscillatory machine” (Steriade, 1999). GWT therefore joins other theories in viewing consciousness as the product of highly integrated and widespread cortico-thalamic (C-T) activity, following a long trail of evidence (Dehaene et al., 1998).

Here we aim to clarify some empirical questions that have been raised, and review evidence that the prefrontal and posterior regions support dynamic global workspace functions, in agreement with several other authors. Static, gross anatomical divisions are superseded by the dynamical connectome of cortex.

We aim to correct the following misunderstandings. In a recent paper, Raccah et al. (2021) claimed that the prefrontal cortex (PfC) is not causally involved in enabling consciousness, based on a review of intracranial electrical stimulation (iES) experiments. We will show that Raccah et al.’s claim that the prefrontal cortex (PfC) does not support consciousness is incorrect.

Scientists Discover a Unique Group of Neurons With a Remarkable Ability

A group of nerve cells in the brain displays a remarkable ability to halt all forms of movement, as revealed by a recent study conducted on mice. This finding contributes significantly to our understanding of how the nervous system exercises control over our movements.

When a hunting dog detects the scents of a deer, it sometimes completely freezes. This phenomenon can also be observed in humans who must focus intently on a complex task.

Now, a recent discovery contributes to our understanding of what happens in the brain when we abruptly stop moving.

How random chance changed the man who invented modern probability

If two statisticians were to lose each other in an infinite forest, the first thing they would do is get drunk. That way, they would walk more or less randomly, which would give them the best chance of finding each other. However, the statisticians should stay sober if they want to pick mushrooms. Stumbling around drunk and without purpose would reduce the area of exploration, and make it more likely that the seekers would return to the same spot, where the mushrooms are already gone.

Such considerations belong to the statistical theory of “random walk” or “drunkard’s walk,” in which the future depends only on the present and not the past. Today, random walk is used to model share prices, molecular diffusion, neural activity, and population dynamics, among other processes. It is also thought to describe how “genetic drift” can result in a particular gene—say, for blue eye color—becoming prevalent in a population. Ironically, this theory, which ignores the past, has a rather rich history of its own. It is one of the many intellectual innovations dreamed up by Andrei Kolmogorov, a mathematician of startling breadth and ability who revolutionized the role of the unlikely in mathematics, while carefully negotiating the shifting probabilities of political and academic life in Soviet Russia.