Genomics and lab studies reveal numerous new findings about Alzheimer’s disease, including a key role for Reelin amid neuronal vulnerability, and for choline and antioxidants in sustaining cognition.
Category: neuroscience – Page 452
Will implants that meld minds with machines enhance human abilities?
Brain computer interface will have to be significantly more advanced before there’s an enhancement of cognitive abilities.
Devices that let people with paralysis walk and talk are rapidly improving. Some see a future in which we alter memories and download skills – but major challenges remain.
Getting drugs into the brain is hard. Maybe a parasite can do the job
A mind-bending parasite may one day deliver drugs to the brain.
Toxoplasma gondii is a single-celled parasite that famously makes mice lose their fear of cats, but also can cause deadly foodborne illnesses (SN: 1/14/20).
Those with weakened immune systems have a higher risk of developing severe disease when exposed to T. gondii. Pregnant people run the risk of preterm birth and pregnancy loss. In addition, the parasite can cause a variety of problems for the baby including blindness, hearing loss, epilepsy and jaundice. More than 200,000 cases of toxoplasmosis are diagnosed each year in the United States, with about 5,000 requiring hospitalization. An estimated 750 people each year die from the disease.
Koshy’s own previous research indicates that brain cells the parasite injects a payload into eventually die.
If researchers want to use the parasite for drug delivery, they will need to learn how it causes disease and disable those mechanisms without harming T. gondii’s ability to quietly infect the brain.
Nerve fibres in the brain could generate quantum entanglement
Calculations show that nerve fibres in the brain could emit pairs of entangled particles, and this quantum phenomenon might explain how different parts of the brain work together.
Will we upload our brains to the cloud? | Ray Kurzweil and Lex Fridman
Lex Fridman Podcast.
432 videos.
FINDING THAT CONNECTION© — neurons connecting to one another in a Petri dish — growth cones
FINDING THAT CONNECTION ©
This is my laboratory work, please see copyright details at bottom.
You’re watching two neurons that I saw under the microscope sensing one another and connecting.
There are 86 billion neurons in the brain — how do they know how to connect to other neurons or body parts when our bodies are developing?
They use these webbed hand-like structures that you can see in this video. The finger like projections actively sense the environment around it.
When we are developing in utero, you’ll find these “growth cones,” at the tip of every growing neuron, actively searching their way between cells, trying to find the right spot to connect to. When they make their connection, they become resorbed and disappear.
I know — it’s heartbreaking that the video ends right when we get to the exciting part, but see the black wavering line in the bottom right? That’s what they look like after they’ve connected together in a Petri dish.
Scientists ‘Mind Controlled’ Mice Remotely in Extraordinary World First
At the mere flick of a magnetic field, mice engineered with nanoparticle-activated ‘switches’ inside their brains were driven to feed, socialize, and act like clucky new mothers in an experiment designed to test an innovative research tool.
While ’mind control’ animal experiments are far from new, they have generally relied on cumbersome electrodes tethering the subject to an external system, which not only requires invasive surgery but also sets limits on how freely the test subject can move about.
In what is claimed to be a breakthrough in neurology, researchers from the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in Korea have developed a method for targeting pathways in the brain using a combination of genetics, nanoparticles, and magnetic fields.