With recent significant advances in brain implants, MailOnline talks to law professor Burkhard Schafer about how neurotechnologies could influence criminal trials in the future.
Category: neuroscience – Page 474
Astronomers build new telescopes and peer at the night sky to see what they might find. Janelia Group Leader Abraham Beyene takes a similar approach when looking at the cells that make up the human brain.
Beyene and his team design and synthesize new types of highly sensitive biosensors they use to peer at neurons to see what they can learn.
“You have this new tool that now helps us make the kinds of measurements that we’ve never been able to make before, and we go into the lab and deploy this technology and we see what happens,” Beyene says. “What you see is that some really interesting phenomena begin to emerge that you haven’t even begun to think about.”
3Brain.
This 3D chip will help to observe complex structures such as the human brain, according to a report published by Labiotech.eu on Tuesday.
Lisa5201/iStock.
This is a promising step toward reactivating previously inactive communication pathways between the retina and the brain by utilizing the plasticity of the teenage brain.
Finally, there’s the issue that black holes can destroy information. Once you have crossed the event horizon, it seems you’d need to move faster than light to get back out. But a non-local connection across the horizon would also get information out. Some physicists have even suggested that dark matter, a hypothetical type of matter that supposedly makes up 85% of matter in the universe, is really a misattribution. There may be only normal matter, it’s just that its gravitational attraction is multiplied and spread out because places are non-locally connected to each other.
A non-locally connected universe, hence, would make sense for many reasons. If these speculations are correct, the universe might be full with tiny portals that connect seemingly distant places. The physicists Fotini Markopoulou and Lee Smolin estimated that our universe could contain as much as 10,360 of such non-local connections. And since the connections are non-local anyway, it doesn’t matter that they expand with the universe. The human brain, for comparison, has a measly 1015connections.
Let me be clear that there is absolutely zero evidence that non-local connections exist, or that, if they existed, they’d indeed allow the universe to think. But we cannot rule this possibility out either. Crazy as it sounds, the idea that the universe is intelligent is compatible with all we know so far.
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Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found a new druggable pathway that potentially could be used to help prevent Alzheimer’s dementia.
Amyloid beta accumulation in the brain is the first step in the development of Alzheimer’s dementia. Scientists have poured countless hours and millions of dollars into finding ways to clear amyloid away before cognitive symptoms arise, with largely disappointing results.
In this study, published Aug. 24 in the journal Brain, researchers found a way to increase clearance of waste products from the brains of mice by ramping up a genetic quirk known as readthrough. This same strategy also may be effective for other neurodegenerative diseases characterized by the buildup of toxic proteins, such as Parkinson’s disease, the researchers said.
It’s a wild idea, but recent experiments suggest plants may have the ability to learn and make decisions. Are the claims true and if so, what does it mean for our understanding of consciousness and the human mind?
A new study by theoretical physicists has made progress toward identifying how particles and cells give rise to large-scale dynamics that we experience as the passage of time.
A central feature of how we experience the world is the flow of time from the past to the future. But it is a mystery precisely how this phenomenon, known as the arrow of time, arises from the microscopic interactions among particles and cells. Researchers at the CUNY Graduate Center Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences (ITS) are helping to unravel this enigma with the publication of a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters. The findings could have important implications in a wide range of disciplines, including physics, neuroscience, and biology.
Fundamentally, the arrow of time emerges from the second law of thermodynamics. This is the principle that microscopic arrangements of physical systems tend to increase in randomness, moving from order to disorder. The more disordered a system becomes, the more difficult it is for it to find its way back to an ordered state, and the stronger the arrow of time. In short, the universe’s propensity toward disorder is the fundamental reason why we experience time flowing in one direction.
The human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is involved in cognitive control including attention selection, working memory, decision making and planning of actions. Changes in this brain region are suspected to play a role in schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression and bipolar disorder, making it an important research target. Researchers from Forschungszentrum Jülich and Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf now provide detailed, three-dimensional maps of four new areas of the brain region.
In order to identify the borders between brain areas, the researchers statistically analysed the distribution of cells (the cytoarchitecture) in 10 post mortem human brains. After reconstructing the mapped areas in 3D, the researchers superimposed the maps of the 10 different brains and generated probability maps that reflect how much the localization and size of each area varies among individuals.
High inter-subject variability has been a major challenge for prior attempts to map this brain region leading to considerable discrepancies in pre-existing maps and inconclusive information making it very difficult to understand the specific involvement of individual brain areas in the different cognitive functions. The new probabilistic maps account for the variability between individuals and can be directly superimposed with datasets from functional studies in order to directly correlate structure and function of the areas.