Neuroscience – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Oct 13
2022

Caltech’s New Ultrafast Camera Captures Signals Traveling Through Nerve Cells

Reach out right now and touch anything around you. Whether it was the wood of your desk, a key on your keyboard, or the fur of your dog, you felt it the instant your finger contacted it.

Or did you?

In actuality, takes a bit of time for your brain to register the sensation from your fingertip. However, it does still happen extremely fast, with the touch signal traveling through your nerves at over 100 miles per hour. In fact, some nerve signals are even faster, approaching speeds of 300 miles per hour.

Oct 13
2022

Video Shows Human Brain Cells in Dish Teaching Themselves to Play a Videogame

In Scientists were, for the first time, able to show that 800,000 living brain cells trapped in a petri dish can be taught how to play the videogame Pong.

Oct 13
2022

Human brain cells transplanted into baby rats’ brains grow and form connections

When lab-grown clumps of human neurons are transplanted into newborn rats, they grow with the animals. The research raises some tricky ethical questions.

Oct 13
2022

In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world

The DishBrain system was developed to leverage neuronal computation and interact with neurons embodied in a simulated environment (STAR Methods; Figure 4 A; Video S2). The DishBrain environment is a low-latency, real-time system that interacts with the vendor MaxOne software, allowing it to be used in ways that extend its original functions (Figure 4 B). This system can record electrical activity in a neuronal culture and provide “sensory” (non-invasive) electrical stimulation comparably to the generation of action potentials by activity in the neuronal network (

Toward the neurocomputer: image Processing and pattern recognition with neuronal cultures.

Oct 12
2022

Lab-grown brain cells play video game Pong

Australian and UK researchers grow brain cells in a lab that have learned to play a 1970s video game.

Oct 12
2022

Scientists grow human brain cells in rats to study diseases

Scientists have transplanted human brain cells into the brains of baby rats, where the cells grew and formed connections.

It’s part of an effort to better study human brain development and diseases affecting this most complex of organs, which makes us who we are but has long been shrouded in mystery.

“Many disorders such as autism and schizophrenia are likely uniquely human” but “the human brain certainly has not been very accessible,” said said Dr. Sergiu Pasca, senior author of a study describing the work, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Oct 12
2022

Human ‘mini-brains’ implanted in rats prompt excitement — and concern

Rat–human hybrid brains offer new ways to study human neuro disorders, but also raise ethical questions.

Oct 12
2022

Is everything in the world a little bit conscious?

The idea that consciousness is widespread is attractive to many for intellectual and, perhaps, also emotionalreasons. But can it be tested? Surprisingly, perhaps it can.

Oct 12
2022

Human Brain Cells in a Dish Learn to Play Pong

Summary: Brain cells grown in a petri dish can perform goal-directed tasks, such as learning to play a game of Pong.

Source: Cortical Labs.

A Melbourne-led team has for the first time shown that 800,000 brain cells living in a dish can perform goal-directed tasks – in this case the simple tennis-like computer game, Pong.

Oct 12
2022

AI equal to humans in text-message mental health trial

UW Medicine researchers have found that algorithms are as good as trained human evaluators at identifying red-flag language in text messages from people with serious mental illness. This opens a promising area of study that could help with psychiatry training and scarcity of care.

The findings were published in late September in the journal Psychiatric Services.

Text messages are increasingly part of mental health care and evaluation, but these remote psychiatric interventions can lack the emotional reference points that therapists use to navigate in-person conversations with patients.