Lifeboat Foundation

Now, a pair of research papers published the week of April 22 from the University of Washington — one in the Journal of Neuroscience, the other in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — use functional MRI to identify two differences in the brains of blind individuals that might be responsible for their abilities to make better use of auditory information.

“There’s this idea that blind people are good at auditory tasks, because they have to make their way in the world without visual information. We wanted to explore how this happens in the brain,” said Ione Fine, a UW professor of psychology and the senior author on both studies.

Instead of simply looking to see which parts of the brain were most active while listening, both studies examined the sensitivity of the brain to subtle differences in auditory frequency.

Continue reading “Brains of blind people adapt to sharpen sense of hearing, study shows” »

Researchers say a new video game can tell researchers whether someone is at risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

Graphene quantum dots drawn from common coal may be the basis for an effective antioxidant for people who suffer traumatic brain injuries, strokes or heart attacks.

Their ability to quench oxidative stress after such injuries is the subject of a study by scientists at Rice University, the Texas A&M Health Science Center and the McGovern Medical School at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

Quantum dots are semiconducting materials small enough to exhibit quantum mechanical properties that only appear at the nanoscale.

Continue reading “Scientists discover coal-derived ‘dots’ are effective antioxidant” »

German scientists create see-through ORGANS in a step toward 3D-printed parts that could be transplanted in the human body…

Researchers in Germany have created transparent human organs using a new technology that could pave the way to print three-dimensional body parts such as kidneys for transplants.

Continue reading “German scientists create see-through human ORGANS in step toward 3D-printed body parts” »

It’s a step towards a system that would let people send texts straight from their brains.

By Michael Le Page

People with incurable melanomas and brain or breast cancers are to get injections of tumour-fighting viruses.

The trial will test the safety of a virus that has been engineered to shrink tumours – an approach that holds promise for a range of cancers, including deadly brain tumours.

Continue reading “Genetically modified virus may shrink incurable brain cancers” »

The research may one day give voice to people who lost speech from neurological disorders.

A state-of-the-art brain-machine interface created by UC San Francisco neuroscientists can generate natural-sounding synthetic speech by using brain activity to control a virtual vocal tract—an anatomically detailed computer simulation including the lips, jaw, tongue, and larynx. The study was conducted in research participants with intact speech, but the technology could one day restore the voices of people who have lost the ability to speak due to paralysis and other forms of neurological damage.

Stroke, traumatic brain injury, and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease) often result in an irreversible loss of the ability to speak. Some people with severe speech disabilities learn to spell out their thoughts letter-by-letter using assistive devices that track very small eye or facial muscle movements. However, producing text or synthesized speech with such devices is laborious, error-prone, and painfully slow, typically permitting a maximum of 10 words per minute, compared to the 100–150 words per minute of natural speech.

Continue reading “Synthetic speech generated from brain recordings” »

A special focus on rogue proteins may hold future promise in stopping the progression of nerve cell destruction in people who have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or frontotemporal dementia.

ALS, a rare but devastating disorder that’s also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, attacks the body’s nerve cells, resulting in progressive muscle weakness as the neurons degenerate over time. There is no cure. People with ALS eventually lose their strength and the ability to move their arms, legs and body.

About a third of those with ALS also develop frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a destruction of neurons in the brain that causes profound personality changes and disability. The two diseases are similar in both pathology and genetics. FTD tends to affect people earlier than Alzheimer’s disease, the most common type of dementia.

Continue reading “A new clue in the mystery of ALS, frontotemporal dementia” »