How does experience alter our perceptions? This adapted book excerpt from We Know It When We See It describes how the brain’s visual system rewires itself to make the best use of its neural resources.
Category: neuroscience – Page 783
Revealing yet another super-power in the skillful squid, scientists have discovered that squid massively edit their own genetic instructions not only within the nucleus of their neurons, but also within the axon — the long, slender neural projections that transmit electrical impulses to other neurons. This is the first time that edits to genetic information have been observed outside of the nucleus of an animal cell.
The study, led by Isabel C. Vallecillo-Viejo and Joshua Rosenthal at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, is published this week in Nucleic Acids Research.
The discovery provides another jolt to the “central dogma” of molecular biology, which states that genetic information is passed faithfully from DNA to messenger RNA to the synthesis of proteins. In 2015, Rosenthal and colleagues discovered that squid “edit” their messenger RNA instructions to an extraordinary degree — orders of magnitude more than humans do — allowing them to fine-tune the type of proteins that will be produced in the nervous system.
Researchers have designed a brain-computer interface to read your mind better than ever.
A new method to accurately record brain activity at scale has been developed by researchers at the Crick, Stanford University and UCL. The technique could lead to new medical devices to help amputees, people with paralysis or people with neurological conditions such as motor neurone disease.
The research in mice, published in Science Advances, developed an accurate and scalable method to record brain activity across large areas, including on the surface and in deeper regions simultaneously.
The hydra is named after the serpent monster from Greek myth, which regrows two heads each time one is cut off. But freshwater hydras have an even more impressive regenerating ability: an entire hydra can regrow from a small piece of tissue in only a few days.
Biologists are particularly excited by this ability, since many of the networks involved in the healing process developed early in the process of evolution, meaning that they are shared among many animals, including humans.
“In other organisms, like humans, once our brain is injured, we have difficulty recovering because the brain lacks the kind of regenerative abilities we see in hydra,” said researcher Abby Primack.
A new device enables researchers to observe hundreds of neurons in the brain in real-time. The system is based on modified silicon chips from cameras, but rather than taking a picture, it takes a movie of the neural electrical activity.
Think we’re far off from The Matrix? Gabe Newell says you should think again.
In a rare interview with IGN ahead of next week’s release of Half-Life: Alyx, Newell reasoned that more advanced forms of VR might not be too far out. “We’re way closer to The Matrix than people realize,” he stated. “It’s not going to be ‘The Matrix’, The Matrix is a movie and it misses all the interesting technical subtleties and just how weird the post-brain-computer interface world is going to be. But it’s going to have a huge impact on the kinds of experiences that we can create for people.”
Multiple lines of evidence show that the anti-aging and cognition-enhancing protein Klotho fosters neuronal survival, increases the anti-oxidative stress defense, and promotes remyelination of demyelinated axons. Thus, upregulation of the Klotho gene can potentially alleviate the symptoms and/or prevent the progression of age-associated neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and demyelinating diseases such as multiple sclerosis. Here we used a CRISPR-dCas9 complex to investigate single-guide RNA (sgRNA) targeting the Klotho promoter region for efficient transcriptional activation of the Klotho gene. We tested the sgRNAs within the — 1 to — 300 bp of the Klotho promoter region and identified two sgRNAs that can effectively enhance Klotho gene transcription. We examined the transcriptional activation of the Klotho gene using three different systems: a Firefly luciferase (FLuc) and NanoLuc luciferase (NLuc) coincidence reporter system, a NLuc knock-in in Klotho 3’-UTR using CRISPR genomic editing, and two human cell lines: neuronal SY5Y cells and kidney HK-2 cells that express Klotho endogenously. The two sgRNAs enhanced Klotho expression at both the gene and protein levels. Our results show the feasibility of gene therapy for targeting Klotho using CRISPR technology. Enhancing Klotho levels has a therapeutic potential for increasing cognition and treating age-associated neurodegenerative, demyelinating and other diseases, such as chronic kidney disease and cancer.
Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease; Cancer; Chronic kidney disease; Multiple sclerosis; Myelin; Neuroprotection.
The Posthuman Enlightenment
Posted in neuroscience
What does it take to think beyond the human? Can we imagine our human selves in other lives? And should we? While contemporary answers to these questions have highlighted the desirability and necessity of imagining ourselves as animals, plants, and even objects, others argue that such acts of the imagination are fundamentally flawed. The human, Lynn Festa argues in Fiction without Humanity, is really all we get access to.
The 21st century has seen the rise of what are often lumped together as a variety of “posthumanist” critical approaches: thing theory and “new materialism” (see Bill Brown’s Other Things and Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter), animal studies (see Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am and Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet), and even a burgeoning plant studies (see Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life). Each of these approaches has asked us to broaden the range of what Miguel Tamen calls “interpretable objects” well beyond the human; to consider what forms of signification, consciousness, or meaning might belong to animals, plants, and objects.1
Much of this scholarship employs, roughly, a “sympathy-expanding” critical model. That is, the authors consider the effects of granting some provisional sympathy, consciousness, or at least signifying potential to nonhuman things or beings; specifically, to those who had formerly been denied such qualities or thought not to possess them. As earlier political movements have asserted that those who had been presumed to lack full rights, consciousness, or agency should be granted those previously denied qualities (then: female and nonwhite or non-European human beings), so too with posthuman studies (now: animals and the otherwise nonhuman).