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Category: neuroscience – Page 914

Electrical stimulation of the rat brain to move neural stem cells (credit: Jun-Feng Feng et al./ Stem Cell Reports)

Electric fields can be used to guide transplanted human neural stem cells — cells that can develop into various brain tissues — to repair brain damage in specific areas of the brain, scientists at the University of California, Davis have discovered.

It’s well known that electric fields can locally guide wound healing. Damaged tissues generate weak electric fields, and research by UC Davis Professor Min Zhao at the School of Medicine’s Institute for Regenerative Cures has previously shown how these electric fields can attract cells into wounds to heal them.

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“Microglia play an important role in Alzheimer’s and other diseases of the central nervous system. Recent research has revealed that newly discovered Alzheimer’s-risk genes influence microglia behavior,” Jones said in an interview for a UCI press release. “Using these cells, we can understand the biology of these genes and test potential new therapies.”

A Renewable Method

The skin cells had been donated by patients from UCI’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. These were first subjected to a genetic process to convert them into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells — adult cells modified to behave as an embryonic stem cell, allowing them to become other kinds of cells. These iPS cells were then exposed to differentiation factors designed to imitate the environment of developing microglia, which transformed them into the brain cells.

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One afternoon in February 2011, Kelly Dwyer strapped on a pair of snowshoes and set out to hike a beaver pond trail near her home in Hooksett, New Hampshire. When the sun dropped below the horizon hours later, the 46-year-old environmental educator still hadn’t returned home. Her husband, David, was worried. Grabbing his cellphone and a flashlight, he told their two daughters he was going to look for Mom. As he made his way toward the pond, sweeping his flashlight beam across the darkening winter landscape, he called out for Kelly. That’s when he heard the moans.

Running toward them, David phoned their daughter Laura, 14, and told her to call 911. His flashlight beam soon settled on Kelly, submerged up to her neck in a hole of dark water in the ice. As David clutched her from behind to keep her head above water, Kelly slumped into unconsciousness. By the time rescue crews arrived, her body temperature was in the 60s and her pulse was almost too faint to register. Before she could reach the ambulance, Kelly’s heart stopped. The EMTs attempted CPR—a process doctors continued for three hours at a hospital in nearby Manchester. They warmed her frigid body. Nothing. Even defibrillation wouldn’t restart her heart. Kelly’s core temperature hovered in the 70s. David assumed he’d lost her for good.

reanimators

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The research team of Prof. Sonja Hofer at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, has discovered why our brain might be so good at perceiving edges and contours. Neurons that respond to different parts of elongated edges are connected and thus exchange information. This can make it easier for the brain to identify contours of objects. The results of the study are now published in the journal Nature.

Individual visual stimuli are not processed independently by our brain. Rather neurons exchange incoming information to form a coherent perceptual image from the myriad of visual details impinging on our eyes. How our visual perception arises from these interactions is still unclear. This is partly due to the fact that we still know relatively little about the rules that determine which neurons in the brain are connected to each other, and what information they exchange. The research team of Prof. Sonja Hofer at the Biozentrum, University Basel studies neuronal networks in the brain. She has now investigated in the mouse model what information individual neurons in the visual cortex receive from other neurons about the wider .

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The wonder of your gut: Experts explain why a healthy digestive system can trigger weight loss, fight depression, and ward off Parkinson’s.

  • Jasenka Zubcevic works in Physiological Sciences, and Christopher Martynuik in Toxicology at the University of Florida
  • They have been investigating how gut bacteria affect all other body parts
  • Here they explain everything we know thus far about the gut

By Jasenka Zubcevic and Christopher Martynuik For The Conversation

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A new therapy for brain cancer.

A new type of cell that can seek and destroy brain cancer and then dispose of themselves has just been successfully tested in mice. The cells are able to home in on brain tumors and reduce them to between 2 to 5% of their original size[1].

This new approach could potentially give doctors a new weapon against aggressive cancers like brain cancer (glioblastoma), which normally kills in 12–15 months.

Interestingly, it only took the researchers four days to create and deploy these cells in the mice, which is an amazing accomplishment.

Continue reading “Reprogramming Cells to Seek and Destroy Brain Cancer” | >

According to the report, the US Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy and other special forces are looking to improve troops’ performance by looking at their bodies at a genetic level (stock)

Earlier this year the AirForce successfully tested a helmet that can monitor brain activity and tell if the pilot is feeling stressed or panicked.

One research project is using a laptop-camera lens to find out if a person’s haemoglobin is oxygenated. This can then be used to work out a person’s heart rate.

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ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. — Thanks to a new “suit” being developed by the DOD-funded Warrior Web program, future Soldiers will be able to march longer, carry heavier gear and improve mental sharpness.

The suit has pulleys and gears designed to prevent and reduce musculoskeletal injuries caused by the dynamic events typically experienced in the Warfighter’s environment.

Scientists and engineers from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory have been testing variations of the suit for more than three years at the Soldier Performance and Equipment Advanced Research, or SPEAR, facility at Aberdeen Proving Ground.

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US military reveals $65m funding for ‘Matrix’ projects to plug human brains directly into a computer…

The US military has revealed $65 of funding for a programme to develop a ‘brain chip’ allowing humans to simply plug into a computer.

They say the system could give soldiers supersenses and even help treat people with blindness, paralysis and speech disorders.

Continue reading “US military reveals ‘Matrix’ projects to plug brains into a computer” | >

DARPA’s quest for high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) has a new partner in Paradromics, which will be leading one of the agency’s six BCI-development consortia. This is just one of the projects working to develop a breakthrough BCI right now.

The U.S. Department of Defense has created six consortia to develop brain-computer interface (BCIs) technologies and is backing them up with a $65 million investment. On July 10, the Department chose Paradromics Inc., and neural interface company, to lead one of the six groups.

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