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Category: neuroscience – Page 957

D esigner therapies are treatments tailored to a specific disease, and nowhere is the need greater for new therapies than in a group of nervous system disorders, known as “neurodegenerative diseases.”

Many of these diseases are common and well-known, such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease. However, some are very rare, genetic disorders that are the consequence of a defective gene. In all these diseases, a mutant protein that misfolds causes the degeneration and death of neurons. One effective therapeutic strategy is to prevent the rogue protein from ever being made.

Spinocerebellar ataxia type 7 (SCA7) is one such disease in which nerves in different parts of the brain, including the eye, degenerate, which leads to blindness and difficulty walking, speaking, and balancing. SCA7 is dominantly inherited — which means that you just need one bad copy of the mutation to cause disease. The disease occurs when a short section of DNA that encodes ataxin-7 gene is erroneously repeated — like a word in a book printed two or three times. In this case, three chemical units of the DNA sequence — C-A-G — are repeated over and over.

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New research suggests that exposure to childhood adversity is associated with reduced cognitive control and alterations in key brain networks. The findings, which appear in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, could help explain the link between childhood adversity and depression.

“My work focuses on how we can use objective biomarkers to aid in clinical decision making,” said study author Scott A. Langenecker of the University of Utah.

“One challenging clinical decision point is what to do when individuals have recovered from a depressive episode. Do we continue treatment? Do we exercise regular check-ins? Or do we just wait and see?”

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Newborns with vitamin D deficiency have an increased risk of schizophrenia later in life, a team of Australian and Danish researchers has reported.

The discovery could help prevent some cases of the disease by treating vitamin D deficiency during the earliest stages of life.

The study, led by Professor John McGrath from The University of Queensland (UQ) in Australia and Aarhus University in Denmark, found newborns with vitamin D deficiency had a 44 per cent increased risk of being diagnosed with schizophrenia as adults compared to those with normal vitamin D levels.

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The question and answer interview of He Jianku conference presentation has the most interesting parts of this debate about human gene editing of embryos. The interview starts at about 1 hour and 28 minutes of the record. The formal presentation showed that the scientist He has taken appropriate scientific care to perform the work. He took care to make sure it was on target and was successful. He took care to make sure there were no unintended off-target side-effects.

* the parents (father HIV positive) made a choice to use the edited embryos versus unedited * the CRISPR vector used to make the change. Appears to be the kind that can be ordered for about $100. There have been adult people who have self-experimented with mail order gene editing kits * the conference interviewer asked about whether He Jianku was aware of a few other research papers. Some paper suggests that the gene CCR5 could cause increased susceptibility to flu and another suggests a tiny increase in cognitive effect.

Intelligence is controlled by many thousands of genes.

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A 68-year-old Seattle woman who died after contracting a rare brain-eating amoeba used regular tap water to rinse her sinuses, according to new research.

As noted in a new International Journal of Infectious Diseases case study, the infection was initially misdiagnosed as a brain tumor. During surgery to remove the suspected tumor, the lead neurosurgeon, Charles Cobbs from Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center, was taken aback by the extent of the brain damage. So he extracted a sample for further testing.

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Over the past few years, classical convolutional neural networks (cCNNs) have led to remarkable advances in computer vision. Many of these algorithms can now categorize objects in good quality images with high accuracy.

However, in real-world applications, such as autonomous driving or robotics, imaging data rarely includes pictures taken under ideal lighting conditions. Often, the images that CNNs would need to process feature occluded objects, motion distortion, or low signal to noise ratios (SNRs), either as a result of poor image quality or low light levels.

Although cCNNs have also been successfully used to de-noise images and enhance their quality, these networks cannot combine information from multiple frames or video sequences and are hence easily outperformed by humans on low quality images. Till S. Hartmann, a neuroscience researcher at Harvard Medical School, has recently carried out a study that addresses these limitations, introducing a new CNN approach for analyzing noisy images.

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The city he described did not exist for much longer. A bishop soon destroyed the heritage of many generations of ancient minds in the name of a new faith. In 391 AD, the beautiful temple of wisdom was ruined. There is no evidence of the existence of the library after that date, but it seems that the people of Alexandria, the legendary philosophers, scientists, and their supporters saved some of the books. However, in 642 AD, when the city was captured by Muslims, they burned all the books not related to Islam that they found in public places.

The monumental Musaeum of Alexandria was famous for its legendary library. The tragic story of the building’s destruction continues to be a painful one for people who love ancient history and literature. So what treasures were lost in its devastating fire?

The Musaeum, or Mouseion, was a home to art, music, poetry, and philosophy. It is extremely difficult to find out exactly what was located on the shelves of the library, but generations of passionate researchers have created some possible lists of the lost scrolls’ authors.

The Brain Center of Alexander’s City

Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great, whose heart was conquered by the beauty of the country near the Nile. After his death, his friend (or perhaps step brother) Ptolemy I became the pharaoh of Egypt. Ptolemy was also the creator of the Ptolemaic dynasty.

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