Nice.
Doctors in the US have developed a stimulator that bypasses spinal injuries by forcing the body to use alternative pathways to transmit signals from the brain to other areas of the body.
In the latest test, the team has shown that the device can improve a quadriplegic patient’s finger motion by 300 percent while improving grip strength, helping him to perform everyday tasks again.
Nice write up.
A research team led by Associate Professor Mitsuharu ENDO and Professor Yasuhiro MINAMI (both from the Department of Physiology and Cell Biology, Graduate School of Medicine, Kobe University) has pinpointed the mechanism underlying astrocyte-mediated restoration of brain tissue after an injury. This could lead to new treatments that encourage regeneration by limiting damage to neurons incurred by reduced blood supply or trauma. The findings were published on October 11 in the online version of GLIA ahead of print release in January 2017.
When the brain is damaged by trauma or ischemia (restriction in blood supply), immune cells such as macrophages and lymphocytes dispose of the damaged neurons with an inflammatory response. However, an excessive inflammatory response can also harm healthy neurons.
Astrocytes are a type of glial cell*, and the most numerous cell within the human cerebral cortex. In addition to their supportive role in providing nutrients to neurons, studies have shown that they have various other functions, including the direct or active regulation of neuronal activities.
Pretty wild.
A mesmerising new video reveals how neuronal signaling changes blood flow through the brain. Image shows patterns of brain activity occurring across the bilateral cortex of an awake mouse. Colours indicate different patterns of activity over time.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans are a common type of brain scan used in both research and medicine.
Trying to simplify and understand imagination isn’t that easy. Should be a great read for my tech friends trying to replicate this process.
Imagination… we can all imagine things – even things we have never seen before. Even things that don’t exist. How do our brains achieve that?
Imagine a duck teaching a French class. A Ping-Pong match in orbit around a black hole. A dolphin balancing a pineapple.
Very promising for Giloblastoma patients.
Adding Tumor Treating Fields (TTFields) to maintenance temozolomide significantly prolongs both median and long-term survival.
Among patients with newly diagnosed glioblastoma multiforme, adding Tumor Treating Fields (TTFields) to maintenance temozolomide significantly prolongs both median and long-term survival, according to a study presented 21st Annual Scientific Meeting of the Society of Neuro-Oncology (SNO).
TTFields is a frequency-tuned, anti-mitotic, physical treatment modality delivered to the brain through a patient-operated, portable medical device called Optune. Results of a pre-specific successful interim analysis of the international, phase 3 trial (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT00916409) comparing TTFields and temozolomide with temozolomide alone after radiotherapy and adjuvant temozolomide led to the approval of TTFields for the treatment of adult patients with glioblastoma.
Physical plasma is one of the four fundamental states of matter, together with solid, liquid, and gas, and can be completely or partially ionized (thermal/hot or non-thermal/cold plasma, respectively). Non-thermal plasma has many industrial applications, but plasma medicine is a new field of therapy based on non-thermal atmospheric pressure plasma that has been used in cancer treatment, wound healing, and blood coagulation. Plasma is known to react with air to produce highly reactive free radicals, and with liquid to produce long-lived reactive molecules that can be used for chemotherapy. However, the exact components responsible for the anti-tumor effects were unknown.
Now, a research team based at Nagoya University used plasma to activate Ringer’s solution, a salt solution with existing therapeutic functions, and showed that its lactate component had anti-tumor effects.
Previous work by the researchers developed plasma-activated cell culture medium as a form of chemotherapy, but selected Ringer’s solution in the present work because of its simpler composition and likelihood of forming less complex reaction products. Ringer’s lactate solution (Lactec) was irradiated with plasma for 3–5 minutes, after which it demonstrated anti-tumor effects on brain tumor cells.
Westworld recently wrapped its first season with a few stunning twists and a stunning statistic: With a 12-million-viewer average, it was the most-watched first season of an original HBO show in the network’s history. Westworld concerns a perverse theme park, styled in the fashion of the American Old West. The park’s “hosts,” artificially intelligent beings physically indistinguishable from humans, begin to remember the horrifying experiences inflicted on them by the park’s “guests,” the humans who pay to visit and do as they please, including raping and killing hosts.
Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), the fictional cofounder of Westworld, built the park’s hosts with the ability to improvise and make decisions based on their environment—a vision of AI strikingly similar to the one held by Simon Stringer, the director of the Oxford Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence. Stringer is one of the field’s leading thinkers, and like Ford, he says machines with some internalized spatial and causal model of the world could achieve an intuitive, human-like intelligence.
In my conversation with Stringer about Westworld, we discussed what makes AI seem human, the potential threat AI poses to humans, the role of self-modifying programming, and the importance of the Turing Test.
While they have a speech-ready vocal tract, primates can’t speak because they lack a speech-ready brain, contrary to widespread opinion that they are limited by anatomy, researchers at Princeton University and associates have reported Dec. 9 in the open-access journal Science Advances.
The researchers reached this conclusion by first recording X-ray videos showing the movements of the different parts of a macaque’s vocal anatomy — such as the tongue, lips and larynx. They then converted that data into a computer model that could predict and simulate a macaque’s vocal range.
IBM Watson is known for its work in identifying cancer treatments and beating contestants on Jeopardy! But now the computing system has expertise in a new area of research: neuroscience.
Watson discovered five genes linked to ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease, IBM announced on Wednesday. The tech company worked with researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. The discovery is Watson’s first in any type of neuroscience, and suggests that Watson could make discoveries in research of other neurological diseases.
SEE ALSO: This high-tech E.L.F. is guiding confused shoppers with the help of IBM’s Watson.
Nice.
Chronic pain is thought to involve the long-lasting strengthening of synapses, akin to what happens during the formation of new memories. This phenomenon, known as long-term potentiation (LTP), is triggered when neurons on both sides of a synapse are active at the same time. But now, Jürgen Sandkühler, Medical University of Vienna, Austria, and colleagues provide evidence that LTP in nociceptive circuits arises in a different way.
By simultaneously activating two types of glial cells―astrocytes and microglia―the researchers were able to produce LTP at synapses that connect peripheral C-fibers and lamina I neurons in the dorsal horn spinal cord. They also showed that with high-frequency stimulation of C-fibers, glial cells strengthen active and inactive synapses through their release of the NMDA receptor co-agonist D-serine and the cytokine tumor necrosis factor (TNF). Moreover, these molecules traveled to distant synapses, perhaps explaining why pain hypersensitivity can develop in areas surrounding or far away from an injury.
“This paper is going to stimulate a lot of discussion that will lead to important advances for all of us in the pain field,” said Theodore Price, The University of Texas at Dallas, US, who was not involved in the study. “It raises questions for my lab in our day-to-day research that we can address immediately. That’s ultimately the true measure of a really good paper.”
