What else do you think is hiding up there?
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Category: neuroscience – Page 982
Living in a culture dependant upon caffeine and lack of sleep, its important to remember that sleep offers an incredibly important biological function. One night of sleep deprivation is tied to Alzheimer’s disease.
While people once believed that sleep was merely a period of inactivity and rest, modern studies in chronobiology have shown that sleep is important for a variety of biochemical processes. A recent study suggests that sleep is even more important than physicians and scientists previously thought, allowing the brain to flush out toxic chemicals that build up over the course of a day.
Neurotoxins and Your Brain
The cells in your brain are busy throughout the day, performing a variety of reactions that create mental function. Unfortunately, many of these processes have toxic byproducts that could be deadly to cells if not removed.
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Maryam shanechi, university of southern california.
With recent technological advances, we can now record neural activity from the brain, and manipulate this activity with electrical or optogenetic stimulation in real time. These capabilities have brought the concept of brain-machine interfaces (BMI) closer to clinical viability than ever before. BMIs are systems that monitor and interact with the brain to restore lost function, treat neurological disorders, or enhance human performance.
February 2018
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Polio was a devastating disease before the development of the polio vaccine. But now, this once-feared virus might help treat another deadly illness — brain cancer.
In a new study, some patients who had an aggressive type of brain cancer called glioblastoma and who received a genetically modified poliovirus lived much longer than typical for these patients.
The study found that about 21 percent of the brain cancer patients who received the poliovirus therapy were alive three years later. In contrast, among a group of previously treated patients who had the same cancer but received standard therapies (such as chemotherapy), just 4 percent were alive after three years.
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Dreeming big.
Dreem Announces $35 Million Financing from lead investors Johnson & Johnson Innovation and Bpifrance (press release):
“Dreem, a neurotechnology company, today announced the closing of a new round of funding, raising $35 million USD to rapidly accelerate product development, invest in strategic research and development, and advance the future of sleep technology. Last year, Dreem introduced a comprehensive solution to address a suite of sleep problems and enhance the quality of rest during the night. The Dreem headband monitors brain activity to track sleep accurately and uses auditory stimulation as a medium to help people fall asleep faster, get deeper sleep, and wake up refreshed.
With the $35 million investment, led by strategic investor JJDC, Dreem will bring next-generation sleep technology to markets across the globe and continue to invest in R & D for future sleep-related scientific discoveries and technological innovations … Dreem previously raised a total of $22 million, from billionaire French entrepreneur Xavier Niel, entrepreneur and biotech investor Dr. Laurent Alexandre, and one of the top French insurance leaders — MAIF. With additional investment from JJDC and Bpifrance, Dreem has raised nearly $60 million in less than four years.”
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Recommended Books ➤
📖 Life 3.0 — http://azon.ly/ij9u
📖 The Master Algorithm — http://azon.ly/excm
📖 Superintelligence — http://azon.ly/v8uf
This video is the twelfth and final in a multi-part series discussing computing. In this video, we’ll be discussing the future of computing, more specifically – the evolution of the field of computing and extrapolating forward based on topics we’ve discussed so far in this series!
[0:31–5:50] Starting off we’ll discuss, the 3 primary eras in the evolution of the field of computing since its inception, the: tabulating, programming and cognitive eras.
Afterwards, we’ll discuss infinite computing, a paradigm that incorporates cloud computing and the principles of heterogenous architecture that is accelerating the transition to cognitive computing.
Finally, to wrap up, we’ll discuss the future of computing, ubiquitous computing, fueled by the rise of abundant, affordable and smart computing devices, where computing is done using any device, in any location and in any format.
So what’s the catch?
For one, iPSCs can take months to make and the process is expensive. Furthermore, reverting cells back to a stem cell state wipes out their history, which is sometimes useful for studying disease progression.
In essence, iPSCs are the middlemen between one cell type and another. What if we could simply take out the middleman altogether?
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A remarkable new study has successfully used the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technique to edit a specific gene in mice engineered to have fragile X syndrome (FXS), a single-gene disorder often related to autism. The single gene edit in the live mice resulted in significant improvements in repetitive and obsessive behaviors, making this the first time gene editing has been used to effectively target behavioral symptoms related to autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
FXS is a genetic disorder associated with intellectual disability, seizures and exaggerated repetitive behavior. Previous studies have shown that the repetitive behaviors associated with FXS are related to a specific excitatory receptor in the brain that, when dysregulated, causes exaggerated signaling between cells.
The CRISPR technique homes in on the gene that controls that excitatory receptor, the metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 (mGluR5), and essentially disables it, dampening the excessive signaling the corresponds with repetitive behaviors. In mice treated with the new system, obsessive digging behavior was reduced by 30 percent and repetitive leaping actions dropped by 70 percent.
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