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“Our new data suggest that the upregulation of Neuregulin-responsive genes in animals with severely repetitive behaviors reflects gene changes in the striosomal neurons that control the release of dopamine,” Crittenden explains. “Dopamine can directly impact whether an animal repeats an action or explores new actions, so our study highlights a potential role for a striosomal circuit in controlling action-selection in health and in neuropsychiatric disease.”

Graybiel lab identifies genes linked to abnormal repetitive behaviors often seen in models of addiction and schizophrenia.

Extreme repetitive behaviors such as hand-flapping, body-rocking, skin-picking, and sniffing are common to a number of brain disorders including autism, schizophrenia, Huntington’s disease, and drug addiction. These behaviors, termed stereotypies, are also apparent in animal models of drug addiction and autism.

In a new study published in the European Journal of Neuroscience, researchers at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research have identified genes that are activated in the brain prior to the initiation of these severe repetitive behaviors.

Continue reading “Gene Changes Linked to Severe Repetitive Behaviors Seen in Autism, Schizophrenia, and Drug Addiction” | >

For first time, fibroblast-derived model of early embryo will allow extensive study into causes of very early miscarriage and effects of toxins and drugs on early development.

In a discovery that will revolutionize research into the causes of early miscarriage, infertility and the study of early human development — an international team of scientists led by Monash University in Melbourne, Australia has generated a model of a human embryo from skin cells.

The team, led by Professor Jose Polo, has successfully reprogrammed these fibroblasts or skin cells into a 3-dimensional cellular structure that is morphologically and molecularly similar to human blastocysts. Called iBlastoids, these can be used to model the biology of early human embryos in the laboratory.

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A patient with a genetic form of childhood blindness gained vision, which lasted more than a year, after receiving a single injection of an experimental RNA therapy into the eye.

The gene editing research was conducted at the Perelman School of Medicine in the University of Pennsylvania. Results of the case, detailed in a paper published April 1 in Nature Medicine, show that the treatment led to marked changes at the fovea, the most important point of human central vision.

In the international clinical trial, participants received an intraocular injection of an antisense oligonucleotide called sepofarsen. This short RNA molecule works by increasing normal CEP290 protein levels in the eye’s photoreceptors and improving retinal function under day vision conditions.

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After years of trying, 60 Minutes cameras finally get a peek inside the workshop at Boston Dynamics, where robots move in ways once only thought possible in movies. Anderson Cooper reports.

“60 Minutes” is the most successful television broadcast in history. Offering hard-hitting investigative reports, interviews, feature segments and profiles of people in the news, the broadcast began in 1968 and is still a hit, over 50 seasons later, regularly making Nielsen’s Top 10.

Watch full episodes: http://cbsn.ws/1Qkjo1F
Get more “60 Minutes” from “60 Minutes: Overtime”: http://cbsn.ws/1KG3sdr.
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Continue reading “Robots of the future at Boston Dynamics” | >

Circa 2019

SpaceX’s Mars ships won’t be ferrying just the super rich to and from the Red Planet, if everything goes according to Elon Musk’s plan.

The price of a seat aboard SpaceX’s Starship interplanetary vehicle will eventually drop enough to be accessible to a large chunk of the industrialized world’s population, the billionaire entrepreneur predicted over the weekend.

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Huaqiangbei, the world’s largest electronics wholesale market area in the Chinese technology hub of Shenzhen, has become the latest Wonderland for geeks, the way Tokyo’s Akihabara was to otaku during the tech bubble at the turn of the millennium. Amid the warren of closet-sized shops and makeshift stalls, the latest catalogue of smartphones, LED lights, holograms, electronic parts and every type of gadget imaginable compete for attention and the spending yuan of consumers.

Shenzhen has become an international hotspot for the unmanned aerial vehicle industry, following the global success of drone giant DJI.

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Exactly one week after new Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger unveiled plans to reinvent Intel Corp., Arm Ltd. announced version 9 of its architecture and put forth its vision for the next decade. We believe Arm’s direction is strong and compelling as it combines an end-to-end capability, from edge to cloud to the data center to the home and everything in between.

Moreover, it doubles down on Arm’s model of enabling ecosystem partners to add significant value while at the same time maintaining software compatibility with previous generations. We see this as extremely important because the variety of use cases requiring specialized silicon is rapidly expanding in the marketplace, and the Arm architecture is by far in our view the best-positioned to capitalize on this coming wave.

In this Breaking Analysis, we’ll explain why we think this announcement is so important and what it means for Intel and the broader technology landscape. We’ll also share with you some feedback we received from theCUBE community on last week’s episode and a little inside baseball on how Intel, IBM Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. and the U.S. government might be thinking about the shifting landscape of semiconductor technology.

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A single “super photon” made up of many thousands of individual light particles: About ten years ago, researchers at the University of Bonn produced such an extreme aggregate state for the first time and presented a completely new light source. The state is called optical Bose-Einstein condensate and has captivated many physicists ever since, because this exotic world of light particles is home to its very own physical phenomena.

Researchers led by Prof. Dr. Martin Weitz, who discovered the super photon, and theoretical physicist Prof. Dr. Johann Kroha have returned from their latest “expedition” into the quantum world with a very special observation. They report of a new, previously unknown phase transition in the optical Bose-Einstein condensate. This is a so-called overdamped phase. The results may in the long term be relevant for encrypted quantum communication. The study has been published in the journal Science.

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