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“We found that lactate stimulates synaptic activity-dependent genes in the short-term and genes involved in regulating neuronal excitability in the long-term,” explains the first author of the paper Michael Margineanu, a KAUST Master’s student.

Study illustrates the links between brain energy metabolism and neuronal activity.

A genome-wide study led by Dean Pierre Magistretti sheds light on the mechanisms through which lactate regulates long-term memory formation and neuroprotection.

Continue reading “Lactate activates multiple genes that modulate neuronal activity” »

There are, of course, minor variants, but it turns out that moral actions and principles are amazingly consistent across cultures. Anthropologists studied 60 different cultures and found seven rules that are common across cultures.

Sergiu Pasca’s three-dimensional culture makes it possible to watch how three different brain-cell types – oligodendrocytes (green), neurons (magenta) and astrocytes (blue) – interact in a dish as …

Particles that produce electrical signals when bombarded with ultrasound could be a way to direct a cell-killing treatment directly to tumors.

This quiet supersonic plane could cross the Atlantic in 3 hours.

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If you could become a cyborg, what enhancements would you get?

In a 2018 Science paper, co-authored with Jacob Bellmund, Christian Doeller, and Edvard Moser—neuroscientists from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig and the Kavli Institute in Trondheim—Gärdenfors, of the University of Lund, buttressed his idea with recent advances in brain science. He argued that the brain represents concepts in the same way that it represents space and your location, by using the same neural circuitry for the brain’s “inner GPS.”

“Cognitive spaces are a way of thinking about how our brain might organize our knowledge of the world,” Bellmund said. It’s an approach that concerns not only geographical data, but also relationships between objects and experience. “We were intrigued by evidence from many different groups that suggested that the principles of spatial coding in the hippocampus seem to be relevant beyond the realms of just spatial navigation,” Bellmund said. The hippocampus’ place and grid cells, in other words, map not only physical space but conceptual space. It appears that our representation of objects and concepts is very tightly linked with our representation of space.

Gärdenfors’ theory highlights a fruitful path, not only for cognitive scientists, but for neurologists and machine-learning researchers.

Continue reading “New Evidence for the Strange Geometry of Thought” »

The Pentagon is funding brain-implant research aimed at creating neurally “enhanced” soldiers.

• By John Horgan on February 9, 2019
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