#Electronic pill that helps you slim by tricking your tummy An electronic pill that tricks the brain into thinking the stomach is full could help tackle obesity.
This nerve carries signals from the stomach to the hypothalamus, the area of the brain responsible for regulating appetite.
It then fires low-level electrical pulses into the vagus nerve to fool the brain into thinking the stomach has no more room.
the pill begins to transmit signals along the nerve to the brain to dampen down appetite.
#Mutebutton can train your brain to ignore tinnitus By Roger Dobson for the Daily mail Published:
and is designed to help the brain turn down the volume of phantom noise of the condition.
the brain overcompensates and creates phantom noise. There is no cure although treatments such as maskers (ear-plugs that generate white noise to try to block out tinnitus noise), antidepressants,
However, the Mutebutton is designed to gradually re-train the brain (via the nerves in the tongue)
The idea is that the brain gradually begins to play down the illusory sounds of tinnitus
'Meanwhile, researchers have identified now the areas of the brain thought to be involved in tinnitus-with the hope that this new understanding could trigger new treatments.
Scientists at Newcastle University and the University of Iowa, in the U s.,have shown that more areas of the brain are involved in tinnitus than just the sound centre-the auditory cortex-which was thought previously to be responsible.
Using electrical implants to record the brain activity of a 50-year-old man they mapped the areas
and infection Doctors have developed a brain pressure test using a special set of headphones that can detect life-threatening head injuries and infections.
In particular, the pressure tests measure fluid via a channel that links the inner ear with the brain.
As fluids in the ear and brain are connected a change in pressure in the brain is reflected by a corresponding change in the ear
-which can signal the need for intervention. Changes to ICP occur when the brain swells as a result of an injury or infection and prevents blood flow,
depriving the brain of the oxygen it needs to function. Currently, it can only be measured by drilling a hole through the skull to implant a pressure probe into the brain in theatre or a lumbar puncture,
where a sample of fluid that surrounds the spinal cord is removed using a needle under local anaesthetic.
The headphones are set to be used in the diagnosis and treatment of conditions such as meningitis and head trauma injuries
it is also being adapted by Nasa to analyse brain pressure levels in astronauts to help tackle space-related visual problems and sickness.
A company called Emotiv adapted a $499 (£324) gaming headset that lets wearers control on-screen and physical objects with their brain as part of a racing game.
and the device is trained to read their unique brain patterns. They first clear their mind to train the headset to their neutral state
and monitor brain waves and these patterns are converted to commands using a brain-computer interface.
The technology is currently a proof-of-concept and there are no immediate plans to release the game and headset.
and it will work with existing brain-computer interface games and software that work with EEG readings.
our brains are actively controlling our balance all of the time, 'Stentz said.''This dynamic balance makes people nimble
Elsewhere, it is possible to connect the device to an Emotiv Brain Sensor to control holographic objects with your mind,
Scientists see neurons change in real-time as events are recorded'in the brain Scientists have discovered, for the first time exactly how memories are formed in the brain.
The US-UK team has managed to pinpoint individual neurons that fire when people file away their experiences.
The collaboration between the University of Leicester and Medical center revealed how a neuron in the brain instantly fired differently
'Specifically, the study looked at neurons in an area known as the medial temporal lobe associated with something known as'episodic memory'.
'This is the term used to describe the brain's ability to consciously recall experienced events
while cochlear implants turn sounds into electrical signals for the brain to decode, but these devices can't fully replicate natural hearing.
Within a month, around half the mice with the mutation showed brainwave activity consistent with hearing
into electrical impulses that can be read by the brain. The electronic signals are sent wirelessly on to an array of electrodes placed over the damaged cells at the back of the retina.
The impulses stimulate the retina remaining cells, resulting in the corresponding perception of patterns of light in the brain.
it is exhausting. his is new information that Ray brain is receiving and his brain now needs to get use to interpreting it. he Argus II retinal implant was used previously on 130 patients with the rare eye disease retinitis pigmentosa.
However, those patients, unlike Mr Flynn, had no peripheral vision. The new system is thought to be the first in the world that combines artificial and natural eyesight
It uses a eep neural network systemthat works a little like the human brain to analyse infrared images and match them with ordinary photos.
which is a computer programme that imitates the way the human brain makes connections and draws conclusions.
convincingly fools the brain into believing the virtual scenarios. initially the caroswas very complex with advanced exo skeleton electronics,
and brain cells has been found by researchers at Northwestern University, Illinois and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
#Robot arm controlled by quadriplegic intentions Californian researchers have linked a robot arm to the brain of a quadriplegic man,
The electrodes are not in the motor cortex or attached to muscle nerves, but are in a part of the brain associated with planning muscle activity:
the posterior parietal cortex, or PPC. hen you move your arm, you really don think about which muscles to activate
and the details of the movement such as lift the arm, extend the arm, grasp the cup,
and then shaking hands begins with a visual signal that is first processed in the lower visual areas of the cerebral cortex.
These intentions are transmitted to the motor cortex, on through the spinal cord, and then to the muscles where movement is executed.
said Andersen whose team is working on a mechanism to relay signals from the robotic arm back into the part of the brain that gives the perception of touch
and emulate the outcomes of neural activityow thought is opposed formeds to reverse-engineering the human brain itself,
Dube vision is much more grand. large part of your brain is shackled by the boredom and drudgery of everyday existence
and allow you to indulge in the forms of creative expression that only the human brain can indulge in.
they will allow them to delve into the complexity of the human brain, an organ that so far essentially unknown. he scanners are rare due to production complexities.
to carry out comprehensive analysis of some brain diseases, the brain has to be cut and examined after death.
The new technology could change all that. A smaller machine at the Champalimaud research facility allows a brain to be scanned fully in a living person.
It enables researchers to investigate structural changes in the brain, during depression. epression is a widespread disease.
It one of the major causes of disability worldwide. And one of the main problems of depression is that currently there is no way for clinicians to guide a treatment selection,
This capability would be critical for accessing remote corners of the ventricular system of the brain
He said that they have demonstrated already up to 15mm penetration depth into a brain tissue phantom using an 18gauge needle.
We should note that real brains are basically lipid and cytoskeletal protein composites that should be expected to behave nonlinearly with regards to impacts.
and manipulating neural hardware in the ventricular system of the brain. Of the 1700ml or so available space in our skull, 1400ml of that is the brain itself, 150ml is for the blood,
and 150ml for the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in which the brain floats. An additional 30ml of CSF circulates inside a network of chambers in the center of the brain known as the ventricular system.
That a fairly roomy working environment. The fine membranes that separate these spaces are precisely the targets a Gauss gun could work on.
Of note we would offer that one of the key procedures would be making or stitching passageways between the brain and the larger immune and lymphatic systems of the body.
We won say much more here other than to mention that just a week ago, hardly anyone would have imagined the central nervous system had any classical lymphatic system,
and access it to ensure the continued health and power of the brain
#Terapio autonomous medical robot can assist nurses Japan has a rapidly aging population, along with the longest life expectancy in the world.
loosely based on human neural circuitry and how our brains perceive and interact with the world.
You just need your brain to be shaken up a bit, and that what Chef Watson does. u
A brain surgeon, for example, could use GHOST to create a virtual version of the brain that he
#Device delivers drugs to brain by remote control A new wireless device the width of a human hair can be implanted in the brain
and other neurological disorders in people by targeting therapies to specific brain circuits. Published online in the journal Cell,
a technology that makes individual brain cells sensitive to light and then activates those targeted populations of cells with flashes of light.
researchers made the tiny wireless devices capable of delivering drugs directly into the brain, with the remote push of a button.
we could theoretically deliver a drug to a specific brain region and activate that drug with light as needed.
But the new devices were built with four chambers to carry drugs directly into the brain.
By activating brain cells with drugs and with light, the scientists are getting an unprecedented look at the inner workings of the brain.
but it is soft like brain tissue and can remain in the brain and function for a long time without causing inflammation or neural damage,
Jeong adds. OTHER PARTS OF THE BODY, TOO As part of the study, the researchers showed that by delivering a drug to one side of an animal brain
they could stimulate neurons involved in movement, which caused the mouse to move in a circle.
In other mice, shining a light directly onto brain cells expressing a light-sensitive protein prompted the release of dopamine,
more flexible devices could have applications in areas of the body other than the brain, including peripheral organs. ee successfully produced
with application opportunities not only in the brain but in other parts of the nervous system and other organs as well, says the study other co-principal investigator, John A. Rogers, professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois. For now,
so that drugs can continue to be delivered to specific cells in the brain, or elsewhere in the body, for as long as required without the need to replace the entire device.
the mass production of human embryonic (pluripotent) stem cells that could provide an off-the-shelf product for clinical use in the treatment of the heart, liver, and brain.
and brain are all under investigation as possible new stem cell treatments. People are already receiving stem cells derived from eye cells for eye disorders.
#Rare case uncovers missing clue to Fragile X Fragile X syndrome may not only be a problem of receivers in the brain letting in too much information.
because they only dialed down the brain receivers, presumably leaving transmitters on overdrive. Scientists made the discovery by studying the case of someone who doesn even have the disordernly two of its classic symptoms.
which eliminates a protein that regulates electrical signals in the brain and causes a host of behavioral, neurological,
This allowed the researchers to parse out a previously unknown role for the gene. his individual case has allowed us to separate two independent functions of the fragile X protein in the brain,
when brain cells receive signals. Like radio transmitters and receivers, brain cells send and receive transmissions in fine-tuned ways that separate the signals from the noise.
Until recently, most fragile X research has focused on problems with overly sensitive receivers, those that allow in too much information.
Loss of FMRP is known to affect how cells in the brain receive signals dialing up the amount of information allowed in.
geneticist Stephen T. Warren and colleagues at Emory University replicated it in mouse brain cells and tested it for the widely known functions of FMRP.
In other words, the patient brain cells had entirely normal receivers, which appeared to work in ways that were indistinguishable from those in healthy people. his single point mutation does not seem to affect the classical,
Surprisingly, the fruit fly studies indicated that this single mutation increased the number of transmitters in brain cells, implicating a fundamental problem in
which the brain cells send out too many signals. To verify the mechanism in mammals, they turned to Klyachko lab,
which has expertise in understanding how brain cells regulate the sending of electrical signals. In past work Klyachko has shown that total loss of FMRP in mice disrupts the normal process by
which brain cells send signals, causing transmitters to send out too much information. In the new study researchers were able to verify the same effect from just the mutation and link it to human disease.
#High-res MRI links cerebellum to bipolar disorder A different type of MRI has given researchers an unprecedented look at previously unrecognized differences in the brains of people with bipolar disorder, a new study reports.
Specifically, the findings reveal differences in the white matter of patientsbrains and in the cerebellum, an area of the brain not previously linked with the disorder.
The cerebellar differences were not present in patients taking lithium, the most commonly used treatment for bipolar disorder.
professor of psychiatry at University of Iowa. o it really providing a new picture and new insight into the composition and function of the brain in bipolar disease.
including levels of glucose and acidity in the brain. ELEVATED MRI SIGNAL Compared to the brains of people without bipolar disorder,
the MRI signal was elevated in the cerebral white matter and the cerebellar region of patients affected by bipolar disorder.
The elevated signal may be due to either a reduction in ph or a reduction in glucose concentrationoth factors influenced by cell metabolism.
However, investigating metabolic abnormalities in the brain has been hindered by lack of a good imaging tools.
In contrast, the new imaging approach can rapidly acquire a high-resolution image of the whole brain.
One reason researchers didn know that the cerebellum might be important in bipolar disorder, is because no one chose to look there, says Casey Johnson,
The majority of bipolar disorder research has found differences in the frontal region of the brain.
We found focal differences in the cerebellum, which is a region that hasn really been highlighted in the bipolar literature before."
aggregation already has a stronghold in their brains, "says Lisa Lapidus, who uses lasers to study the speed of protein reconfiguration before aggregation."
and began to find pieces of evidence that suggested that the cerebellum may function abnormally in bipolar disorder
and that lithium might potentially target the cerebellum and alter glucose levels in this brain region. ur paper,
with this new technique, starts to bring all these pieces of evidence together for the first time, Johnson says.
it causes numerous unpleasant side effects for patients. f lithium effect on the cerebellum is the key to its effectiveness as a mood stabilizer,
then a more targeted treatment that causes the same change in the cerebellum without affecting other systems might be a better treatment for patients with bipolar disorder,
if your brain didn#t cycle A study with mice shows how the mammalian brain is able to maintain a constant state of up and downhile under anesthesia, during slow-wave sleep,
The findings suggest how the brain walks a healthy line between excitement and inhibition as it strives to be idle but ready,
or whether you are in some kind of idling state of the brain, you need to maintain that balance.
and it calls for more comparative work to be done among cortical areas, Neske says. ou can just use one cortical region as the model for all inhibitory interneuron function.
The National institutes of health and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency supported the research, which was published in the Journal of Neuroscience e
. of the UQ's Queensland Brain Institute that shows the major role played by PSR-1 in the regeneration of nerve axons.
and nerve clusters outside the brain and spinal cord in humans, there currently is no effective way to regenerate broken nerve cells in the central nervous system, noted Dr. Xue.
#Inflamed Brain Is depressed a Brain Researchers at the Centre for Addiction and Mental health (CAMH) in Toronto have found a possible link between inflammation in the brain and clinical depression.
Since more than half of patients suffering from major depression disorder (MDD) do not respond to antidepressant treatment,
a Marker of Neuroinflammation in the Brain During Major depressive episodes showed that there was a 30%increase in inflammation among patients experiencing a major clinical episode."
"This finding provides the most compelling evidence to date of brain inflammation during a major depressive episode,
but this is the first definitive evidence found in the brain.""Dr. Meyer and his team observed the activation of a specific immune cell of the brain called microglia,
which play a prominent role in the neural inflammatory response pathway. They conducted brain scans using positron emission tomography (PET),
which produces a three-dimensional image of functional process within the brain, on 20 patients diagnosed with depression and 20 healthy control subjects.
The results not only showed a significant elevation of inflammation in patients with depression, a trend was observed that the rates of inflammation were proportional to the level of depression,
It provides a potential new target to either reverse the brain inflammation or shift to a more positive repair role,
and the CAMH team believes that using anti-inflammatories as a treatment option needs to be explored further. his finding provides the most compelling evidence to date of brain inflammation,
#Placental Breach Mechanism for Listeria Revealed The host blood-brain and placental barriers act as critical ramparts to infections from microbial pathogens,
#Scientists Discover Specific Brain Receptor Role in Cocaine addiction Scientists at the University at Buffalo have discovered a previously unknown neural pathway that can regulate changes made in the brain due to cocaine use, providing new
"There is a need to more fully understand the long-term molecular changes in the brain involved in drug craving and relapse."
The study focused, specifically, on Activin receptors in regions of the brain that are involved in pleasure and reward."
"There are changes in the brain caused by drug use that occur and persist, but are unmasked only after withdrawal from a drugn this case, cocaine,"notes Dr. Dietz."
an extremely difficult to treat form of brain cancer, though it isn't able to cross the brain-blood barrier very effectively.
The challenge for researchers in this scenario will be to find a way to allow the drug to cross this barrier, the body's natural protection for the brain,
which can make it difficult for drug treatments to reach their target. When SR9243 is used in combination with existing chemotherapy drugs,
The team reports that Lysine-Specific Demethylase 1 (LSD1) turns off genes required to maintain cancer stem cell properties in glioblastoma, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer.
epigenetic changes help make a liver cell different from a brain cell, "said Dr. Li, an assistant project scientist in Chen's lab."Our results indicate that the same programming processes determine
This includes both the central nervous system of the brain and spinal chord, along with the peripheral nervous system in the rest of the body.
and physical characteristics of the fly and even prepare microdissections to analyze the brain. Associate professor of biology Mark Schnitzer and his team were even able to perform behavioral studies with the robot,
#Brain-zapping headwear designed to treat Parkinson's While the device has not yet been clinically trialled on humans,
deep brain stimulation. This involves a surgeon implanting electrical leads into the region of the brain that controls movement.
A pulse generator inserted under the skin below the collarbone provides electrical signals that create a lesion,
We asked if there was a way to provide the same treatment in a less invasive way that doesn't require brain surgery."
Like deep brain stimulation, it affects electrical activity in specific areas of the brain, but it's cheap, safe,
#Implantable device hits targeted brain cells with light and drugs when triggered remotely The field of optogenetics where individual brains cells are made to behave differently
when exposed to light has wide-ranging potential. It may one day be used to reverse acquired blindness,
With one eye on this emerging area of neuroscience, scientists have developed a device the width of a human hair that can be planted in the brain to deliver light
and is made to be soft like brain tissue so as not to cause inflammation and neural damage.
It also houses four separate chambers for carrying drugs directly to the brain and cellular-scale inorganic light-emitting diode(-ILED) arrays, allowing it to shine light on targeted cells.
One part of the study saw the researchers deliver drugs only to one side the brain.
In another experiment, the scientists shone light directly onto specific brain cells. These cells were chosen because they expressed light-sensitive proteins that trigger the release of dopamine.
with application opportunities not only in the brain but in other parts of the nervous system and other organs as well,"says the study co-author John Rogers,
The wrist is flexible enough that its end can be steered to allow needles to reach inside the nose, throat, ears, urethra, and brain.
or face so that tumors can be removed from the pituitary gland and skull base. It can also be done through the nasal cavity with an endoscope (a thin tube with a camera attached),
There appear to be connections between the brain and spinal cord even in some paralyzed people,
The nerves send signals to the brain, and, miraculously, the prosthetic toes have touch. Wolfang Ranger, who lost his right leg in 2007,
#IARPA Seeks Partners in Brain-Inspired AI Initiative US intelligence officials have set in motion a five-year project to spark progress in machine learning by reverse-engineering the algorithms of the human brain.
is ultimately looking to facilitate the development of synthetic systems with brain-like performance and proficiency.
the brain remains far better-suited for a host of detection and recognition tasks. The agency sees the emerging research area of neurally-inspired machine learning as crucial for closing the performance gap between software and wetware. espite significant progress in machine learning over the past few years,
the brain is able to robustly separate and categorize signals in the presence of significant noise and nonlinear transformations,
This performance gap between software and wetware persists despite some correspondence between the architecture of the leading machine learning algorithms and their biological counterparts in the brain,
if we can construct synthetic systems that not only resemble the high-level blueprints of the brain,
and learning rules employed by the brain to create ever more capable neurally-derived machine learning algorithms,
#Delivering drugs straight into the brain A team of Canadian scientists has found a way to inject the drugs directly into the brain,
thus keeping the brain clean. But this barrier also filters good things, such as disease fighting drugs from entering the nervous system.
and get the drugs to where they are needed most to the human brain. Currently, researchers say they have found a way based on the so-called ingle domain antibodiessda.
and making it believe they should be let through to the brain. The antibodies are able to squeeze past the barrier not just because of their size (these are fragments that consist of one molecule)
The single domain antibodies are exploiting the same mechanism that allows nutrients into the brain,
The method is part of the NRC Therapeutics Beyond Brain Barriers (TBBB) program which has been developing special carrier molecules for the past six years. t really opens the possibilities to use many different types of therapeutics for different diseases that we couldn really use before
unless we inject them directly into the brain which is highly invasive, r. Danica Stanimirovic,
Scientists add that it could become a significant step towards slowing the spread of brain diseases like Alzheimer, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson.
#Spoken sentences can be reconstructed from brain activity patterns It is now possible to reconstruct spoken sentences from activity patterns of the human brain surface. rain to Textcombines knowledge from neuroscience, medicine and informatics.
Speech is produced in the human cerebral cortex. Brain waves associated with speech processes can be recorded directly with electrodes located on the surface of the cortex.
It has now been shown for the first time that is possible to reconstruct basic units, words, and complete sentences of continuous speech from these brain waves and to generate the corresponding text.
Researchers at KIT and Wadsworth Center USA present their rain-to-Textsystem in the scientific journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. t has long been speculated
whether humans may communicate with machines via brain activity alone, says Tanja Schultz, who conducted the present study with her team at the Cognitive Systems Lab of KIT. s a major step in this direction,
our recent results indicate that both single units in terms of speech sounds as well as continuously spoken sentences can be recognized from brain activity. hese results were obtained by an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers of informatics, neuroscience, and medicine.
In Karlsruhe, the methods for signal processing and automatic speech recognition have been developed and applied. n addition to the decoding of speech from brain activity
our models allow for a detailed analysis of the brain areas involved in speech processes and their interaction, outline Christian Herff und Dominic Heger,
who developed the Brain-to-Text system within their doctoral studies. The present work is the first that decodes continuously spoken speech
Currently, Brain-to-Text is based on audible speech. However, the results are an important first step for recognizing speech from thought alone.
The brain activity was recorded in the USA from 7 epileptic patients who participated voluntarily in the study during their clinical treatments.
An electrode array was placed on the surface of the cerebral cortex (electrocorticography (ECOG)) for their neurological treatment.
Later on, the researchers in Karlsruhe analyzed the data to develop Brain-to-Text. In addition to basic science and a better understanding of the highly complex speech processes in the brain,
Brain-to-Text might be a building block to develop a means of speech communication for locked-in patients in the future.
Article and image credit via Neuroscience New t
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