#lectric Highwayfor EVS in Nevada The Nevada Electric Highway, recently unveiled by Gov. Brian Sandoval
#Scientists grow human mini-brains that are giving big insights into autism Scientists first grew mini-hearts in a lab. Then they 3d printed skin.
self-organizing, crazy-looking nuggets of living yes, LIVING brain. These erebral organoidsare the brainchild of Dr. Madeline Lancaster, a neuroscientist at Cambridge who is interested in how our brains develop as embryos.
A few years back while working as a postdoc in Vienna at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA
Lancaster noticed off-hand that her cultured brain cells weren sticking to the bottom of the dish as usual instead,
Lancaster tinkered around with growth conditions until her mini-brains expanded several millimeters wide tiny compared to a normal human brain,
The pale, opaque chunks of brain matter didn look like much on the surface, but their intricate internal architecture blew Lancaster away.
Under the microscope, the brain blobs were doppelgangers of 9-week-old fetus brains. They contained neural stem cells that busily churned on
Lancaster and her team could identify regions in the organoids that roughly looked like a hippocampus, forebrain and even retina.
The outer ortexof the organoid stratified into rudimentary layers, in a way eerily similar to how our own cerebral cortex matures.
Brain organoids became an instant hit. Despite their gnarled look, the brain blobs are far more umanthan any animal brain could ever be
making them valuable models for studying human brain development. Plus, unlike actual fetus brains, they can be experimented on.
In a study published last week in Cell, a team from Yale School of medicine used the technique to glean insight into why autism occurs in some people without a clear genetic cause.
The team selected four autistic patients with enlarged heads (a condition that affects roughly one-fifth of people with the disorder), cultured organoids from their skin cells,
This small change upset the delicate excitatory and inhibitory balance in the developing brain, and may in part cause the faulty wiring behind autism behavioral symptoms.
Before mini-brains, scientists had to shift through gobs of genomic data to fish out gene variants associated with autism.
Brain organoids represent a paradigm shift. Scientists can now directly study the biology of complex neurological disorders and from there
Although similar, mouse brains don exactly follow the same developmental trajectory as human brains, so we don know how well the findings translate.
Unlike human embryonic stem cells, brain organoids come from skin samples taken from patients with explicit consent.
the overall structure of the brain blobs is screwed pretty up. Like facial features on a Picasso portrait,
Theye also hoping to coax mini-brains into a later developmental stage by providing external blood supply.
With each advance forward, the mini-brain complexity and applications grow. As of now, the organoids most certainly can hink without external output and mature neural networks to support information processing,
however, scientists may be able to grow organoids that resemble a complete human brain. What happens then?
the new field has given also insight into how the brain works. It can even be used to alter memories.
which usually work to take the information between the rods and cells and the brain.
scientists could make an internet of human brains Scientists have attached successfully together the brains of monkeys
By linking the brains together, scientists suggest that they could create Brainets a system of brains attached together to make an rganic computer The experiments found that the successfully connected animals brains were at least as good as one single one,
and often better, and so could be the beginning of more research on connected animal brains. ssentially,
we created a super-brain, Miguel Nicolelis, the study lead author, told The Guardian. The successful tests show that it could be possible to do the same thing with human brains.
That could mean that the idea that we can never escape our own selves and brains is wrong letting us attach ourselves together
and become more clever in the process. In the monkey experiment, the three animals were attached together using special sensors that were implanted in their brain
and could transmit activity. The three of them successfully learnt to control a virtual avatar on a screen,
working together to move its arm. In the rat one scientists plugged in four different rats to a machine that could capture
and transmit their brain signals. They then successfully did challenges, including recognising patterns and storing information.
The equipment used in the experiments could be used to do the same thing for human brains.""This is the first demonstration of a shared brain-machine interface,
a paradigm that has been translated successfully over the past decades from studies in animals all the way to clinical applications,
Modeled after the human brain, a memprocessor processes and stores information within the same units by means of their mutual interactions.
The reason for this computational power stems from properties inspired by the brain and shared by any universal memcomputing machine
"because it helps retrain the brain pathways that control walking, Angold said. The new exoskeleton can also help people with spinal cord injuries, like Mosko,
#'Pop-up'3d Structures Can Mimic Brain Circuits By mimicking children's pop-up books, scientists can now make complex microscopic 3d shapes that model brain circuitry and blood vessels,
researchers say. These intricate structures, which could resemble tiny flowers and peacocks, may one day help scientists electronically control living tissue, the researchers added.
examples include the circuits of brain cells and networks of veins. Materials scientist John Rogers, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
"Our focus has been on the brain, heart and skin, "Rogers said. Devices that mimic the complex structures found in nature are very difficult to manufacture on microscopic scales.
When one side of the brain is damaged by stroke the healthy side tends to generate much more activity to compensate for the immobile side.
doctors have not known how to reset the brain back into the state of rapid recovery that we see in the initial months after a stroke.
Rebooting recovery Doctors think that part of the problem is that the healthy and injured sides of brains of some stroke patients develop an imbalance over time
The result appears to be overactivity on the healthy side of the brain that may actually prevent the injured side from recovering.
The rtms device helps even out this imbalance by reducing activity on the side of the brain that was injured not by stroke
We use the navigated rtms to essentially map the participant's brain like a GPS SYSTEM would
and then repeatedly stimulate specific areas of the motor cortex in a noninvasive manner. The rtms device is a flat,
which allows us to more easily find the area of the brain that needs to be stimulated,
and restores the brain balance. Adding navigation to TMS is the key to finding the exact location and orientation of the motor area in each person that needs inhibition, via the stimulation.
The process helps improve the brain's receptiveness to activity-based therapy. The technology isn't limited solely to motor recovery after stroke in fact,
it seems to have the potential to affect many of the brain circuits that are injured in stroke.
Nexstim's noninvasive Navigated Brain Stimulation System is currently available for investigational use only. Patients in the trial undergo occupational therapy rehab after each use of the device to improve flexibility, strength and use of weak arms or hands.
We hypothesize that pretreatment with carefully dosed magnetic pulses to the motor cortex will predispose participants to make bigger gains with therapy than they would have with 6 weeks of therapy alone.
yet nonspecific, way of preparing the brain for all types of therapies, and depending on where the magnet is aimed,
can potentially affect many of the brain circuits that are impaired during stroke or other types of brain injuries.
Instead of targeting the motor cortex to promote recovery of arm movement, we can vary the location of magnetic stimulation to target the brain regions associated with other neurologic impairments, e g.,
, language areas, attention areas, chronic pain areas. Thus, rtms treatment could be potentially improve aphasia,
#Bionic Arm Taps New Part of Brain for Natural Moves Mind-controlled prosthetic limbs have been a reality for a few years,
Now, a team of researchers says the members have solved part of the problem of smooth motor control by connecting an artificial limb to a different part of the brain.
Previous designs for mind-controlled prostheses linked the artificial limb to either the person's motor cortex or the individual's premotor cortex
which both translate signals from the brain to the limbs. This time, the connections to the robotic arm were wired into a patient's posterior parietal cortex,
which is located on the side of the head near the ear.""The posterior parietal cortex forms the initial plans to make movements,
"said Richard Andersen, a professor of neuroscience at the California Institute of technology and one of the researchers who developed the new prosthesis.
the posterior parietal cortex outlines the steps in movement, then, the motor cortexes translate that plan into actual signals that are sent to specific parts of the arm.
The researchers used signals from the posterior parietal cortex"to extract the intent of the subject,
"Andersen told Live Science.""Instead of'I want to control muscles, 'we can use smart robotics to work out the fine details"of the movement a person wants to make.
the researchers explain how they connected the posterior parietal cortex of one patient, Erik G. Sorto,
to a computer that acted as a kind of artificial motor cortex. The computer used specific signals from the parietal cortex to detect what kind of movement Sorto intended to make,
and then translated that into signals for the robotic arm. Video: Tetraplegic Patient Controls Robotic Limb With His Brain In a video by the researchers, Sorto used the arm to serve himself a beer.
Sorto's ability to sip a brew came from the fact that the signals from the parietal cortex told the computer the general trajectory of the movement Sorto wanted to make,
and the computer could smooth out the movements of the artificial arm so that they resembled those of a real arm.
Other brain-connected bionic arms have aimed at decoding the motor signals involved with individual movements, such as trying to raise an arm by imagining an individual muscle contracting,
"what is different is used the brain area: posterior parietal cortex versus the premotor,"he said. Krishna Shenoy, a professor of electrical engineering who studies neural prostheses at Stanford,
was enthusiastic about the new prosthesis.""This is clearly the very first recordings from the posterior parietal cortex in humans in the context of qualifying the signals for use in prostheses,
"he said.""It is important to investigate many brain areas for potential use in prostheses, as different areas may well have different advantages.""
""This is an excellent example of this important biomedical science and engineering research path in action, "Shenoy said.
#Robotic Arm System Senses Quadriplegic Man Intentions for Movement Control Brain-computer interfaces have been used in the past to control prosthetic devices.
They have focused on reading signals from the motor cortex, the part of the brain responsible for movement. The signals arising there,
That why researchers at Caltech decided to instead use signals coming from the posterior parietal cortex,
the part of the brain involved in movement planning, as the source of control for a robotic arm.
were implanted in the posterior parietal cortex. The researchers created software that processed and decoded the signals,
The investigators showed that sensing electric signals from the posterior parietal cortex can significantly improve the quality of the motion of robotic prostheses.
The next step the researchers are hoping to take is to gather data coming from both the motor cortex as well as the posterior parietal cortex
Here an example of the patient using the new robotic arm system controlled via the posterior parietal cortex:
Decoding motor imagery from the posterior parietal cortex of a tetraplegic humanource: Caltech S
#Boston Sci Precision Novi, World Smallest 16 Contact Spinal Stimulator OKD in EU (VIDEO) Boston Scientific is releasing in Europe the world smallest and thinnest 16
Link Up Brain cells for First time in a Lab While most differentiated cells can be made to live on their own,
Brain cells need synaptic connections in order to exhibit their physiology, so researchers at the Cellular Neurobiology Research Branch of National institutes of health have been working at making that happen in a laboratory environment.
The team used a so called bidi wound healing dishto connect mesencephalic dopaminergic neurons to neocortical brain cells.
Brain-derived neurotrophic factor was added to the mix to help continue cellular differentiation. What the team discovered was that the initially formed cells generally stayed where they are while tyrosine hydroxylase (TH)- positive projections, that link up neural cells, formed within the gap between the separate chambers.
The researchers now hope this approach will help scientists study brain function, neural connectivity, and how these factors influence the causes and progression of different neurological diseases.
and adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) from normal human pituitary gland and pituitary adenoma tissue sections, using a fully automated droplet-based liquid-microjunction surface-sampling-HPLCSI-MSS system for spatially resolved sampling, HPLC separation,
The protein distributions correlated with the visible anatomic pattern of the pituitary gland. AVP was most abundant in the posterior pituitary gland region (neurohypophysis
#Optical Probe to Help Remove Only Cancerous Tissues in Brain Surgeries Neurosurgeons removing a tumor have to be obsessive about resecting just enough
but the Hopkins team focused on brain cancer cellslack of myelin sheaths as the marker that influences how light passes through them.
Having identified how brain cancer cells uniquely scatter light, the researchers wrote a computer program that spots the relevant parameters within OCT scan data.
Here an example of the probe being used on brain tissue removed in actual surgeries: Study in Science Translational Medicine:
Detection of human brain cancer infiltration ex vivo and in vivo using quantitative optical coherence tomographyource: Johns Hopkins Medicine
#Tiny Remote Controlled Implant Releases Drugs Into Brain The blood-brain barrier is a picky bouncer, preventing most therapeutic compounds from crossing its barricades.
researchers from Washington Universityin St louis and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a wireless implant that can be controlled remotely to release drugs right into the brain.
#Futuristic brain probe allows for wireless control of neurons Scientists developed an ultra-thin, minimally invasive device for controlling brain cells with drugs and lighta study showed that scientists can wirelessly determine the path a mouse walks with a press of a button.
Researchers at the Washington University School of medicine, St louis, and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, created a remote controlled,
and shine lights on neurons deep inside the brains of mice. The revolutionary device is described online in the journal Cell.
"It unplugs a world of possibilities for scientists to learn how brain circuits work in a more natural setting."
Both options require surgery that can damage parts of the brain and introduce experimental conditions that hinder animals'natural movements.
"We used powerful nanomanufacturing strategies to fabricate an implant that lets us penetrate deep inside the brain with minimal damage,
and displaced much less brain tissue. The scientists tested the device's drug delivery potential by surgically placing it into the brains of mice.
In some experiments, they showed that they could precisely map circuits by using the implant to inject viruses that label cells with genetic dyes.
"This is the kind of revolutionary tool development that neuroscientists need to map out brain circuit activity, "said James Gnadt,
and pushed the drug out into the brain.""We tried at least 30 different prototypes before one finally worked,
crowdsourcing approach to neuroscience is a great way to understand normal and healthy brain circuitry."
Scientists used soft materials to create a brain implant a tenth the width of a human hair that can wirelessly control neurons with lights and drugs.
Biomedical researchers at Cedars-Sinai have invented a tiny drug-delivery system that can identify cancer cell types in the brain through"virtual biopsies
and fight tumor cells in the brain without resorting to surgery.""Our nanodrug can be engineered to carry a variety of drugs,
proteins and genetic materials to attack tumors on several fronts from within the brain,"said Julia Ljubimova, MD, Phd,
or stop cancers by blocking them in multiple ways within the brain. The drug is about 20 to 30 nanometers in size-a fraction of a human hair,
diagnosing brain tumors by identifying cells that have spread to the brain from other organs, and then fighting the cancer with precise, individualized tumor treatment.
and lung cancers into laboratory mice to represent metastatic disease-with one type of cancer implanted on each side of the brain.
Lung and breast cancers are those that most often spread to the brain. The researchers used the nano delivery system to identify
but they are ineffective against cancers that spread to the brain because they are not able to cross the blood-brain barrier that protects the brain from toxins in the blood,
"said Keith Black, MD, chair of the Department of Neurosurgery, director of the Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute, director of the Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr.,
so drugs that are effective outside the brain may be effective inside as well,"Black added.#####Ljubimova, Black and Holler led the study
"MRI Virtual Biopsy and Treatment of Brain Metastatic tumors with Targeted Nanobioconjugates.""Publication Date (Web: April 23, 2015.
professor at the Brain Research Institute, University of Zürich, Switzerland, and Gary Bernard, electrical engineering professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, who are renowned experts in the study of insect physiology and ecology.
Researchers in UCSB's Department of Electrical and Computer engineering are seeking to make computer brains smarter by making them more like our own May 11th, 2015making robots more human April 29th, 2015lifeboat Foundation launches Interactive Friendly AI April 6th,
Were still pretty far away from accurately modelling all aspects of a living childs brain, but the algorithms that handle sound and image processing are inspired by biology,
and learns to recognize images using a digital model of how nerve cells in the brain handle sensory impressions.
but rather how its brain connects sounds and images. Learning The robot has already been on display in Trondheim and Arendal
#Injectable nanoelectronics for treatment of neurodegenerative diseases It's a notion that might be pulled from the pages of science-fiction novel-electronic devices that can be injected directly into the brain,
"But if you want to study the brain or develop the tools to explore the brain-machine interface,
you need to stick something into the body. When releasing the electronics scaffold completely from the fabrication substrate,
'"Though not the first attempts at implanting electronics into the brain-deep brain stimulation has been used to treat a variety of disorders for decades-the nano-fabricated scaffolds operate on a completely different scale.
Zhe Jiang, Peter Kruskal, Chong Xie, Zhigang Suo, Ying Fang"Existing techniques are crude relative to the way the brain is wired,
researchers hope to better understand how the brain and other tissues react to the injectable electronics over longer periods.
greatly diminishing their ability to deliver blood to the heart muscle and the brain. The condition
sewn into pillows to monitor brain signals or applied to interactive textiles with heating and cooling capabilities.
Even so, a neuron in the brain differs completely from a liver cell--they perform specific functions
The material could provide an off-the-shelf product for clinical use in the treatment of the heart, liver and brain.
Conditions of the heart, liver and brain are all under investigation as possible new stem cell treatments.
#Take a trip through the brain new imaging tool (Nanowerk News) A new imaging tool developed by Boston scientists could do for the brain
In the first demonstration of how the technology works, published July 30 in the journal Cell("Saturated Reconstruction of a Volume of Neocortex"),the researchers look inside the brain of an adult mouse at a scale previously unachievable, generating images
The inventors'long-term goal is to make the resource available to the scientific community in the form of a national brain observatory.
"The researchers have begun the process of mining their imaging data by looking first at an area of the brain that receives sensory information from mouse whiskers,
"The complexity of the brain is much more than what we had imagined ever, "says study first author Narayanan"Bobby"Kasthuri, of the Boston University School of medicine."
"The researchers see great potential in the tool's ability to answer questions about what a neurological disorder actually looks like in the brain,
as well as what makes the human brain different from other animals and different between individuals. Who we become is very much a product of the connections our neurons make in response to various life experiences.
and someone with schizophrenia would be a leap in our understanding of how our brains shape who we are (or vice versa).
the scientists are now partnering with Argonne National Laboratory with the hopes of creating a national brain laboratory that neuroscientists around the world can access within the next few years."
#Lymphatic vessels acknowledged in the brain; could be the key to better understanding disease Medical professionals everywhere may be stunned by a new discovery that overturns decades of textbook teaching.
Researchers at the University of Virginia School of medicine have discovered recently that lymphatic vessels do in fact go up into the brain,
Director of UVA's Center for Brain Immunology Prof. Jonathan Kipnis said, "It changes entirely the way we perceive the neuro-immune interaction.
"In Alzheimer's, there are accumulations of big protein chunks in the brain. We think they may be accumulating in the brain
because they're not being removed efficiently by these vessels.""Chairman of the UVA Department of Neuroscience Kevin Lee said,
"According to Kipnis, the brain's lymphatic vessels managed to escape notice until now, because they are hidden"very well."
2.)Will they finally recognize the importance of natural healing techniques that now enjoy further scientific validation in regard to healing the brain?
they do need to find new answers about the workings of the brain and the diseases that plague it.
the brain depends upon a relationship between both streams; blood and lymphatic! That all diseases result in morbidity, that all morbidity forms blockages,
SCHIZOPHRENIA BIPOLAR OR MANIACO-DEPRESSION, HOW PLASMA PROTEINS PRODUCE THE CONDITION AT THE BRAIN CELLS'LEVEL OF CHEMICAL IMBALANCE,
#Blown-up brains reveal nanoscale details Microscopes make living cells and tissues appear bigger. But what if we could actually make the things bigger?
but the concept is the basis for a new method that could enable biologists to image an entire brain in exquisite molecular detail using an ordinary microscope,
and they struggle with thick structures, such as sections of brain or tumours. Boyden and many other neuroscientists would like to glean molecular details such as the location of proteins at neural synapses the junctions at
which two neurons communicate within a group of neurons or even across an entire brain."
In one experiment with inflated mouse brain tissue, the researchers gauged the distance between two proteins that sit on opposite ends of neural synapses.
At the meeting, he showed an image of a half-millimetre slab of the mouse brain's hippocampus
Boyden team has worked also on the brains of fruit flies and zebrafish, while a collaborating group is applying expansion microscopy to human brains.
Pushing boundaries Viviana Gradinaru, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of technology in Pasadena, says that Boyden technique is another example of how scientists are bypassing hardware limitations by modifying biological tissue.
and other molecules to make intact brain tissue transparent, allowing thick sections to be imaged with a light microscope2 (see'See-through brains clarify connections'.
'Last year, Gradinaru team applied the technique to other organs and an entire mouse3. his seems a wonderful story,
#Phd students build brain-controlled FPV drone Two Phd students from University of Florida, Marvin Andujar and Chris Crawford, have built a mind-machine method to control a drone through a wearable electroencephalographic (EEG) Brain-Computer Interface device.
The drone operates based on user cognitive commands. When the user thinks forward, the drone moves forward towards the direction it is facing.
While the drone flies, the user is able to view the flight from FPV (first-person view) via a front-facing camera. his project serves as the beginning of brain-machine control as a human-centric application says Marvin Andujar
#Jaguar land rover Mind Sense research monitors brainwaves through the hands via sensors in the steering wheel Jaguar land rover has revealed the ixth Senseproject,
With its road safety research, The british firm is joining a number of other car makers that have been researching the measurement of brainwaves to monitor driver concentration in the car.
if a car could effectively read the brainwaves that indicate a driver is beginning to daydream,
whilst driving. f brain activity indicates a daydream or poor concentration, then the steering wheel or pedals could vibrate to raise the driver awareness
added Dr Epple. f Mind Sense does not detect a surge in brain activity following the car displaying a warning icon or sound,
to ensure the driver is made aware of a potential hazard. he most common method for monitoring brainwaves is close to the source using sensors attached to a headband,
This detects brainwaves through the hands via sensors embedded in the steering wheel. Because the sensing is taking place further away from the driver head
and filter out the pure brainwave from any background oisejaguar Land rover is currently conducting user trials to collect more information on the different brainwaves identified through the steering wheel sensors
On top of brainwave monitoring, Jaguar land rover is also assessing how a vehicle could monitor the well-being of the driver using a medical-grade sensor embedded in the seat of a JAGUAR XJ.
As touch provides an immediate response to the brain, there will be no need for the driver to glance at the screen for visual confirmation
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011