when the shark approches it's tiny little pea brain will say eeew i'm not eatin'that Expletive Deleted thing!
Zaman's Pharmacheck prototype has already been successful in lab tests on oxytocin, a lifesaving drug given to women after childbirth to prevent hemorrhaging.
Long life though brain transplant into clones. Yes! I've always wanted to live long and prosper!
Long life though brain transplant into clones. Yes! I've always wanted to live long and prosper!
With brain-wasting disease in our deer and elk and steroidal enhanced deficiencies accumulating in our cows this bodes really well for U s as a nation huh?
and transmit them to the brain. The average person has three cones which enables him#to see about one million colors.#
Although tetrachromats have more receptors in their eyes their brains are wired the same way as a person with normal vision.
So how can a brain like Antico s change to see more colors? Like anything else practice makes perfect even
when it comes to neural pathways.##For years researchers weren t sure tetrachromacy existed. If it did stipulated they it could only be found in women.
in order to better understand how their brains work. Jameson became fascinated with how people are able to form
This likely has to do with how the brain wires itself when it receives certain signals frequently over time#a concept called neuroplasticity.
Lots of studies about neuroplasticity in animals and some in humans have shown that two individuals with the same capacity for visual perception can have drastically different vision later in life just based on
what they were exposed to early on. Researchers still aren t totally sure why this is the case.
because they haven t trained their brains to pay attention. Antico in this case presents a rare exception.
so her brain became wired to take advantage of her tetrachromacy.##Antico has a personal stake in the continued research of tetrachromacy.
but Jameson is intrigued by the prospect of improving people s perception of color through the training that neuroplasticity allows.
With the help of these nanoscopes researchers have been able to visualize molecules such as those created in synapses in the brain.
Jonathan Viventi Builds Devices That Decode Thoughts Existing brain implants require individual electrodes to be wired to an external device for data processing.
Viventi s arrays contain transistors that enable the signals to be processed locally yet they're as thin and flexible as a sheet of cellophane conforming to the contours of the brain.
We can actually sample with extremely high resolution across a virtually unlimited area of the brain Viventi says.
In animal studies this enabled reseachers to recognize the subtle brain signals that seem to give rise to seizures#a capability#he hopes doctors can use to better understand epilepsy in humans.
Paralyzed Rats Walk Again, Now Farther Than Ever Like a severed telephone line (from back in the days when phones had wires) a spinal cord injury can cut off communication between the brain
Then the top array reads the electrical commands from the brain and beams them to the lower array.
Essentially the EES is a bridge that bypasses the spinal cord injury. The technology has given already paralyzed rats
In the experiment the rats'spinal cords were severed completely causing total paralysis of the hindlimbs. Yet the researchers got the rodents walking again with the help of EES and some training sessions (during
because it mimics the diverse ways that neurons fire naturally. The new turning algorithm also helped the rats to overcome more complicated obstacles in the form of rodent-sized staircases
because it mimics the diverse ways that neurons fire naturally. Additionally the new controller continuously tracks the motion of the legs automatically adjusting the trajectory of each step based on that feedback.
and even brain cancer but the MIT researchers are the first to use them to combat antibiotic resistance.#
#Scientists Send Messages Directly From One Brain To Another So a team of neuroscientists sent a message from the brain of one person in India to the brains of three people in France using brainwave-reading equipment and the Internet.
and italics from the original paper#because they are awesome#wears an EEG cap on her scalp that records the electrical activity in her brain.
The research team including neuroscientists and engineers from universities and startups in Europe and the U s. understandably sent only two messages in this manner:
The boy named Minghao had developed a malignant tumor on his spinal cord and some of his bones needed to be removed.
So during many hours of spinal cord surgery surgeons at the hospital replaced part of the cancerous vertebra in his neck with the implant.
#Dorito from its wedge-shaped body and Cylon from its incredibly sophisticated robotic brain. Unlike most drones which have a pilot dictating their every move#by remote control the X-47b is largely autonomous calculating its flight paths.
#Squid Protein Could Help Brains'Talk'to Computers In the most advanced prosthetics--such as this crazy mind-controlled robotic arm--electronic hardware interfaces directly with nerves and muscles in the human body.
#Open Brain-Computer Interface: An Interview with Conor Russomanno Brain-computer interfacing (BCI) is a rapidly growing field that offers huge potential for many applications such as medical grade BCIS to help people with sensory-motor disabilities.
Currently a number of researchers are developing more affordable BCI systems designed to address a wider range of neurotherapeutic applications.
and research developer of Openbci a low-cost open-source hardware platform that records the brain#s electrical signals and uses devices and software languages to make the data easily accessible.
and having the frequency of the flashing induce a similar frequency in the brain and then telling the robot to turn left.#
This swarm of 1000 robots can assemble themselves into complex shapes without the need for a central brain or a human controller.
First they are decentralised#that is they don t need a central brain or leader. Second they are scalable
The exoskeleton is controlled through an EEG (Electroencephalography) cap placed over the head#the sensors on the cap read brain activity from the scalp.
While EEG is less sensitive than implanting sensors on the brain it has the advantage of being noninvasive meaning that the teenager was required not to undergo surgery for this one-off event.
and females) to enable them to master control of an exoskeleton directly with their brain in a stressful environment like a stadium.
#The intersection of engineering and neuroscience: Dan Bacher on Braingate and assistive technologies Dan Bacher has always been fascinated by two things:
electrical engineering and neuroscience. While these interests may seem divergent the synthesis of them led him to Brown University#s Braingate Group where he is the Senior Research and development Engineer.
Says Bacher#applying technology to the area of neuroscience just always fascinated me.##The Braingate Group is on the cutting edge of an emerging technology#brain-machine interfaces.
Their advances have allowed individuals with extensive paralysis and locked-in syndrome to interact with the world around them by controlling a computer mouse with their mind.
This technology is made possible in part by extensive mapping of the neural activity of the brain
Bacher began working on the Braingate technology by conducting brain-machine interface research on nonhuman primates.
Or as Bacher describes it#basically having monkeys playing video games with their brains.##This research helped Bacher
and other researchers understand how the brain works and begin development of the assistive technologies.
Says Bacher#Although I#m interested in the basic neuroscience and love the pure technology aspects of it thinking about how this translates to improve the quality of life for people in the real world has always been the underlying motivation for me.#
Says Bacher#if we develop a piece of technology for someone with a spinal cord injury who is moving their head to control a computer there s no reason that can#t help someone
Smart phones can provide the#brains#for assistive devices. Eye motion-capture technologies developed for paralyzed individuals open up new ways for the general public to interact with technology
Using a combination of surgically implanted electrodes (connected at one end to the nervous system and at the other end to sensors) and an algorithm to convert signals the team has produced a hand that sends information back to the brain that is so detailed that the wearer could even tell the hardness of objects he was given to Hold in a paper published in Science Translational Medicine in Feb. 2014
the team from EPFL (Switzerland) and SSSA (Italy) headed by Prof. Micera of EPFL and NCCR-Robotics presented an entirely new type of prosthetic hand Lifehand 2 that is capable of interfacing with the nervous system of the wearer
in order to give the ability to grip and sense like a real hand#including being able to feel shape and hardness of an object.
The signals from the sensors are relayed then to an external unit where they are processed before being passed back to the nerves in a format that allows the brain to understand how much pressure is being exerted on the sensors much like how information is passed from a real hand to the brain.
and it was found that the brain automatically assimilated data from multiple sensors in the palm of the hand.
For this to have now been developed into a method that supports the ability of the brain to assimilate impulses from 2 different areas to allow the subject to feel the neurologically complex action of palm closure is something exceptional.
#Engineers build brain-controlled music player Imagine if playing music was as simple at looking at your laptop screen.
and his team of researchers from the Department of Systems and Control engineering and the Centre for Biomedical Cybernetics at the University of Malta who have developed a music player that can be controlled by the human brain.
Camilleri and his team have been studying brain responses for ten years. Now they have found one that is optimal for controlling a music player using eye movements.
The system was developed originally to improve the quality of life of individuals with severely impaired motor abilities such as those with motor neuron disease or cerebral palsy.
The technology works by reading two key features of the userâ#nervous system: the nerves that trigger muscular movement in the eyes and the way that the brain processes vision.
The user can control the music player simply by looking at a series of flickering boxes on a computer screen.
and as the user looks at them their brain synchronizes at the same rate. This brain pattern reading system developed by Rosanne Zerafa relies on a system involving Steady State Visually Evoked potentials (SSVEPS.
Electrical signals sent by the brain are picked then up by a series of electrodes placed at specific locations on the userâ#scalp.
This process known as electroencephalography (EEG) records the brain responses and converts the brain activity into a series of computer commands.
As the user looks at the boxes on the screen the computer program is able to figure out the commands allowing the music player to be controlled without the need of any physical movement.
For people who have become paralyzed due to a spinal injury the normal flow of brain signals through the spine
However the cranial nerves are separate and link directly from the brain to certain areas of the body bypassing the spine altogether.
This particular brain-computer interface exploits one of these; the occulomotor nerve which is responsible for the eyeâ#movements.
This means that even an individual with complete body paralysis can still move their eyes over images on a screen.
This cutting age brain-computer interface system could lead the way for the development of similar user interfaces for tablets and smart phones.
The BCI system was presented at the 6th International IEEE/EMBS Neural engineering Conference in San diego California by team member Dr. Owen Falzon
#Plug-and-play artificial compound eye for robotic applications Flies have small brains that would not be able to process high-resolution images such as those that we see with our own eyes.
and includes neuromorphic photoreceptors that allow motion perception in a wide range of environments from a sunny day to moon light.
#Revolutionary implant enables broken spinal cord to function again A team from EPFL and NCCR Robotics lead by Profs Stéphanie Lacour Grégoire Courtine and Silvestro Micera published an article in Science today describing their e-dura implant that could revolutionise how we think about
and treat paralysis. Until now implants placed beneath the dura mater of the spinal cord have caused significant tissue damage
Previous work by the team have enabled animals paralysed by spinal cord injury (SCI) to voluntarily walk again using both chemical and electrical stimulation.
and were difficult to place accurately on the spinal cord. Drug delivery was via an intraperitoneal injection i e. an injection into the body cavity.
which can be placed directly beneath the dura mater the nervous system protective casing and onto the spinal cord for months at a time a length of time
when moved in any orientation this combination of the flexible electrodes and conducting tracks mean that electrical impulses can be delivered to the spinal cord.
A complimentary fluidic microchannel (100 m x 50 m in cross section) delivers neurotransmitters to reactivate the nerves within the spinal cord.
thus ensuring that it does not rub against the spinal cord causing the issues seen in alternative implants.
and involved a team comprising experts in materials science electronics neuroscience medicine and algorithm programming. Co-author Prof.
As the dura mater also surrounds the brain it is not just SCI patients who could benefit but also potentially those with neurological diseases such as Parkinson.
and Lacour S.#Electric dura mater for long-term multimodal neural interfaces#Science Vol. 347 (6218) pp. 159-163 2015.
with the final challenge of nerve cells to make a working arm.""What's important is to eventually let that limb become functional again,
and muscle cells and with the ability to contract when electrically stimulated in the lab. The next challenge is to create nerve cells
#Prosthetic hand'tells'the brain what it is touching Research on prosthetic hands has come a long way,
implanted an array of small electrodes into the region of the brain that controls movement in a woman who is paralyzed.
The electrodes communicated electrical activity from the brain's motor cortex via wires, to a prosthetic arm that the woman was able to move through a wide range of motions.
They implanted an electrode array in both his motor cortex and sensory cortex, the brain region that recognizes tactile sensations such as texture and pressure.
Wires from the motor cortex array controlled the hand, as they did for the female volunteer,
and sensors in the hand also conveyed information, via another set of wires, back to the array in the sensory cortex.
The researchers showed that this feedback system allowed the hand to communicate directly with the brain.
said Sliman Bensmaia, an associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Chicago. But people will never be able to use these hands with dexterity until they can feel
Although the current demonstration is the first of a prosthetic hand directly communicating with the brain,
other researchers have demonstrated that they can send messages from sensors in the prosthetic hand to electrodes implanted in nerves in the arm that then communicate with the brain."(
"However), in situations where people have spinal cord injury, so they are quadriplegic...you probably couldn't give them sensation back through the nerves,
The big benefit of Sanchez's approach is being able to use prostheses for people with spinal cord injuries,
The 28-year-old man in the current demonstration has been paralyzed for more than a decade because of a spinal cord injury.
The idea of implanting an electrode array into the brain to either control or receive signals from a prosthetic limb is big step forward,
"The biggest challenge, once you put that electrode into the brain, you develop scarring around the electrode,
Currently electrode arrays in the motor cortex only work for a few years, although arrays in the sensory cortex appear to be more stable, he added d
#Robotic Limb System Learns From Its Mistakes The science of brain-machine interface, or BMI, has made enormous leaps in the last few decades.
For patients with significant motor impairments, BMI tech allows the use of artificial limbs by way of electrodes connected to the brain.
Existing neuroprostheses require the user to generate specific brainwave activities for particular motions xtend left arm, for instance.
The brain activity is picked then up through an electroencephalogram and translated into instructions for the prosthetic limb.
If the triggering brain activity isn precisely correct, the desired action fails and the brain emits an electrical signal signifying the failure.
Millán team has found a way to make use of those error signals by teaching the machine itself to learn from mistakes.
When the neuroprosthetic system detects the error message from the brain, it understands that the action was unsuccessful
which is the part of the brain that identifies tactile sensations, enabling him to perceive a basic sense of touch.
"Researchers also sent wires from the man's motor cortex to the hand, so he was able to control its movements with his thoughts.
or missing limbs will not only be able to manipulate objects by sending signals from their brain to robotic devices,
and said only that he had suffered a spinal cord injury.""By wiring a sense of touch from a mechanical hand directly into the brain,
this work shows the potential for seamless biotechnological restoration of near-natural function, "Sanchez said.
#Tapeworms may be good for your brain Tapeworms get a bad rap. Theye voracious parasites that burrow into gut walls and devour nutrients like a nightmarish version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
like Alzheimer. lot of people talk about brain-gut connections. Very few people have data supporting it,
leading to a potentially overactive response in the brain that can include swelling and confusion.
which increases levels of a specific type of signaling molecule in the brain called interleukin-1 ß (IL-1ß).(
Although IL-1ß is important for proper brain function, excessive levels can damage cognition and are associated with some neurological diseases.)
To test the effects on the brain, specifically memory, Williamson and colleagues exposed the rats to a new environment that the rodents soon came to recognize.
But the wormless rats paused only half as muchuggesting their memories of the box were incomplete, the team reports in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.
says co-author Staci Bilbo, a neuroscientist at Duke university in Durham, North carolina. The theory suggests immune systems that evolve without enough exposure to infections (like the wormless rats) overreact
In a study published today in Cell, Feng Zhang and his colleagues at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the Mcgovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT,
says Zhang, the W. M. Keck Assistant professor in Biomedical engineering in MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive sciences.
including cancers of the colon, prostate, breast, brain, ovaries, pancreas and lung.""Hur inhibitors may be useful for many types of cancer,
"says Tejas Kulkarni, an MIT graduate student in brain and cognitive sciences and first author on the new paper."
"Joining Kulkarni on the paper are his adviser, professor of brain and cognitive sciences Josh Tenenbaum;
Vikash Mansinghka, a research scientist in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive sciences; and Pushmeet Kohli of Microsoft Research Cambridge.
which could be particularly valuable in tissues like the brain, where elaborately structured cells are difficult to separate from one another.
#Neurologists Speed up Connectome Analysis by More than 10-Fold Unraveling the connectivity maps between nerve cells in brains is a huge scientific endeavor called connectomics.
The main limitation to mapping large parts of the brain is the analysis of the data obtained with electron microscopes.
Berning and colleagues from the Department of Connectomics at the Frankfurt-based Max Planck Institute for Brain Research developed a novel tool-set, called Segem,
Connectomics is a relatively new research field where researchers aim to reconstruct the neuronal connectivity in parts of the brain from measured datasets.
Besides the anatomical structure of neurons this includes a reconstruction of the actual connections between the nerve cells via their synapses.
As a single neuron communicates with up to thousands of other neurons and the cells are packed extremely densely,
this is a difficult and extremely time-consuming endeavor. In comparison to the measurements, which already take thousands of hours,
and the second strategy is to develop new algorithms to reconstruct the brain tissue data in a more automated way.
Researchers at the Department of Connectomics are already working on increasing the number of participants by developing a platform where also non-qualified personnel (e g. students) can assist in the analysis of the connections between the neurons.
and is currently developing the game Brainflight to have as many as people as possible participating in a similar project for the cerebral cortex.
The most recent publication in Neuron however deals with the other strategy to reduce the analysis time.
Due to the complex structure and the large number of connections in a piece of cerebral cortex
we were able to develop a way to automatically classify brain tissue containing all the synapses. By using these Segem tools,
and an important step towards making connectome analysis a ready-to-use technique in neuroscience labs around the world
#New Memristors Could Usher in Bionic Brains Last month we saw researchers in the US push the envelope of nonvolatile memory devices based on resistance switching to the point where they are now capable of mimicking the neurons in the human brain.
The researchers claim that the memristive devices they have developed mimic the brain ability to simultaneously process
and process information in the very same way that the brain does said Dr Hussein Nili,
but instead offers something akin to how the brain retains and recalls information. The researchers believe that these nanoscale memory devices promise a future of artificial intelligence network that could enable a so-called bionic brain.
Nili suggests that one of the potential applications for these nano-memory devices could be in replicating the human brain outside of the human body.
Nili added: f you could replicate a brain outside the body, it would minimize ethical issues involved in treating
and experimenting on the brain which can lead to better understanding of neurological conditions
#A Computer That Can Sniff out Septic Shock Dr. David Hagar treats dozens of patients each day at the intensive care unit at John Hopkins Hospital in Maryland.
One of his patients was almost perfectly healthy except for having low blood pressure. Within four hours, the patient died of septic shock.
which provides the brains to each drone that Airware powers, the Ground Control Station that lets a single user operate a fleet of drones from a Windows laptop or tablet,
#The device is intended for use in remote laboratory settings to diagnose various types of cancers and nervous system disorders, such as Alzheimer,
#Eyewire Is Making Neuroscience Research Cool Again Editor note: Kevin Raposo is a tech blogger who writes for Knowtechie,
I was able to map out a small section of a neuron through Eyewire, a company that gamifying its neuroscience research
in order to enlist the help of people from all over the world. To understand how the brain works,
scientists need to figure out how electrical impulses travel through its vast network of 85 billion neurons,
connected through 100 trillion synapses. And to do this, they need to map the structure and connections of all these neurons.
Enter Eyewire, a company that crowdsourcing this mapping process with a fun and addictive online game. think that exploring the brain is the greatest adventure of all time.
It seemed natural to invite the world to join the quest, says Eyewire founder, Sebastian Seung.
The Game The game essentially works like a 3d puzzle. Players are tasked with the challenge of mapping the structure and connections of neurons by isolating individual cells from large three-dimensional microscopic image datasets.
Think of it like a coloring book. Remember how as a kid you were taught always to color within the lines?
but instead, players are tasked with the assignment of mapping out neurons from one side of a cube to the other,
by scrolling up and down through the cube and rebuilding neurons in segments. These cubes are the width of an average human hair (about 4. 5 microns per side, technically speaking.
It amazing because hardly any of them have any neuroscience background, but yet theye helping to make discoveries on how the brain works.
To remind users that they are indeed playing a game, Eyewire provides a typical gaming experience.
Individual neurons were identified and encoded in this data, and we used that information to generate the surface models that you see and experience.
In this way, the neurons that you see around you in virtual space were modeled not by an artist,
I was immersed in an environment that was filled with highways of neurons sprawled out in every direction.
Now wee inviting game developers really any developer to build their own games to map the brain.
and submit player neuron traces. One of the developers who helped write the API William Silversmith, tells me, n time,
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