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,
Loss of FMRP is known to affect how cells in the brain receive signals dialing up the amount of information allowed in.
#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.
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.
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.
The majority of bipolar disorder research has found differences in the frontal region of the brain.
aggregation already has a stronghold in their brains, "says Lisa Lapidus, who uses lasers to study the speed of protein reconfiguration before aggregation."
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.
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.
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,
and drugs when triggered remotely The field of optogenetics where individual brains cells are made to behave differently
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
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.
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.
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.
Brain waves associated with speech processes can be recorded directly with electrodes located on the surface of the cortex.
and complete sentences of continuous speech from these brain waves and to generate the corresponding text.
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.
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
#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 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
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
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.
"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
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.
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.
#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.
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,
Tetraplegic Patient Controls Robotic Limb With His Brain In a video by the researchers, Sorto used the arm to serve himself a beer.
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,
#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,
the part of the brain involved in movement planning, as the source of control for a robotic arm.
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.
#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.
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.
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,
The scientists tested the device's drug delivery potential by surgically placing it into the brains of mice.
"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
Even so, a neuron in the brain differs completely from a liver cell--they perform specific functions
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