Menu

Blog

Archive for the ‘neuroscience’ category: Page 404

Aug 12, 2021

Dr. Dennis McKenna — Founder, McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy — A 21st Century Mystery School

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, neuroscience

A 21st Century Mystery School — “Creating New Paradigms In Wellness And Wisdom Never Seen Before, And Never More Needed Than Now” — Dr. Dennis McKenna, Founder, McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy.


Dr. Dennis McKenna is an American ethnopharmacologist, research pharmacognosist, lecturer, author, and Founder of the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy (www.mckenna.academy).

Continue reading “Dr. Dennis McKenna — Founder, McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy — A 21st Century Mystery School” »

Aug 11, 2021

The Amazing Brain: Visualizing Data to Understand Brain Networks

Posted by in categories: computing, neuroscience

The NIH-led Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative continues to teach us about the world’s most sophisticated computer: the human brain. This striking image offers a spectacular case in point, thanks to a new tool called Visual Neuronal Dynamics (VND).

VND is not a camera. It is a powerful software program that can display, animate, and analyze models of neurons and their connections, or networks, using 3D graphics. What you’re seeing in this colorful image is a strip of mouse primary visual cortex, the area in the brain where incoming sensory information gets processed into vision.

This strip contains more than 230,000 neurons of 17 different cell types. Long and spindly excitatory neurons that point upward (purple, blue, red, orange) are intermingled with short and stubby inhibitory neurons (green, cyan, magenta). Slicing through the neuronal landscape is a neuropixels probe (silver): a tiny flexible silicon detector that can record brain activity in awake animals [1].

Aug 11, 2021

Beige Fat “Indispensable” in Protecting the Brain From Dementia

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Pear-shaped people, whose weight is generally distributed more evenly, rather than “apple shaped” individuals with fat clustered around their middle and often around internal organs like the liver in the abdominal cavity, are considered less at risk for cardiometabolic problems like heart disease and diabetes, as well as cognitive decline, says Stranahan, neuroscientist at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University.


Summary: Adipocytes, or beige fat cells, are indispensable to the anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective effects of subcutaneous fat, researchers say.

Source: Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University

Continue reading “Beige Fat ‘Indispensable’ in Protecting the Brain From Dementia” »

Aug 11, 2021

Meet the Two Scientists Who Implanted a False Memory Into a Mouse

Posted by in categories: innovation, neuroscience

Circa 2014 😗 mind uploading soon.


In a neuroscience breakthrough, the duo pioneered a real-life version of Inception.

Aug 10, 2021

How ‘organoids’ are making sci-fi a reality

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

The ones Teresa is handling in this Cambridge laboratory are mini bile ducts, thin tubes that carry bile from the liver to the small intestine to help with digestion.

Teresa also has gut organoids in the incubator, while down the corridor a different team is developing brain organoids.

In fact, around the world, miniatures of everything from lungs to kidneys are being coaxed gently to life. And because they function just as organs do, they are perfect for research.

Aug 10, 2021

Brain Structure in Premature Babies Linked to Emotional Processing in Preschool

Posted by in categories: futurism, neuroscience

Summary: Brain connectivity at birth may impact emotional processing and social development later in childhood, especially in children born preterm. Researchers found children born preterm with a weaker uncinate fasciculus, the white-matter tract that connects brain regions associated with emotional processing, were more likely to interpret situations in a negative light.

Source: SfN

The strength of brain connections at birth may predict the future emotional and social development of babies born prematurely, according to new research published in eNeuro.

Aug 10, 2021

Scientists Reversed Aging in Mouse Brains With Poo Transplants From Young Mice

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, life extension, neuroscience

Evidence has been accumulating for almost a decade that the microbiome composition changes with age. In 2,012 research by my colleagues at University College Cork showed that diversity in the microbiome was linked to health outcomes in later life, including frailty.


In 1,895 on turning 50 Elie Metchnikoff became increasingly anxious about aging. As a result, the Russian Nobel prize-winning scientist, and one of the founders of immunology, turned his attention away from immunology and towards gerontology – a term that he coined.

He was fascinated by the role that intestinal bacteria play in health and disease and suggested that people from parts of eastern Europe lived longer because they ate a lot of fermented foods containing lactic acid bacteria.

Continue reading “Scientists Reversed Aging in Mouse Brains With Poo Transplants From Young Mice” »

Aug 9, 2021

Monkey brain mapped in 3D at micron resolution

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Chinese scientists have produced a 3D map of an entire rhesus monkey brain, which is 200 times larger than a mouse brain, at a resolution of just 0.001 mm (1 micron).

Aug 8, 2021

Nutritional Supplements Could Help Treat PTSD

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, genetics, neuroscience

Since DNMT3A increases DNA methylation, the researchers used a natural product that donates methyl groups S-adenosylmethionine (SAMe) and to activate the retinoic acid receptor they treated the animals with vitamin A. They found that combined treatment with the methyl donor SAM and retinoic acid reversed PTSD-like behaviors.


Summary: Combining two natural products that modulate the epigenome, researchers believe they have identified a feasible approach to reversing symptoms of PTSD in animal models that could be effective in humans.

Source: Bar Ilan University

Continue reading “Nutritional Supplements Could Help Treat PTSD” »

Aug 7, 2021

New tool maps cell types in lab-grown blobs of brain tissue

Posted by in categories: genetics, mapping, neuroscience

A new tool helps researchers explore the types of cells that make up brain organoids — clusters of cells that can mimic the basic structure, function and development of different parts of the brain.

The software, detailed in Cell Stem Cell, maps information about when and where genes are expressed in brain organoids onto a reference atlas of the developing mouse brain. Scientists can use the resulting overlay to develop organoids that better recapitulate the developing brain, the team says, or to uncover the effects of gene mutations and other experimental perturbations.

Brain organoids derived from the cells of people with conditions such as autism have proved useful in capturing neuronal abnormalities. But the findings are muddied by methodological differences in how researchers develop these lab-grown blobs. Advanced techniques to profile gene expression in single cells have made it easier to identify the cell types in any given organoid. But it’s remained difficult to map those cell types onto different brain regions.