The past decade of Alzheimer’s disease research has been fraught with disappointment.
Years of focus on one hallmark of the disease ultimately resulted in no progress toward treatment or prevention.
But next week, when top scientists gather in Los Angeles at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference, an annual meeting, many will present research on a different target: inflammation.
YaleNew
In a stunning scientific breakthrough, Yale School of Medicine researchers restored brain activity in pigs that had died hours before. The finding could revolutionize the neuroscience field and how scientists conceive the boundaries between life and death.
By circulating a cocktail of cell-rejuvenating compounds throughout the pigs’ brains, the researchers prevented tissue decomposition and restored some cell function. If replicated, their technique could be used as a model for drug testing and has implications for how scientists understand brain plasticity after traumatic events such as strokes.
They are found in many freshwater lakes.
A potentially deadly brain-eating amoeba has been detected in a Louisiana neighborhood’s drinking water — the third time the terrifying discovery has been made in the same parish since 2015, reports said.
Naegleria fowleri, which causes fatal brain swelling and tissue destruction, was found over the weekend in Terrebonne Parish, deep in the Louisiana bayou about an hour south of New Orleans, WWL-TV reported.
The Allen Brain Explorer (beta) is an application that allows users to browse multimodal datasets in an annotated 3D spatial framework. This new application is an integrated web-based navigator, allowing users to explore the Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas projection data and Allen Reference Atlas (ARA) in a standardized coordinate space.
The Brain Explorer 2 software is a desktop application for viewing the Allen Mouse Brain Connectivity Atlas projection data and the Allen Mouse Brain Atlas gene expression data in the framework of the Allen Reference Atlas (ARA). This downloadable software will be discontinued in 2019, as improved functionality and new features will be available via the integrated web-based platform. Updates to this software will be discontinued after that time.
Researchers report ultraprecise imaging of a postmortem human brain.
Despite their names, artificial intelligence technologies and their component systems, such as artificial neural networks, don’t have much to do with real brain science. I’m a professor of bioengineering and neurosciences interested in understanding how the brain works as a system – and how we can use that knowledge to design and engineer new machine learning models.
In recent decades, brain researchers have learned a huge amount about the physical connections in the brain and about how the nervous system routes information and processes it. But there is still a vast amount yet to be discovered.
At the same time, computer algorithms, software and hardware advances have brought machine learning to previously unimagined levels of achievement. I and other researchers in the field, including a number of its leaders, have a growing sense that finding out more about how the brain processes information could help programmers translate the concepts of thinking from the wet and squishy world of biology into all-new forms of machine learning in the digital world.