Nothingman's Blog About Nothing

jtotheizzoe:

Mapping a Living Brain, Neuron by Neuron

A brain, along with all of the thoughts, decisions and consciousness that it brings with it, is nothing more than the sum of its parts. But it is precisely the sum of those parts that makes a brain more than just a pile of neurons and gray goo. Mapping the complex networks of the brain in space and time will be the key to figuring out how it works.

Thanks to some breakthrough work in a fish, we may be getting closer. HHMI scientists have mapped the activity of a zebrafish brain down to the individual neuron in real time! A zebrafish brain contains 100,000 times fewer neurons than our own, but techniques like this will make the Obama administration’s ambitious (and slightly controversial) human Brain Activity Map Project possible. Of course, mapping the activity of a brain isn’t the same as knowing what that activity means, but it’s hard to navigate anything without a detailed map. And when it comes to the brain, a static map is pretty useless. Seeing how signals change over time at a single-cell level is what it will take to turn flashing cells into an idea of what makes the brain tick. 

This isn’t our first glance at what “fish thoughts” look like, but it’s definitely the most complete, and the most completely awesome. Check out more great coverage, plus complete videos of the blinking brain, at io9.

I really want to know what this zebrafish was thinking about that made its whole brain light up. Maybe “Oh man, I’m gonna be so famous on the internet after this!!”

scinerds:

Three Radical New Brain-Mapping Tools Obama’s Plan Could Deliver

The Obama administration wants to make a huge investment in mapping the human brain, according to The New York Times. How can they get the most bang for their buck? We have details on three future technologies that are being eyed by the scientists behind the bold proposal.

The U.S. already has one big brain-mapping effort under way, the Human Connectome Project, which aims to map the connections between regions of the human brain. The new project would go beyond this static depiction and map the activity of individual neurons in real time.

“All the really interesting features of the brain — language, perception, cognition, the mind — emerge from collections of neurons interacting with each other in ways we don’t understand,” said neuroscientist John Donoghue of Brown University, one of the architects of the proposed project. It’s those interactions, the electrochemical blips coursing through networks of interconnected neurons, that the new Brain Activity Map project aims to capture.

The Connectome project focuses mostly on static images of the brain. Although it does include some measures of brain activity, the fMRI scans it will use provide a view that’s something like that of a city seen from an airplane window. What the scientists behind the proposed Brain Activity Map want instead are detailed street maps with real-time traffic info. Ideally, they want to record every blip of every neuron in a network of thousands, or even millions.

The scientists hope they’ll get as much as $3 billion over the next decade to build a new set of dream tools for studying how the human brain works when it’s healthy and what goes wrong in disorders like epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease. Here are three ideas they’ve discussed, all in various stages of development.

“Sure, they sound far-fetched,” Donoghue said. “But we’re on the cusp of being able to do them.”

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‘Different kind of stem cell’ possesses attributes favoring regenerative medicine

A research team at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center say the new and powerful cells they first created in the laboratory a year ago constitute a new stem-like state of adult epithelial cells. They say these cells have attributes that may make regenerative medicine truly possible.

In the November 19 online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they report that these new stem-like cells do not express the same genes as embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) do. That explains why they don’t produce tumors when they grow in the laboratory, as the other stem cells do, and why they are stable, producing the kind of cells researchers want them to.

“These seem to be exactly the kind of cells that we need to make regenerative medicine a reality,” says the study’s senior investigator, chairman of the department of pathology at Georgetown Lombardi, a part of Georgetown University Medical Center.

This study is a continuation of work that led to a breakthrough in December 2011 when Schlegel and his colleagues demonstrated that he and his team had designed a laboratory technique that keep both normal as well as cancer cells alive indefinitely — which previously had not been possible.

They had discovered that adding two different substances to these cells (a Rho kinase inhibitor and fibroblast feeder cells) pushes them to morph into stem-like cells that stay alive indefinitely. When the two substances are withdrawn from the cells, they revert back to the type of cell that they once were. They dubbed these cells conditionally reprogrammed cells (CRCs).

(via thescienceofreality)

sciencecenter:

Why some seconds seem to last forever

Though our perception of time can be stunningly precise — given a beat to keep, professional drummers are accurate within milliseconds — it can also be curiously plastic. Some moments seem to last longer than others, and scientists don’t know why.

Unlike our other senses, our perception of time has no defined location in our brain, making it difficult to understand and study. But now researchers have found hints that our sense of time stems from specialized units in our brain, channels of neurons tuned to signals of certain time lengths.

“We know keeping track of time is incredibly important, it allows us to coordinate movements, interpret body language,” said optometrist James Heron of the University of Bradford in the UK, lead author of the study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Aug. 10. “We know the brain does this routinely and accurately, but we’re not sure how. Our evidence strongly suggests the presence of neural units in the brain that are tuned to different durations.”

Data as Art: Textured Brain

The brain is a monotone mass of neurons that is often difficult to pick apart, even on a dissection table. Yet through a technique called diffusion MRI, which measures the spread of water molecules through neural tissue, researchers can add revealing color to the maze of connections.

Ultra-strong magnetic fields on the order of 7 teslas (about 1,400 times stronger than a refrigerator magnet) manipulate the water molecules along tracks of white matter neurons, breaking the movement into three basic directions.

Left–right tracks of neural tissue are represented by red, front–back tracks by green and top–bottom tracks by blue. Each track winds around in a specific way, lending it a unique color. Functional clusters of white matter emerge as colored regions. “It’s a smart way to transform something so complex into something simple and immediately comprehensible,” Margulies says of the diffusion MRI technique.

(via scinerds)

neuropsy:

New Chip Borrows Brain’s Computing Tricks!

IBM has unveiled an experimental chip that borrows tricks from brains to power a cognitive computer, a machine able to learn from and adapt to its environment.

Reactions to the computer giant’s press release about SyNAPSE, short for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronic, have ranged from conservative to zany. Some even claim it’s IBM attempt to recreate a cat brain from silicon.

“Each neuron in the brain is a processor and memory, and part of a social network, but that’s where the brain analogy ends. We’re not trying to simulate a brain,” said IBM spokesperson Kelly Sims. “We’re looking to the brain to develop a system that can learn and make sense of environments on the fly.”

(via best-likes)