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.
New possibilities for treating cancer and other ills.
We need worms
You might think they are disgusting. But our war against intestinal worms has damaged our immune systems and mental health.
William Parker
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.
Data from Mental Work project, conducted as an experimental artwork at EPFL’s Artlab, indicates that BMI is robust and accessible to the general public, spurring new research collaborations in Switzerland on user experience.
Brain-machine interfaces are rarely found outside of medical clinics, where the disabled receive hours or days of training in order to operate wheelchairs with their minds. Now the largest-ever BMI experiment Mental Work, conducted as an experimental artwork at EPFL’s Artlab, has provided preliminary evidence that training time can be shortened, the use of dry electrodes are a robust solution for public BMI and that user performance tends to improve within a relatively short period of time. The still-to-be-published results suggest that BMI may soon reach a much larger and more diverse population. A new collaboration between the Foundation Campus Biotech Geneva, the EPFL and the HEIG-VD in Yverdon will build on the promising results will build on the promising results of Mental Work to further develop user-friendly and publicly accessible interfaces to interact with the physical and digital world using only one’s mind.
“This is the first demonstration that installation art can be used as an experimental platform for breakthrough science,” says Jonathon Keats, the artist and experimental philosopher who conceptualized Mental Work.
There’s a very un-sexy view of consciousness: our rich, meaningful inner experience of self and other is nothing but electrical and chemical chattering inside our brains.
If you, like many scientists, subscribe to this theory, then a difficult question naturally follows: at what point does electro-chemical activity in dissected brain-like tissue become conscious? Yes, I’m talking about the classic sci-fi “brain in a vat” scenario; no, we are absolutely not there.
But this week, a Japan-led study in Stem Cell Reports is raising some serious red flags. For the first time, a team carefully characterized the electrical chattering of neurons grown from a brain organoid and found that they spontaneously formed long-distance connections that allowed them to fire in synchrony. “Fire together; wire together” is a fundamental testament of learning in neuroscience. Because neurons in lab-grown minibrains can sync up their activity, analogous to how neurons hook up in our brains, it’s possible that the brain nuggets have the capability to support higher cognitive functions when they’re more mature.
