New answer for stroke victims.
Hacking the body’s inflammatory immune response via the gut microbiome.
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Category: neuroscience
Now, we have to truly ask ourselves; when one looks at all of the complexities of the brain and how it interacts with the body such as pathways; and then you look at our existing digital infrastructure and technology how can anyone truly believe that they can mimic the human brain and all of its functions. Not on the existing digital platform, not happening. We need a way more advance platform and infrastructure.
Suppose it’s Thursday night and you’re in bed. Your roommate is talking to you about the football team’s chances for the fall, but just when they predict a Tiger playoff berth, you drift off to sleep.
Enzo Tagliazucchi, a physicist at the Institute for Medical Psychology in Kiel, Germany, might explain why you fell asleep during the conversation by suggesting that your neurons are too disconnected.
In the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Tagliazucchi and colleagues suggest that there is a specific balance between brain signaling pathways that causes consciousness to arise. The finding is based on six years of research on the neuronal pathways of the brain which prompt the sleep state.
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To solve some of the world’s toughest computing problems, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is getting a boost from the human brain.
The U.S. government lab will begin testing on Thursday a $1 million computer, the first of its kind, packed with 16 microprocessors that are designed to mimic the way the brain works.
The chip called TrueNorth, introduced by International Business Machines Corp. in 2014, is radically…
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Hmmm;
Researchers are testing mild electrical stimulation to improve brain function and mental health, but warn do-it-yourselfers to be wary of treating themselves with models available online.
Dr. Fidel Vila-Rodriguez, director of the Non-Invasive Neurostimulation Therapies (NINET) Lab at the University of B.C., is starting to lend devices for home use to people with Parkinson’s disease and depression that will deliver a weak electrical current through electrodes placed on their temples.
The machines in his experiments can’t be adjusted above two milliamps — similar to the power created by two AA batteries. In contrast, some unregulated brain stimulators sold online can deliver about 10 times that amount of current, something he calls “worrisome.” It is an amount of electricity still small enough that users might not notice an immediate effect — or danger.
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U.S. Navy Admiral Michael S. Rogers, who serves as Commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, Director of the National Security Agency, and Chief of the Central Security Service, secretly visited Israel last week, according to Israel-based Haaretz.
The visit’s purpose was to reinforce ties with Intelligence Corps Unit 8200 of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), particularly against cyber attacks by Iran and Hezbollah, according to Haaretz.
Israel has been the target of cyber attacks since the summer of 2014, but attacks have lately intensified. The U.S. too appears to have been victimized by Iran, with a federal court indicting a seven Iranians last week – said to be working for the Iranian government and the Revolutionary Guards – on charges of carrying out attacks against financial institutions and a dam in New York.
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Awesome!
Even the simplest networks of neurons in the brain are composed of millions of connections, and examining these vast networks is critical to understanding how the brain works. An international team of researchers, led by R. Clay Reid, Wei Chung Allen Lee and Vincent Bonin from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Harvard Medical School and Neuro-Electronics Research Flanders (NERF), respectively, has published the largest network to date of connections between neurons in the cortex, where high-level processing occurs, and have revealed several crucial elements of how networks in the brain are organized. The results are published in the journal Nature.
“This is a culmination of a research program that began almost ten years ago. Brain networks are too large and complex to understand piecemeal, so we used high-throughput techniques to collect huge data sets of brain activity and brain wiring,” says R. Clay Reid, M.D., Ph.D., Senior Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “But we are finding that the effort is absolutely worthwhile and that we are learning a tremendous amount about the structure of networks in the brain, and ultimately how the brain’s structure is linked to its function.”
“Although this study is a landmark moment in a substantial chapter of work, it is just the beginning,” says Wei-Chung Lee, Ph.D., Instructor in Neurobiology at Harvard Medicine School and lead author on the paper. “We now have the tools to embark on reverse engineering the brain by discovering relationships between circuit wiring and neuronal and network computations.”
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Washington D.C.: A new study has revealed that fruit flies, who have similar sleeping habits like humans, can tell a lot about the connection between sleep deprivation and metabolic disorders like diabetes, obesity, and blood glucose levels.
The study conducted by the Florida Atlantic University is the first to identify that a conserved gene called translin works as a modulator of sleep in response to metabolic changes.
The study establishes that translin is an essential integrator of sleep and metabolic state, with important implications for understanding the neural mechanism underlying sleep deprivation in response to environmental challenges.
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FRIDAY, March 25, 2016 — Brain stimulation may ease major symptoms of the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, a typically hard-to-treat condition, a new study suggests.
British researchers evaluated anorexia patients before and after they underwent repetitive transcranial stimulation (rTMS), a treatment approved for depression.
“With rTMS we targeted … an area of the brain thought to be involved in some of the self-regulation difficulties associated with anorexia,” study first author Jessica McClelland, a postdoctoral researcher at King’s College London, said in a school news release.
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