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Tag Archives: neuroscience
Glia brain cells: Not just infrastructure
So many stories about this recent neuroscience research begin with – “human brain cells make mice smarter” – and miss the point of the research almost entirely. It’s not about mice. It’s about a type of human brain cells, glia, which are just now coming into focus for neuroscience. For those that understand the prolog, [...]
Posted in Impact: Neuroscience Also tagged astrocytes, brain cells, glia, Goldman, intelligence, mice, mouse model, Nedergaard, neurons, smarter mice, synapses, white matter Comments closed
Rethink the brain: More evidence for the tripartite synapse
The star (fish) shaped astrocyte cell….Credit: Neurorocker If you’ve had any exposure to how the brain and nervous system works, you probably know about synapses – the juncture where the end of one neuron almost meets the beginning of another neuron. The synapse is two neurons and the gap between them, the point where either [...]
Posted in Impact: Neuroscience Also tagged astrocytes, glia, Nedergaard, neurons, neurotransmission, signaling, synapses, tripartite synapse Leave a comment
Epigenetics in the brain: Evidence of methylation beyond cell division
Methylation is not a gasoline additive process or nor does it have anything to do with amphetamines. I mention this because methylation is proving to be significant. It is something that happens to your DNA and despite not being very well known by the public, research is showing it to be far more important than [...]
Posted in Impact: Epigenetics Also tagged DNA, epigenetic regulation, epigenetics, methylation, neuron, Song Leave a comment
Sci-Fi Movie Review: Inception
[Inception. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Released July 16, 2010. DVD/Blu-Ray released. As usual, the review contains many spoilers.] I’m going to try something unusually, um, structural for this review. It’s in keeping with a structural notion of dream levels used in Inception and it may help shed some light on the divide that separates the [...]
Posted in Review Also tagged diCaprio, dream, Inception, movie review, Nolan, science fantasy, science fiction Leave a comment
A keystone discovery: Proteins and synaptic vesicles
It happens quite a lot in neuroscience that something can be described without really knowing why it’s doing something. Bear with me a bit, as what I’m about to describe is probably unfamiliar to most people and also very much concerns the nitty-gritty of how the cells (neurons) of the brain and nervous system work. [...]
Neuroscience: Memory tied to a specific protein complex
At times it must seem to neuroscientists that the enigma of memory reveals its secrets to them as if they were the proverbial blind men describing an elephant. “Ah yes, it has a hose, a very thick hose, so thick it’s almost like a tree trunk!” If only it were as easy to get the [...]
Connecting to neurons with semiconductor nanotubes
“Patching into the brain” is a staple of science fiction and you hear about it fairly often in neuroscience; connecting ‘wires’ into the brain somehow seems routine. It’s not. Scientists and sometimes doctors do lots of things with reading or probing the brain with external (on the skin) sensors. They also occasionally do neural implants [...]
Posted in News: Neuroscience Also tagged brain implant, Justin Williams, nanotechnology, nanotubes, neuron connection, prosthetic connection Leave a comment
The visual cortex can learn to do speech and language
It’s been known for well over a century that different parts of the brain handle different tasks. This was certainly true for the autonomous functions, such as breathing and hormone activity, but it was also apparently true for higher level functions such as speech and language. Two regions of the brain, Broca’s area and Wernicke’s [...]
Posted in News: Neuroscience Also tagged Bedny, brain, brain regions, Broca, fMRI, language processing, MIT, senses, visual cortex, Wernicke Leave a comment
Ephaptic coupling: Could be how brains coordinate
I love it when scientists say things like this: “I firmly believe that understanding the origin and functionality of endogenous brain fields will lead to several revelations regarding information processing at the circuit level, which, in my opinion, is the level at which percepts and concepts arise,” Anastassiou says. “This, in turn, will lead us [...]
Posted in Impact: Neuroscience Also tagged biophysics, brain, consciousness, electric field, endogenous, ephaptic coupling, neuron, spike field, synapse, thought 3 Comments
NEWS: Short List
Cosmology – Hubble does it again: Another oldest galaxy | Is there no end to the universe? Trick question, of course, but the succession of ever older galaxies discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope is provocative. In the newest instance, the galaxy discovered is 13.2 billion light years away, which is the same as saying [...]
Posted in News: Also tagged clean transport, cosmology, nanomedicine, sythetic biology Leave a comment
Putting the impact of dementia in perspective
What constitutes a major disease? Percentage of population affected, certainly. Global prevalence, yes. Severity of effects, yes. Difficulty of treatment, perhaps. I wrestled with this question in thinking about creating a category of medical research that will have great impact on human life, an Impact Area. There are so many diseases. Unless you’re a medical [...]
Posted in Impact: Major Disease Cures Also tagged aging, Alzheimer, dementia, major disease, molecular biology, neurology, senescence, senility Leave a comment
Neuroscience: The brain’s got rhythm
Much of neuroscience, the study of the brain, is in the business of deconstruction – of reducing the brain into ever smaller parts: Regions, neurons, neural chemistry, molecular biology. This is vital research and a typical main path for many sciences. However, it’s not the only path. Another one leads in the other direction – [...]
Posted in News: Neuroscience Also tagged brain, cell assemblies, coordination, cortical rhythms, neural integration, oscillatory phase coupling 1 Comment
DHA: The alpha of omega-3
While it’s quite likely few have heard of docosahexaenoic acid (much less pronounce it), the term “Omega-3” has been splattered over the health and wellness headlines for years. I bring it up because of a May meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine (UK) that discussed the wonders of docosahexaenoic acid, fortunately abbreviated to DHA. [...]
Posted in Impact: Neuroscience Also tagged brain development, DHA, docosahexzaenoic acid, fatty acid, nutrition, omega-3 Leave a comment
Enhancer RNA (eRNA): More powerful than previously thought
As should be said repeatedly, we don’t know how the brain works. Not yet. Neuroscience is just starting on the vastly complex study of the brain at the molecular level, perhaps the lowest common denominator and the most important. A new study, published April 15 in Nature, by a team of researchers from Harvard Medical [...]
Posted in News: Neuroscience Also tagged ChIP-seq, DNA, epigenetics, eRNA, junk DNA, neurons, RNA, RNA-seq Leave a comment
Cracking the neural code: Not yet, but models help
What neuroscience researchers really, really want is to figure out the neural (brain) code. What are all those neurons saying to each other? That’s an analogy, of course. There are many analogies that can be used to describe the brain. For the moment, let’s use a big tangled ball of thread. The neurons, brain cells, [...]
Posted in News: Neuroscience Also tagged cerebral cortex, computer model, neural code, neuron, spikes, spiny stellate cells, synapses, thalamus Leave a comment
New link between proteins and memory
Just as geneticists are finding that proteins play a complex and often crucial role in the expression of genes, the link between memory and proteins presents much new territory for neuroscience. That makes it exciting, for those in the field; and tantalizingly inconclusive. Work being done by Dr. Nahum Sonenberg at McGill University (Canada) has [...]
Posted in News: Neuroscience Also tagged 4E-BP2, deamidation, memory, proteins, proteomics Leave a comment
A guide to science as presented by the Media
Are you one of those people who like stories about science? Do you watch the news about volcanoes in Iceland and goggle at the Rings of Saturn? Then you’re one of the consumers of science as presented by the Media – and this is a guide for you. The Media has an awesome task. The [...]
Posted in Spun Also tagged Creationism, junk science, Media, science, science narrative, weird science Leave a comment
Neural stem cells: Going back to a brain with more plasticity
Of mice and men: If it works in mice it (might) work in people. So the thinking goes when scientists do brain research with mice. Only, as a rule, the scientists would say it’s possible that something they observe in mice might also be observed in human beings (they usually hope so), but there is [...]
Posted in News: Stem Cells Also tagged MGE, neural stem cells, neuron, ocular dominance plasticity, plasticity, stem cells, visual cortex 1 Comment
Psychopaths love them some dopamine
Some science stories are echoed all over the media and quickly. Here are a couple of common headings for a recent story: “Psychopaths’ Brains Wired to Seek Rewards, No Matter What the Cost” and “Psychopaths Produce Excessive Dopamine.” The original story is in Nature Neuroscience under the website title Psychopathic traits correlate with hyperreactive dopamine [...]
Posted in Impact: Neuroscience Also tagged amphetamine, dopamine, fMRI, PET, psychopath, psychopathic traits 1 Comment
Reading the brain for motor control – without implants
It’s been decades since neuroscience began the search for ways ‘read the brain’ so that people can move, communicate, and respond when their physical body can no longer do so. Just about every year there are advances, and announcements, of this and that device, which can interpret the brain’s neuron electrical pulses to perform something [...]
Posted in Impact: Neuroscience Also tagged 3-D movement, brain sensors, cerebral control, EEG, motor control Leave a comment
Brain memory is actively cleared
We forget, a lot. It’s always been assumed that we forget either because new information is coming in and ‘overwrites’ (replaces) older memories, or because memory just sort of degrades. There’s some kind of selection at work, of course, because some things we forget more readily than others. A new study by a team from [...]
Posted in News: Neuroscience Also tagged brain, memory, molecular biology, neurons, protein, Rac Leave a comment
New links in neuron impulse generation
Neurons in the brain have complicated electrical systems. In fact, a study by the University of Calgary Hotchkiss Brain Institute, Faculty of Medicine (Canada) has cleared up an important misconception about the way neurons generate signals. Ion channels are used by cells to manage the (minute) difference in electrical charge between the inside and the [...]
Posted in News: Neuroscience Also tagged A-type, cerebellum, electrochemical gradient, ion channels, neuron, synapse, T-type Leave a comment
It’s not a ‘stream’ of consciousness…
In song and story the mind works as a stream of consciousness. Maybe not. Maybe it’s like a film, 24 frames per second but we perceive it as a continuous stream? Maybe it’s something else…like waves perhaps? Or, according to a recently published study from the University of Illinois (USA), at least the visual function [...]
Posted in News: Neuroscience Also tagged cognition, entrainment, perception, stream of consciousness Leave a comment
Prions bad. Prion shaping good – for memory
Understanding how memory in the brain works remains one of the most difficult and insight-resistant issues in neuroscience. Also, like most things about the brain (human brains, any brains), the more we look, the more complex it becomes. The research by a team from Kansas and New York (USA) on prion-like proteins is a good [...]
Getting your head around huge brain projects