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A new robotic headgear allows mice to move freely while being attached to heavy and cumbersome brain-recording machinery, allowing scientists to track their brain activity in motion, according to a new report by Spectrum published on Thursday. The development could have major implications in neuropathy and other sciences of the brain.

Under normal circumstances, researchers analyze brain activity in an awake mouse by fixing the animal’s head in a stiff unmovable position beneath a microscope. This however severely limits the mouse’s range of motion and therefore does not produce accurate results.

As Ted Abel, chair of neuroscience and pharmacology at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who was not involved in the study, explained to Spectrum, this approach is not conducive to usable outcomes.

Still a big maybe but it gives them other ideas/possibilities. Hopefully they succeed soon! My mother has glaucoma. It’ll probably be decades before this cure happens though. Unless it can be accelerated which is predicted by Ray Kurzweil in his book The Singularity is Near. I think other futurists have said similar things though I’m not familiar with all of them, I saw a talk by one for NASA.

In efforts to tackle the leading cause of blindness in developed countries, researchers have recruited nanotechnology to help regrow retinal cells.

Macular degeneration is a form of central vision loss, which has massive social, mobility, and mental consequences. It impacts hundreds of millions of people globally and is increasing in prevalence.

Continue reading “Scientists Regrow Retinal Cells in The Lab Using Nanotechnology” »

Dopamine is a type of neurotransmitter that can provide an intense feeling of reward. It has been a long-standing assumption that most, if not all, dopamine neurons solely respond to rewards or reward-predicting cues. However, a study in mice led by researchers at Northwestern University reveals dopamine may also control movements. The researchers uncovered that one genetic subtype fires when the body moves and that these neurons do not respond to rewards at all.

The findings are published in Nature Neuroscience in an article titled, “Unique functional responses differentially map onto genetic subtypes of dopamine neurons,” and shed new light on the brain which may lead to new research on Parkinson’s disease, which is characterized by the loss of dopamine neurons yet affects the motor system.

“Dopamine neurons are characterized by their response to unexpected rewards, but they also fire during movement and aversive stimuli,” the researchers wrote. “Dopamine neuron diversity has been observed based on molecular expression profiles; however, whether different functions map onto such genetic subtypes remains unclear. In this study, we established that three genetic dopamine subtypes within the substantia nigra pars compacta, characterized by the expression of Slc17a6 (Vglut2), Calb1, and Anxa1, each have a unique set of responses to rewards, aversive stimuli, and accelerations and decelerations, and these signaling patterns are highly correlated between somas and axons within subtypes.”

The device was equipped with infrared technology.

A police drone equipped with infrared capabilities has risen as a hero in the search for a missing person with dementia that disappeared from a Delta hospital on July 29. Delta is a city located in British Columbia, Canada.

This is according to a report by Global News published on Wednesday.

Continue reading “Police use drone to find missing person with dementia” »

Johns Hopkins University (JHU) researchers have developed an experimental brain cancer treatment that not only cured 100% of mice that received it, but also trained their immune systems to fight future cancers.

The challenge: Glioblastoma is a rare but aggressive type of brain cancer — only 5% of patients live for more than five years after they’re diagnosed, and the average survival time is just 12–18 months. It is considered the deadliest kind of cancer.

Continue reading “New gel destroys brain cancer in 100% of treated mice” »

The cognition needed to support cooperation in its multifaceted forms varies in different scenarios. In this Review, Melis and Raihani argue that whether individuals must recognize interaction partners and whether cooperative interactions need investment repayment can differentiate the cognitive demand posed.

Sound waves combined with tiny bubbles in the bloodstream can push drugs into the brain and tough-to-reach tumors.

Yang and co-workers state that “using inducible changes to the epigenome, we find that the act of faithful DNA repair advances aging at physiological, cognitive, and molecular levels, including erosion of the epigenetic landscape, cellular exdifferentiation, senescence, and advancement of the DNA methylation clock, which can be reversed by OSK-mediated rejuvenation. These data are consistent with the information theory of aging, which states that a loss of epigenetic information is a reversible cause of aging.” There is extensive evidence that the key reagent, restriction endonuclease I-PpoI, is cytotoxic. Moreover, the corresponding author published two papers—neither cited—showing that I-PpoI targeted to specific cell types causes a p53 response and cell elimination within a month. Despite globally inducing I-PpoI activation for seven times as long as required to induce a progeric effect, no analysis of mice during this critical window was presented. No significant conclusion of Yang was demonstrated.

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Earl.