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Archive for the ‘neuroscience’ category: Page 281

Jul 26, 2022

Brain.space remakes the EEG for our modern world (and soon, off-world)

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Figuring out what’s going on in the brain is generally considered to be somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible. One major challenge is that the best ways to do so are room-sized machines relegated to hospitals — but brain.space is hoping that its portable, powerful and, most importantly, user-friendly EEG helmet could power new applications and treatments at home and, as a sort of cork pop for its debut, in space.

Electroencephalography, or EEG, is an established method for monitoring certain signals the brain produces. An EEG can indicate which areas of the cortex are active, whether the user is concentrating, agitated, and so on. It’s not nearly as precise as an MRI, but all you need for an EEG is a set of electrical contacts on the scalp, while an MRI machine is huge, loud and incredibly expensive.

There’s been precious little advancement in EEG tech, though, and it’s often done more or less the same way it was done decades ago. Recently, that’s begun to change with devices like Cognixion’s, which uses re-engineered EEG to interpret specific signals with the goal of allowing people with motor impairments to communicate.

Jul 26, 2022

An animation showing the Dopaminergic system Transmission Across the Synapses!

Posted by in categories: innovation, neuroscience

Credit: Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute:

Dopaminergic Transmission.

Handbook of Basal Ganglia Structure and Function, Second Edition: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/dopaminergic-transmission.

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Jul 25, 2022

Three Ways Nanotechnology Is Changing The Healthcare Industry

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, nanotechnology, neuroscience

Antoine Galand, Director of Technology, GraphWear

Nanotechnology was once the stuff of science fiction, but today the concept of creating devices and machines that are several thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair is a well-established fact. The rise of nanotechnology has already transformed industries ranging from consumer electronics to textile manufacturing and cosmetics by unlocking new materials and processes at the nanoscale. The device you’re reading this on, for example, is only possible because of techniques adopted in the semiconductor industry that enable us to pattern silicon and metals to create the microscopic circuits and switches that are at the heart of modern computers.

One of the most promising applications of our newfound ability to manipulate individual atoms and molecules is in healthcare, where the ability of doctors to treat disease has been hamstrung by relatively blunt “macro” solutions. The human body is a remarkably complex system where, fundamentally, nanoscale processes occurring inside cells are what determine whether we are sick or healthy. If we’re ever going to cure diseases like diabetes, cancer or Alzheimer’s, we need technologies that work at their scale. Although medical nanotechnologies are relatively new, they’re already impacting the way we diagnose, treat and prevent a broad range of diseases.

Jul 24, 2022

Untreated Vision Problems Can Increase Your Risk of Dementia

Posted by in category: neuroscience

According to recent research, dementia risk in older persons may be increased by vision issues. According to a recent systematic review and meta-analysis of 16 studies comprising 76,373 individuals, older adults with untreated eyesight problems may have a higher chance of developing dementia. Th.

Jul 24, 2022

Community Newsletter: An ‘unexpected autistic,’ presynaptic optogenetics, neuroanatomy art

Posted by in categories: genetics, neuroscience

Heating up Twitter feeds this week was a new commentary about a rarely discussed perspective on autism, talk about the use of optogenetics tools to manipulate ‘presynapses,’ a possible explanation for decision-making differences between the sexes, and a striking illustration of the human brain.

Jul 24, 2022

Novel sensor allows the detection of Alzheimer’s 17 years in advance

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Jul 24, 2022

How Neurons Build and Maintain Their Capacity to Communicate

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Summary: Researchers reveal how neurons set up and sustain the vital infrastructure that allows for seamless neurotransmission.

Source: picower institute for learning and memory.

The nervous system works because neurons communicate across connections called synapses. They “talk” when calcium ions flow through channels into “active zones” that are loaded with vesicles carrying molecular messages.

Jul 23, 2022

Potential fabrication in research images threatens key theory of Alzheimer’s disease

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Neuroscientist and physician Matthew Schrag found suspect images in dozens of papers involving Alzheimer’s disease, including Western blots (projected in green) measuring a protein linked to cognitive decline in rats.

The Neuro-Network.

𝐁𝐋𝐎𝐓𝐒 𝐎𝐍 𝐀 𝐅𝐈𝐄𝐋𝐃?

Continue reading “Potential fabrication in research images threatens key theory of Alzheimer’s disease” »

Jul 23, 2022

An investigation across 45 languages and 12 language families reveals a universal language network

Posted by in categories: biological, evolution, neuroscience

To understand the architecture of human language, it is critical to examine diverse languages; however, most cognitive neuroscience research has focused on only a handful of primarily Indo-European languages. Here we report an investigation of the fronto-temporo-parietal language network across 45 languages and establish the robustness to cross-linguistic variation of its topography and key functional properties, including left-lateralization, strong functional integration among its brain regions and functional selectivity for language processing. fMRI reveals similar topography, selectivity and inter-connectedness of language brain areas across 45 languages. These properties may allow the language system to handle the shared features of languages, shaped by biological and cultural evolution.

Jul 23, 2022

‘Universal language network’ identified in the brain

Posted by in category: neuroscience

This network had mostly been studied in English speakers.


Japanese, Italian, Ukrainian, Swahili, Tagalog and dozens of other spoken languages cause the same “universal language network” to light up in the brains of native speakers. This hub of language processing has been studied extensively in English speakers, but now neuroscientists have confirmed that the exact same network is activated in speakers of 45 different languages representing 12 distinct language families.

“This study is very foundational, extending some findings from English to a broad range of languages,” senior author Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of neuroscience at MIT and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, said in a statement (opens in new tab).