Science
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
Location of the mind remains a mystery - life - 22 August 2012
Where does the mind reside? It's a question that's occupied the best brains for thousands of years. Now, a patient who is self-aware – despite lacking three regions of the brain thought to be essential for self-awareness – demonstrates that the mind remains as elusive as ever. The finding suggests that mental functions might not be tied to fixed brain regions. Instead, the mind might be more like a virtual machine running on distributed computers, with brain resources allocated in a flexible manner, says David Rudrauf at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who led the study of the patient. Recent advances in functional neuroimaging – a technique that measures brain activity in the hope of finding correlations between mental functions and specific regions of the brain – have led to a wealth of studies that map particular functions onto regions.
When you have no clue, call it glue. “Glia,” the Greek word for glue, was the name the pathologist Rudolph Virchow gave, back in 1856, to the gelatinous substance that forms the bulk of the brain.
The brain’s silent majority - 2009 FALL
We knew anatomy could be gorgeous , but this is beyond anything else we’ve ever seen, and it’s guaranteed to be something you haven’t seen, being the first 3D image of a brain’s connections . Van Wedeen, a Harvard radiology professor, is awestruck: “We’ve never really seen the brain – it’s been hiding in plain sight.” Conventional scanning has offered us a crude glimpse, but scientists such as Wedeen aim to produce the first ever three-dimensional map of all its neurons.
First 3D Map of the Brain’s Connections
Color Your Judgment Articles: Research reveals that information from different senses interacts in the brain http://www.sfn.org/index.cfm?
Mind: The Science, Art, and Experience of our Inner Lives
Incredible close-up shot of living human brain wins microscope photography competition | Mail Online
By Eddie Wrenn PUBLISHED: 11:02 GMT, 26 June 2012 | UPDATED: 11:17 GMT, 26 June 2012 A unique close-up image of a living human brain has won the Wellcome Prize for microscope photography after it was taken during a surgical procedure to treat a patient with epilepsy. Taken by Robert Ludlow of UCL's Institute of Neurology, the image is a rare shot of a living brain - a view normally only seen by neurosurgeons, showing veins, arteries and grey matter flushed pink with blood.MIT and Harvard researchers have developed technologies that could be used to rewrite the genetic code of a living cell, allowing them to make large-scale edits to the cell’s genome.
Scientists unveil tools for rewriting the code of life
It is funny how researching lists can send you off in other directions. Here is a classic example. I started researching this list and when I looked up information about the upcoming Venus transit, I realized there was enough great information to do an entire list just on that topic. To see that list go here .
10 Upcoming Astronomical Events Worth Seeing
Aurora / Meteor Shower Images
Aurora / Meteor Shower Images Update: We have now come out of one of the lowest Solar Minimums on record. The cycle for lows and highs of solar activity occur roughly every 11 years.The world's smallest bit
Atomic-scale magnetic memory - United States
Out of an estimated 1,500 active volcanoes around the world, 50 or so erupt every year, spewing steam, ash, toxic gases, and lava. In 2011, active volcanoes included Chile's Puyehue, Japan's Shinmoedake, Indonesia's Lokon, Iceland's Grímsvötn, Italy's Etna, and recently Nyamulagira in the Democratic Republic of Congo.