RDF: Bionic eye goes live in world first by Australian researchers. 2012/12/the-top-5-neuroscience-breakthroughs-of-2012/ More than any year before, 2012 was the year neuroscience exploded into pop culture.
From mind-controlled robot hands to cyborg animals to TV specials to triumphant books, brain breakthroughs were tearing up the airwaves and the internets. From all the thrilling neurological adventures we covered over the past year, we’ve collected five stories we want to make absolutely sure you didn’t miss. Now, no matter how scientific our topic is, any Top 5 list is going to turn out somewhat subjective. For one thing, we certainly didn’t cover every neuroscience paper published in 2012 – we like to pick and choose the stories that seem most interesting to us, and leave the whole “100 percent daily coverage” free-for-all to excellent sites like ScienceDaily. As you may’ve also noticed, we tend to steer clear of headlines like “Brain Region Responsible for [X] Discovered!”
Brain May ‘See’ More Than the Eyes, Study Indicates. Vision may be less important to “seeing” than is the brain’s ability to process points of light into complex images, according to a new study of the fruit fly visual system currently published in the online journal Nature Communications.
University of Virginia researchers have found that the very simple eyes of fruit fly larvae, with only 24 total photoreceptors (the human eye contains more than 125 million), provide just enough light or visual input to allow the animal’s relatively large brain to assemble that input into images. Pancreatic cancer genomes reveal aberrations in axon guidance pathway genes : Nature. The research network comprising the Australian Pancreatic Cancer Genome Initiative, the Baylor College of Medicine Cancer Genome Project and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research Pancreatic Cancer Genome Study (ABO collaboration) contributed collectively to this study as part of the International Cancer Genome Consortium.
Biospecimens were collected at affiliated hospitals and processed at each biospecimen core resource centre. Data generation and analyses were performed by the genome sequencing centres, cancer genome characterization centres and genome data analysis centres. Investigator contributions are as follows: S.M.G., A.V.B., J.V.P., R.L.S., R.A.G., D.A.W., M. -C.G., J.D.M., L.D.S and T.J.H. Press release No 20. Making Choices: How Your Brain Decides. Every day, we face thousands of decisions both major and minor — from whether to eat that decadent chocolate cupcake to when to pursue a new romantic relationship or to change careers.
How does the brain decide? A new study suggests that it relies on two separate networks to do so: one that determines the overall value — the risk versus reward — of individual choices and another that guides how you ultimately behave. “Cognitive control and value-based decision-making tasks appear to depend on different brain regions within the prefrontal cortex,” says Jan Glascher, lead author of the study and a visiting associate at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, referring to the seat of higher-level reasoning in the brain. Cognitive control is what keeps this network in check. Consciousness science and ethics: Abortion, animal rights, and vegetative-state debates.
The Neuroscience of Creativity and Insight. The Internet has a terrible habit of misquoting Einstein on energy and creativity until he sounds like he’s the author of , not the theory of relativity.
Here’s something he actually did say . Describing the effect of music on his inner life, he told a friend: “When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come close to the conclusion that the gift of imagination has meant more to me than any talent for absorbing absolute knowledge.” At times, he explained, “I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason.” Mathematics or memory? Study charts collision course in brain. A new type of nerve cell found in the brain. Public release date: 21-Dec-2012 [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ] Contact: Press Officepressinfo@ki.se 46-852-486-077Karolinska Institutet Scientists at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, in collaboration with colleagues in Germany and the Netherlands, have identified a previously unknown group of nerve cells in the brain.
The nerve cells regulate cardiovascular functions such as heart rhythm and blood pressure. It is hoped that the discovery, which is published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, will be significant in the long term in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases in humans. The scientists have managed to identify in mice a previously totally unknown group of nerve cells in the brain. It is well-known that patients with untreated hyperthyroidism (too high a production of thyroid hormone) or hypothyroidism (too low a production of thyroid hormone) often develop heart problems. Neural Crest. The Neuroscience of Barbie. In science fiction and fantasy tales, there is a long running fascination with the idea of dramatically diminishing or growing in stature.
In the 1989 classic, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Rick Moranis invents a device which accidentally shrinks both his own and the neighbor’s children down to a quarter-of-an-inch tall. Preceding this by more than 100 years, Lewis Carroll wrote about a little girl who, after tumbling down a rabbit hole, nibbles on some cake and then grows to massive proportions. Where thinking about thinking happens in the brain. We evaluate and alter the cognitive functions we perform, as when we revise or edit our writing or speaking. This monitoring and controlling is usually referred to as metacognition.
Middlebrooks and Sommer have recently done an elegant study of metacognition in Macaque monkeys, using a simple betting paradigm: Nervous System: Facts, Function & Diseases. Biology and ideology: The anatomy of politics. A popular political advertisement from early this summer begins with US President Barack Obama addressing a crowd of moon-eyed supporters.
The Neuroscience of Barbie.