Neuroscience. Bacteria 'linked' to Parkinson's disease. 23 May 2011Last updated at 00:03 Could this bacterium cause Parkinson's disease? The bacteria responsible for stomach ulcers have been linked to Parkinson's disease, according to researchers in the US. Mice infected with Helicobacter pylori went onto develop Parkinson's like symptoms. The study, presented at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, argues that infection could play "a significant role". The charity Parkinson's UK said the results should be treated with caution. Parkinson's disease affects the brain and results in slow movements and a tremor. Middle-aged mice, the equivalent of being between 55 and 65 in humans, were infected. These changes were not noticed in younger mice.
Toxic Dr Traci Testerman, from the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, said: "Our findings suggest that H. pylori infection could play a significant role in the development of Parkinson's disease in humans. "However, the results should be treated with caution.
Battle of the Brains. Can you think of 100 different uses for a sock? How would you cope with glasses that turn everything upside down? What's your emotional intelligence? Can you create a work of art in 10 minutes? Horizon takes seven people who are some of the highest flayers in their field: a musical prodigy, a quantum physicist, an artist, a dramatist, an RAF fighter pilot, a chess grandmaster and a Wall Street trader, and puts them through a battery of tests to measure their intelligence.
Who is the most intelligent? The principle way that we measure intelligence, the IQ test, is based on research done before even Einstein was in his prime. Because these tests label us with a single number they are still a popular and convenient way to divide people into clever clogs and dunces. Horizon looks for evidence of intelligence in the brain, in our genes and in our upbringing and tests some of the latest theories using them to see which of the seven has the highest intelligence.
BrainSCANr. Cerebellum Grey Matter Volume Used to Predict General Intelligence. Researchers believe they found a link between the volume of one’s cerebellum and general intelligence. Neuroimaging was used on 228 older adults that lived independently in the Aberdeen area of Scotland. These subjects were born in 1936 and tested at school in 1947 using the Moray House intelligence test. The 228 adults were tested again when they were 63-65 years old and had the voxel-based morphometry neuroimaging technique applied.
The volumes of grey and white matter in frontal brain areas and the cerebellum were compared using the neuroimaging results. The press release covering the findings claims researchers found that the volume of grey matter in the cerebellum could be used to predict intelligence. Experiments such as this have large amounts of variables which should be accounted for before extremely useful data can be applied to the general population. Further details are provided in the original press release below. Notes about this neuroscience press release.
Entrainment. Vision. Neurology and Psychiatry. Deciphering hidden pattern reveals brain activity. The algorithm to find an efficient route through a complicated, connected network can be used to decode patterns in the brain (credit: Rachel Ewing) Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have shown that the mathematics used to find an efficient route through a complicated, connected network can be used to decode how the brain represents information, says Geoffrey K.
Aguirre, MD, Assistant Professor of Neurology. The researchers developed an algorithm using a de Bruijn sequence, a set of things — letters, pictures, or sounds, for example — in a cyclic order such that every possible “word” or combination of things occurs only once. Aguirre and colleagues presented a series of faces in different combinations and orders to subjects, as dictated by the de Bruijn sequence, to measure the brain response to each face individually. The next step is to apply the new algorithm to actual fMRI studies of visual perception and representation in the brain, says Aguirre.
Frequently Asked Questions - Synaesthesia Research Team (SRT) Backyard Brains. Technology Review: Brain Coprocessors. Ed Boyden, an Assistant Professor, Biological Engineering, and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, will give a presentation on using light to study and treat brain disorders at 3.30pm on Wednesday at EmTech 2010. Watch a live feed of the session here. The last few decades have seen a surge of invention of technologies that enable the observation or perturbation of information in the brain. Functional MRI, which measures blood flow changes associated with brain activity, is being explored for purposes as diverse as lie detection, prediction of human decision making, and assessment of language recovery after stroke.
Implanted electrical stimulators, which enable control of neural circuit activity, are borne by hundreds of thousands of people to treat conditions such as deafness, Parkinson’s disease, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The NeuroNetwork. Allen Human Brain Atlas - Brain Explorer :: Allen Human Brain Atlas.
Windows Minimum Configuration Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7CPU: Intel Core Duo or AMD 1.8GHzSystem Memory: 1GBGraphics Card: Hardware 3D OpenGL accelerated AGP or PCI Express with 64MB RAMScreen: 1024x768, 32-bit true colorHard Disk: 200MB free space Note: The Brain Explorer 2 software is known to work with the following video chipsets: nVidia GeForce 9400/9600, nVidia Quadro FX 1800/3800/5600, AMD Radeon 9600, AMD Radeon HD 3200/4550, Intel Q35/Q45 Express Important: Please install the latest drivers for your video card for best compatibility and performance.
A wheel of time: the circadian clock, nuclear receptors, and physiology. Xiaoyong Yang1 + Author Affiliations Abstract It is a long-standing view that the circadian clock functions to proactively align internal physiology with the 24-h rotation of the earth. Recent studies, including one by Schmutz and colleagues (pp. 345–357) in the February 15, 2010, issue of Genes & Development, delineate strikingly complex connections between molecular clocks and nuclear receptor signaling pathways, implying the existence of a large-scale circadian regulatory network coordinating a diverse array of physiological processes to maintain dynamic homeostasis.
Keywords: Light from the sun sustains life on earth. Circadian rhythms are controlled by evolutionarily conserved internal clocks residing in most tissues of the body. The rhythmic production and circulation of many hormones and metabolites within the endocrine system is instrumental in regulating regular physiological processes such as reproduction, blood pressure, and metabolism. The clock entrainment by nuclear receptors. Computer-Assisted 3D Kinematic Analysis of All Leg Joints in Walking Insects. High-speed video can provide fine-scaled analysis of animal behavior. However, extracting behavioral data from video sequences is a time-consuming, tedious, subjective task. These issues are exacerbated where accurate behavioral descriptions require analysis of multiple points in three dimensions.
We describe a new computer program written to assist a user in simultaneously extracting three-dimensional kinematics of multiple points on each of an insect's six legs. Digital video of a walking cockroach was collected in grayscale at 500 fps from two synchronized, calibrated cameras. We improved the legs' visibility by painting white dots on the joints, similar to techniques used for digitizing human motion. Compared to manual digitization of 26 points on the legs over a single, 8-second bout of walking (or 106,496 individual 3D points), our software achieved approximately 90% of the accuracy with 10% of the labor. Figures Editor: Björn Brembs, Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany Introduction.
Equal numbers of neuronal and nonneuronal cells ma... [J Comp Neurol. 2009] - PubMed result. BCI. EEG. Connectome. Book Review: The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human. My mind on books : books on the mind, consciousness, cognitive science… Brian.