neurons

Brain scan might determine your age within a year

If you're prone to lying about your age, steer clear of structural magnetic resonance imaging. When used to scan your brain, no matter how good (or bad) you may look, a new imaging technique that uses MRI won't lie. In fact, it probably knows your age to the exact year.

"We have uncovered a 'developmental clock' of sorts within the brain -- a biological signature of maturation that captures age differences quite well, regardless of other kinds of differences that exist across individuals," Timothy Brown of the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine says in a news release.… Read more

Bots beat humans probing brain's neural activity

In what could be a major boon for the study of brain disorders such as schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, autism, and epilepsy, researchers at MIT and Georgia Tech say they've figured out how to automate finding and recording information from neurons in live brains.

The process, described this week in the journal Nature Methods, involves a robotic arm guided by a cell-detecting algorithm that can identify and record data from neurons faster and more accurately than we mortal humans.

"In all [the abovementioned disorders], a molecular description of a cell that is integrated with [its] electrical and circuit … Read more

Brain-machine interface helps move paralyzed hand

After "eavesdropping" on the electrical signals of monkeys' brains that tell their arms and hands how to move, researchers at Northwestern University are reporting this week in the journal Nature that they've devised new tech that could some day help paralyzed patients move their limbs in spite of their spinal cord injuries.

To analyze the monkeys' natural neuroelectrical activity, the researchers implanted tiny multi-electrode arrays that detected the activity of about 100 neurons in the brain to decipher the signals that generate hand movements.

They then recorded the electrical activity that occurred when the monkeys grasped, lifted, … Read more

Nifty stem-cell engineering sheds light on Parkinson's disease

Researchers at the University at Buffalo may have taken a significant step toward unraveling the way Parkinson's disease assails the human nervous system--thanks in part to a nifty bit of stem-cell engineering.

Scientists led by physiologist Jian Feng took skin cells from healthy control subjects and people with a particular type of Parkinson's disease and transformed them into a type of primordial cell--technically, an "induced pluripotent stem cell." Such iPS cells, as they're known, can be coaxed into developing as almost any type of cell in the body.

Here, they turned into brain cells. … Read more

Human brain has more switches than all computers on Earth

The human brain is truly awesome.

A typical, healthy one houses some 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Each synapse functions like a microprocessor, and tens of thousands of them can connect a single neuron to other nerve cells. In the cerebral cortex alone, there are roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies.

These synapses are, of course, so tiny (less than a thousandth of a millimeter in diameter) that humans haven't been able to see with great clarity what exactly they do and how, beyond knowing that their numbers vary over time. That is until now.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have spent the past few years engineering a new imaging model, which they call array tomography, in conjunction with novel computational software, to stitch together image slices into a three-dimensional image that can be rotated, penetrated and navigated. Their work appears in the journal Neuron this week.

To test their model, the team took tissue samples from a mouse whose brain had been bioengineered to make larger neurons in the cerebral cortex express a fluorescent protein (found in jellyfish), making them glow yellow-green. Because of this glow, the researchers were able to see synapses against the background of neurons.… Read more

Basic file eraser gets the job done

Send unwanted files to the point of no return with this simple privacy tool, but we weren't impressed with its hard-to-find configuration menu and lack of a Help file.

Accessing 4Neurons Eraser is simply a matter of right-clicking on a file or folder and selecting the Erase option from your context menu. As soon as we selected it, a window popped up to confirm our choice. One click and the file was completely removed. Accessing the configurations menu proved to be much more cumbersome, and we had to perform a search just to locate it. The program doesn't … Read more