Amazing Science

Peripheral nerves provide the sense of touch and drive the muscles that move arms and legs, hands and feet. Unlike nerves of the central nervous system, peripheral nerves can regenerate after they are cut or crushed. But the mechanisms behind the regeneration are not well understood.

In the new study, the scientists show that a protein called dual leucine zipper kinase (DLK) regulates signals that tell the nerve cell it has been injured – often communicating over distances of several feet. The protein governs whether the neuron turns on its regeneration program. DLK is a key molecule linking an injury to the nerve’s response to that injury, allowing the nerve to regenerate efficiently.

Do you look happy? You’ll see ads for vacation packages and consumer electronics, but not weight-loss programs or self-help products. Do you look sad? You won’t see that over-the-top animated ad for children’s birthday parties at the local bowling alley. Feeling frustrated? It’s PC support ads for you.

Those are actual examples from the patent application, which incorporates some of the same ideas as the earlier filing for deducing the user’s mood — including scanning messages and social media postings. Also included: audio and video capture devices (to detect facial expressions and tone of voice) in addition to the company’s Kinect sensor, which would be used to analyze body movements as another input for the emotion-detecting algorithm.

The anterior insular cortex is a small brain region that plays a crucial role in human self-awareness and in related neuropsychiatric disorders. A unique cell type – the von Economo neuron (VEN) – is located there. For a long time, the VEN was assumed to be unique to humans, great apes, whales and elephants. Henry Evrard, neuroanatomist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, now discovered that the VEN occurs also in the insula of macaque monkeys. The morphology, size and distribution of the monkey VEN suggest that it is at least a primal anatomical homolog of the human VEN. This finding offers new and much-needed opportunities to examine in detail the connections and functions of a cell and brain region that could have a key role in human self-awareness and in mental disorders including autism and specific forms of dementia.

Giving sight to the blind has always been a dream of science — until now. The Monash Vision Group at Australia’s Monash University is developing a direct-to-brain bionic eye system that allows blind people to see.

A patient wears a pair of glasses equipped with a digital camera that acts like a retina and captures low-resolution black-and-white images. The images are wirelessly sent to a brain chip, which sends signals to electrodes that penetrate into the visual cortex, the part of the brain that controls vision.

http://tinyurl.com/bfcnn6p

Neuroscientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have reached an important milestone, publicly releasing the first installment out of 500 terabytes of data so far collected in a project to construct the first whole-brain wiring diagram of a vertebrate brain, that of the mouse.

The data consist of gigapixel images (each close to 1 billion pixels) of whole-brain sections that can be zoomed to show individual neurons and their processes, providing a “virtual microscope.” The images are integrated with other data sources from the web, and are being made fully accessible to neuroscientists as well as interested members of the general public (http://mouse.brainarchitecture.org). The data are being released pre-publication in the spirit of open science initiatives that have become familiar in digital astronomy (e.g., Sloan Digital Sky Survey) but are not yet as widespread in neurobiology.

Kevin Warwick, a researcher in cybernetics at the University of Reading, has been working on creating neural networks that can control machines. He and his team have taken the brain cells from rats, cultured them, and used them as the guidance control circuit for simple wheeled robots. Electrical impulses from the bot enter the batch of neurons, and responses from the cells are turned into commands for the device. The cells can form new connections, making the system a true learning machine. Warwick hasn’t released any new videos of the rat brain robot for the past few years, but the three older clips we have for you below are still awesome. He and his competitors continue to move this technology forward – animal cyborgs are real.

Weill Cornell Medical College scientists have discovered that single protein alpha 2 delta controls the volume of neurotransmitters and other chemicals. The alpha 2 delta protein determines how many calcium channels will be present at the synaptic junction between neurons. The transmission of chemical signals is triggered at the synapse by the entry of calcium into these channels, so the volume and speed of neurotransmission depends on the availability of these channels.

Several species of newts and frogs produce the toxin, known as tetrodotoxin, that is more lethal than cyanide. The six snake species—including three kinds of North American garter snakes—have independently developed a nearly identical molecular mechanism for resisting the toxin, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Tetrodotoxin attacks an organism by binding to sodium channels in the body’s cells, which interrupts electrical impulses in the muscles. Normally, this quickly results in paralysis and the death of any animal that ingests it. The six snake species studied, however, have independently evolved an adaptation over millions of years that inhibits the toxin from binding to the sodium channels. What’s interesting to the researchers is that the mechanism for resistance is essentially the same in all six species, regardless of where they live or the kind of prey they eat.

Using tiny solar-panel-like cells surgically placed underneath the retina, scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have devised a system that may someday restore sight to people who have lost vision because of certain types of degenerative eye diseases.

This device — a new type of retinal prosthesis — involves a specially designed pair of goggles, which are equipped with a miniature camera and a pocket PC designed to process the visual data stream. The resulting images would be displayed on a liquid crystal microdisplay embedded in the goggles, similar to what’s used in video goggles for gaming, corresponding to approximately 30 degrees of visual field.

Unlike the regular video goggles, though, the images would be beamed from the LCD using laser pulses of near-infrared light to a photovoltaic array on a silicon chip  — one-third as thin as a strand of hair — implanted beneath the retina. It would have 25 micron (millionths of a meter, about 1/1000th of an inch) pixels, each containing a ~10 micron stimulating electrode.

Scientists were able to repair severed sciatic nerves in the upper thigh of rats, with results showing the rats were able to use their limb within a week and had much function restored within 2 to 4 weeks, in some cases to almost full function.