Hmmm.
LIFE after death has been “confirmed” by scientists who have discovered consciousness continues even once a person has died.
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Category: neuroscience – Page 1,041
Math isn’t everyone’s strong suit, especially those who haven’t stretched that part of their brain since college. Thanks to the wonders of image recognition technology, we now have Mathpix, an iOS app that lets you point your phone camera at a problem and calculates solutions in seconds.
The interface looks like any standard camera app: simply drag the on-screen reticle over the equation and the app solves it and provides graph answers where appropriate. More useful is a step-by-step guide offering multiple methods to reach a solution, making this a bona fide educational tool. It uses image recognition to process problems and pings its servers to do the mathematical heavy lifting, so it likely requires an internet connection to work.
Mathpix was envisioned by Stanford PhD student Nico Jimenez, who was advised by Stanford grad Paul Ferrell. The app’s other developers are high schoolers Michael Lee and August Trollback, which is impressive for an app that claims to be the first to visually recognize and solve handwritten math problems.
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New spin on all things that are Singular. Hmmm — so if Singularity becomes a religion; is Ray Kurzweil its God?
A colleague forwarded John Horgan’s recent Scientific American article, “The Singularity and the Neural Code.” Horgan argues that the intelligence augmentation and mind uploading that would lead to a technological singularity depend upon cracking the neural code. The problem is that we don’t understand our neural code, the software or algorithms that transform neurophysiology into the stuff of minds like perceptions, memories, and meanings. In other words, we know very little about how brains make minds.
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Another exampme of how precision works.
While pregnant with her first child, Rhea Birusingh started experiencing blurry vision that her OB-GYN dismissed as an expected pregnancy-related change, but three months later, she went to her ophthalmologist, who discovered an inoperable 2-centimeter benign brain tumor behind her right eye. Now, nearly four months later, Birusingh’s son is healthy and her vision is normal, thanks to a powerful, precise radiation treatment.
“When you’re a pathologist and your eyes are a money maker, you start to get a little bit worried,” Birusingh, 37, of Howey-in-the-Hills, Florida, told FoxNews.com.
Doctors at UF Health Cancer Center – Orlando Health decided to use the treatment, called proton beam therapy, because Birusingh’s tumor was adjacent to her hippocampus, which is critical for short- and long-term memory and learning. Proton beam therapy works differently from conventional radiation treatments, which rely on X-rays. Birusingh was the first patient to undergo the treatment— which uses a three-story, 200,000 pound machine— at the hospital.
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Researchers have created a beautiful visualization the electrical activity in the human brain with the Unity3D game development engine. It’s gorgeous eye candy but it’s also amazing when you find out what it is you’re looking at.
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Very promising. Wonder how effective it is with Prescription Med. Addictions.
A type of brain cell known as microglia plays a key role in reducing the effects of cocaine in the brain, according to a major study by a team from the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) in Montreal.
The discovery, published in the journal Neuron, establishes for the first time that microglia can diminish the adverse changes to neural circuitry brought on by the chronic use of cocaine and has significant implications for developing an effective treatment for addiction.
Microglia may not be as well known as neurons, the brain cells that relay messages, but they have many important functions. They constantly monitor their environment, and can act to maintain normal brain functioning. When they find something amiss, they can produce molecules that instruct neurons to make adaptive changes to their connections. One such example is the inflammatory molecule known as tumor necrosis factor (TNF).
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A specific type of immune cell, called microglia (green) can help contain amyloid plaques (magenta), the key hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, thus limiting their damage to surrounding brain cells.
But, Dr Jaime Grutzendler, associate professor of neurology and neuroscience at Yale, said that is no longer thought to be the case, and should signal a new.
He said: ‘It suggests we should be enhancing the function of these immune cells, not trying to suppress it.’
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Pressure is on DARPA by US Military to speed up on completing the soft Exosuit.
The clothing-like Soft Exosuit has been described as a “Wearable Robot” by the U.S. Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) that’s commissioning universities and research institutions to advance this military technology. The DARPA Soft Exosuit is part of the agency’s Warrior Web program.
A prototype Soft Exosuit had a series of webbing straps around the lower half of the body with a low-power microprocessor and a network of flexible strain sensors. These electronics act as the “brain” and “nervous system” of the Soft Exosuit. They continuously monitor data signals, including suit tension, wearer position (walking, running, crouched) and more.
In 2014, DARPA awarded $2.9 million to The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University to further develop its Soft Exosuit, other versions of which might eventually help persons (military and civilian) with limited mobility.
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Interesting read on PTSD. Wonder how much this plays into DARPA’s own research around memory removal on PTSD patients. hmmm.
New research suggests that PTSD patients with a larger region of the brain that helps distinguish between safety and threat are more likely to respond to exposure-based therapy.
The study expands upon prior research that discovered having a smaller hippocampus is associated with increased risk of PTSD.
In the current study, researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI), examined the relationship between hippocampus volume, and response to treatment in 50 participants with PTSD and 36 trauma-exposed healthy controls.
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The crew of the Proteus has one desperate chance to save a mans life. Shrunk to the size of a large bacterium, the submarine contains a team of scientists and physicians racing to destroy a blood clot in the brain of a Soviet defector. The group journeys through the body, evading giant white blood cells and tiny antibodies while traveling through the heart, the inner ear and the brain to reach and destroy the blockage.
Although events in the film Fantastic Voyage were far-fetched when it was released in 1966, theyre now being realized every day in labs around the world, particularly in cancer treatment. A growing field called nanotechnology is allowing researchers to manipulate molecules and structures much smaller than a single cell to enhance our ability to see, monitor and destroy cancer cells in the body.
Tens of thousands of patients have already received chemotherapy drugs delivered by nanoparticles called liposomes, and dozens of other approaches are currently in clinical trials. Within the next five to 10 years, our bodies biggest defenders may be tinier than we could have ever imagined.
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