Dana Smith In January, the European Commission pledged 500 million euros to work towards creating a functional model of the human brain. Then, yesterday, Barack Obama officially announced an initiative to advance neuroscience, funding a large-scale research project aimed at unlocking the secrets of the brain that involves over $100 million in federal spending in the first year alone, as well as investments from private organizations. Both projects are geared towards creating a working model of the brain, mapping its 100 billion neurons. The first, the Human Brain Project, is being spearheaded by Professor Henry Markram of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Together with collaborators from 86 other European institutions, they aim to simulate the workings of the human brain using a giant super computer. This would mean compiling information about the activity of individual neurons and neuronal circuits throughout the brain in a massive database. They then hope to integrate the biological actions of these neurons to create theoretical maps of different subsystems, and eventually, through the magic of computer simulation, a working model of the entire brain. Neurologic and psychiatric disorders collectively "affect 100 million Americans and cost us $500 billion each year in terms of health-care costs." Similarly, the United States' recently renamed Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or BRAIN (previously the Brain Activity Map Project, or BAM), is an initiative that will be organized through the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and carried out in a number of universities and research institutes throughout the U.S. © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 17989 - Posted: 04.05.2013

By Puneet Kollipara President Barack Obama has unveiled a long-term neuroscience research initiative that will develop new tools and technologies to study human and animal brains on larger scales than currently possible. Announced April 2, the BRAIN Initiative could ultimately help researchers better understand human behavior and thought and develop new ways to diagnose, treat and cure neurological and psychiatric diseases. The initiative is slated to begin in October, with $100 million budgeted for the project in fiscal year 2014. The National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation will lead the effort, which Obama likened to the Human Genome Project in terms of its ambitious aims and the scientific and health benefits the initiative could yield. The human brain remains one of the greatest scientific mysteries. Researchers can now probe only a small number of neurons simultaneously or get relatively crude looks at specific regions or the entirety of the brain. But scientists believe that understanding the action of circuits containing thousands or millions of coordinated neurons could lead to a better understanding of how the brain works — as well as what goes wrong when it doesn’t. Short for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, the BRAIN Initiative would seek to develop tools and technologies to measure and manipulate the firing patterns of all neurons in a circuit. Other new tools — hardware, software and databases — would store the data, make it public and analyze it. The initiative takes its inspiration from a research vision known as the Brain Activity Map, which originated from a group of neuroscientists, nanoscientists and research groups. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 17984 - Posted: 04.03.2013

By John McCarthy Maybe this discovery is interesting because it sheds therapeutic light on the dreaded neurodegenerative diseases that killed Woody Guthrie and Lou Gehrig. Or maybe it’s fascination with healthy cells, and yet another unsuspected complexity in how they work. What’s discovered: a previously unknown energy source in nerve cells. It propels the molecular “motors” that drag neurotransmitters from the nucleus where they’re made. The “motors” are assemblies of molecules. They walk like clumsy robots, with a staggering gait, dragging a capsule of neurotransmitter “bullets” along microtubule “highways” between nucleus and synapses. They move by flinging their boot-like feet (lavender blobs, in the image) forward, a billionth of a meter at each step. (A superb animation of “motors” in action is XVIVO’s “Life of a Cell” (at ~1:15 of playing time)). When the cargo finally arrives at the synapses, neurotransmitters are loaded into compartments at the synapse’s interior face, like bullets into a magazine. They are ready to be “fired” across a synapse to signal an adjoining neuron. It’s this transport of neurotransmitter “bullets” that failed in Guthrie’s and Gehrig’s nerve cells. Their synapses had nothing to fire. What powers the flinging that moves those boots? Previously, the answer has been specialized molecules (acronym: ATP) spewed into the cell’s fluid interior by mitochondria. The boots, it was thought, powered each step by grabbing a floating ATP and blowing it up like a firecracker. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 17978 - Posted: 04.02.2013

Regina Nuzzo In a twist that evokes the dystopian science fiction of writer Philip K. Dick, neuroscientists have found a way to predict whether convicted felons are likely to commit crimes again from looking at their brain scans. Convicts showing low activity in a brain region associated with decision-making and action are more likely to be arrested again, and sooner. Kent Kiehl, a neuroscientist at the non-profit Mind Research Network in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his collaborators studied a group of 96 male prisoners just before their release. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the prisoners’ brains during computer tasks in which subjects had to make quick decisions and inhibit impulsive reactions. The scans focused on activity in a section of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a small region in the front of the brain involved in motor control and executive functioning. The researchers then followed the ex-convicts for four years to see how they fared. Among the subjects of the study, men who had lower ACC activity during the quick-decision tasks were more likely to be arrested again after getting out of prison, even after the researchers accounted for other risk factors such as age, drug and alcohol abuse and psychopathic traits. Men who were in the lower half of the ACC activity ranking had a 2.6-fold higher rate of rearrest for all crimes and a 4.3-fold higher rate for nonviolent crimes. The results are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Aggression; Aggression
Link ID: 17950 - Posted: 03.26.2013

By John Horgan Does anyone still remember “The Decade of the Brain“? Youngsters don’t, but perhaps some of my fellow creaky, cranky science-lovers do. In 1990, the brash, fast-growing Society for Neuroscience convinced Congress to name the ’90s the Decade of the Brain. The goal, as President George Bush put it, was to boost public awareness of and support for research on the “three-pound mass of interwoven nerve cells” that serves as “the seat of human intelligence, interpreter of senses and controller of movement.” One opponent of this public-relations stunt was Torsten Wiesel, who won a Nobel Prize in 1981 for work on the neural basis of vision. When I interviewed him in 1998 for my book The Undiscovered Mind, he grumbled that the Decade of the Brain was “foolish.” Scientists “need at least a century, maybe even a millennium,” to understand the brain, Wiesel said. “We are at the very beginning of brain science.” I recalled Wiesel’s irritable comments as I read about big new neuroscience initiatives in the U.S. and Europe. In January, the European Union announced it would sink more than $1 billion over the next decade into the Human Brain Project, an attempt to construct a massive computer simulation of the brain. The project, according to The New York Times, involves more than 150 institutions. Meanwhile, President Barack Obama is reportedly planning to commit more than $3 billion to a similar project, called the Brain Activity Map. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 17943 - Posted: 03.25.2013

By Meghan Rosen Shushing neural chitchat in mouse brains can spark schizophrenia-like symptoms, a new study suggests. The findings are the first to demonstrate — at least in mice — that curbing communication among neurons in certain parts of the brain can cause some of the cognitive problems associated with schizophrenia. By muzzling neurons in the mediodorsal thalamus, or MD — a cell cluster that sends signals to the brain’s outer layer — researchers hindered mouse memory and learning in much the same way that schizophrenia seems to do in humans, scientists report March 20 in Neuron. Cognitive problems in schizophrenia have long been a mystery to scientists and a troubling symptom for people with the condition. The findings suggest that the problems stem from the thalamus, says neuropsychologist Neil Woodward of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, who was not involved with the new work. People with schizophrenia suffer from a range of debilitating symptoms: hallucinations, delusions and social disorders, says study coauthor Christoph Kellendonk of Columbia University. Patients also have problems with short-term memory and learning. Unlike other symptoms, these cognitive problems have been nearly impossible to treat. Brain imaging of people with schizophrenia had previously linked cognitive defects to changes in the MD — part of a walnut-sized chunk of gray matter snuggled above the brain stem. Normally, the MD relays information to and from the prefrontal cortex, the brain region behind the forehead that controls complex thought. In people with schizophrenia, the imaging showed, the MD is unusually quiet. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 17929 - Posted: 03.23.2013

by Sara Reardon When she returned from serving in the Gulf conflict in 1991, US Air Force nurse Denise Nichols experienced sudden aches, fatigue and cognitive problems, but had no idea 'what was causing them. They grew worse: even helping her daughter with multiplication tables became difficult, she says, and eventually she had to quit her job. Nichols wasn't alone. About a third of Gulf war veterans – possibly as many as 250,000 – returned with a similar set of symptoms. Now an imaging study has found that these veterans have what appear to be unique structural changes in the wiring of their brains. This fits with the scientific consensus that Gulf War syndrome (GWS) is a physical condition rather than a psychosomatic one, and should be treated with painkilling drugs instead of counselling. The military in various countries has in the past consistently denied that there is a physical basis to GWS. Although the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) now officially accepts that the disorder is physical, the issue has been mired in controversy. Earlier this month, Steven Coughlin, a former senior epidemiologist at the VA, testified to a Congressional panel that the VA had suppressed and manipulated research data so as to suggest that the disorder was psychosomatic. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stress; Aggression
Link ID: 17928 - Posted: 03.23.2013

Monya Baker At first glance, it looks like an oddly shaped campfire: smoky grey shapes light up with red sparks and flashes. But the video actually represents a different sort of crackle — the activity of individual neurons across a larval fish brain. It is the first time that researchers have been able to image an entire vertebrate brain at the level of single cells. “We see the big picture without losing resolution,” says Phillipp Keller, a microscopist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, who developed the system with Janelia neurobiologist Misha Ahrens. The researchers are able to record activity across the whole fish brain almost every second, detecting 80% of its 100,000 neurons. (The rest lie in hard-to-access areas, such as between the eyes; their activity is visible but cannot be pinned down to single cells.) The work is published today in Nature Methods1. “It’s phenomenal,” says Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York. “It is a bright star now in the literature, suggesting that it is not crazy to map every neuron in the brain of an animal.” Yuste has been leading the call for a big biology project2 that would do just that in the human brain, which contains about 85,000 times more neurons than the zebrafish brain. The resolution offered by the zebrafish study will enable researchers to understand how different regions of the brain work together, says Ahrens. With conventional techniques, imaging even 2,000 neurons at once is difficult, so researchers must pick and choose which to look at, and extrapolate. Now, he says, “you don't need to guess what is happening — you can see it”. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 17922 - Posted: 03.19.2013

By TIM REQUARTH For months, Henry Markram and his team had been feeding data into a supercomputer, four vending-machine-size black boxes whirring quietly in the basement of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. The Blue Brain computer has 10,000 virtual neurons. The colors represent the neurons' electric voltage at a specific moment. The boxes housed thousands of microchips, each programmed to act like a brain cell. Cables carried signals from microchip to microchip, just as cells do in a real brain. In 2006, Dr. Markram flipped the switch. Blue Brain, a tangled web of nearly 10,000 virtual neurons, crackled to life. As millions of signals raced along the cables, electrical activity resembling real brain waves emerged. “That was an incredible moment,” he said, comparing the simulation to what goes on in real brain tissue. “It didn’t match perfectly, but it was pretty good. As a biologist, I was amazed.” Deciding then that simulating the entire brain on a supercomputer would be possible within his lifetime, Dr. Markram, now 50, set out to prove it. That is no small feat. The brain contains nearly 100 billion neurons organized into networks with 100 trillion total connections, all firing split-second spikes of voltage in a broth of complex biological molecules in constant flux. In 2009, Dr. Markram conceived of the Human Brain Project, a sprawling and controversial initiative of more than 150 institutions around the world that he hopes will bring scientists together to realize his dream. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging; Aggression
Link ID: 17921 - Posted: 03.19.2013

By Ben Thomas In 1956, a legion of famed scientific minds descended on Dartmouth College to debate one of mankind’s most persistent questions: Is it possible to build a machine that thinks? The researchers had plenty to talk about – biologists and mathematicians had suggested since the 1940s that nerve cells probably served as binary logic gates, much like transistors in computer mainframes. Meanwhile, computer theorists like Alan Turing and Claude Shannon had been arguing for years that intelligence and learning could – at least in theory – be programmed into a machine of sufficient complexity. Within the next few decades, many researchers predicted, we’d be building machines capable of conscious thought. Fifty-odd years after that first Dartmouth Conference, our sharpest supercomputers still struggle to hold basic conversations. We’ve created software that can drive our cars and predict our purchases, but the dreams of a true artificial brain – and of a working neuron-by-neuron model of the human brain itself – look even more distant than they did in the 1950s. The more we learn about how the brain works, the more interwoven and inextricable we realize its components and processes are – and the less like a computer it seems. Take synapses, for example – the points where neurons link up and exchange information. Neuroscientists estimate that a human brain may contain about 150 trillion of them, and no two are quite identical – either to one another, or to any synapse in anyone else’s brain. On top of this complexity, every neuron in a brain is constantly learning, adapting, fine-tuning its sensitivity, tinkering with its synaptic connections – rarely wired the same way from one day to the next. In light of all this, it’s not hard to see why many scientists seriously doubt that we’ll map an entire human brain any time this century – much less engineer a digital version from scratch. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 17920 - Posted: 03.19.2013

By Charles Q. Choi and Txchnologist Scientists scanning the human brain can now tell whom a person is thinking of, the first time researchers have been able to identify what people are imagining from imaging technologies. Work to visualize thought is starting to pile up successes. Recently, scientists have used brain scans to decode imagery directly from the brain, such as what number people have just seen and what memory a person is recalling. They can now even reconstruct videos of what a person has watched based on their brain activity alone. Cornell University cognitive neuroscientist Nathan Spreng and his colleagues wanted to carry this research one step further by seeing if they could deduce the mental pictures of people that subjects conjure up in their heads. “We are trying to understand the physical mechanisms that allow us to have an inner world, and a part of that is how we represent other people in our mind,” Spreng says. His team first gave 19 volunteers descriptions of four imaginary people they were told were real. Each of these characters had different personalities. Half the personalities were agreeable, described as liking to cooperate with others; the other half were less agreeable, depicted as cold and aloof or having similar traits. In addition, half these characters were described as outgoing and sociable extroverts, while the others were less so, depicted as sometimes shy and inhibited. The scientists matched the genders of these characters to each volunteer and gave them popular names like Mike, Chris, Dave or Nick, or Ashley, Sarah, Nicole or Jenny. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging; Aggression
Link ID: 17906 - Posted: 03.15.2013

By Rachel Ehrenberg Surgeons have replaced 75 percent of a man’s skull with a custom-designed polymer cranium constructed with a 3-D printer. The surgery took place on March 4 and is the first U.S. case following the FDA’s approval of the implants last month. The patient’s reason for needing such extensive replacement surgery has not been revealed. Similar surgeries may follow in other cases where sections of the skull are removed because the brain has swollen during a surgery or after an accident, says Scott DeFelice, president of Connecticut-based Oxford Performance Materials, the company that created the prosthetic. Technicians used CT scans to get images of the part of the skull that needed replacing. Then, with computer software and input from surgeons, engineers designed the replacement part. A machine that uses lasers to fuse granules of material built the prosthetic layer by layer out of a special plastic called PEKK. While inert like titanium, PEKK is riddled on its surface with pocks and ridges that promote bone cell growth, DeFelice says. Such implants have value as a brain-protecting material, says Jeremy Mao, a biomedical engineer and codirector of Columbia University’s center for craniofacial regeneration. But doctors will need to keep an eye out for long-term problems; The skull isn’t just a box for the brain but a complicated piece of anatomy linked to connective and soft tissues. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 17891 - Posted: 03.12.2013

by Moheb Costandi Mice transplanted with a once-discounted class of human brain cells have better memories and learning abilities than normal counterparts, according to a new study. Far from a way to engineer smarter rodents, the work suggests that human brain evolution involved a major upgrade to cells called astrocytes. Astrocytes are one of several types of glia, the other cells found alongside neurons in the nervous system. Although long thought to merely provide support and nourishment for neurons, it's now clear that astrocytes are vital for proper brain function. They are produced during development from stem cells called glial progenitors. In 2009, Steven Goldman of the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York and his colleagues reported that human astrocytes are bigger, and have about 10 times as many fingerlike projections that contact other brain cells and blood vessels, than those of mice. To further investigate these differences, they have more recently grafted fluorescently labeled human glial progenitors into the brains of newborn mice and examined the animals when they reached adulthood. Most of the grafted cells remained as progenitors, but some matured into typical human-looking astrocytes. They connected to their mouse counterparts to form astrocyte networks that transmitted electrical signals. Furthermore, they propagated internal signals about three times faster than the mouse astrocytes and improved the strengthening of connections between neurons in the hippocampus, a process thought to be critical for learning and memory. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Glia; Aggression
Link ID: 17883 - Posted: 03.09.2013

By Partha Mitra The Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles features the great Grimpen Mire, a treacherous marsh in Dartmoor, England. Holmes’ protagonist, the naturalist Stapleton, knows where the few secure footholds are, allowing him to cross the mire and reach the hills with rare plants and butterflies, but he warns Dr. Watson that a false step can be fatal, the bog inexorably consuming the unsuspecting traveller. Trying to unravel the complexities of the brain is a bit like crossing the great Grimpen Mire: one needs to know where the secure stepping-stones are, and a false step can mean sinking into a morass. As we enter the era of Big Brain Science projects, it is important to know where the next firm foothold is. As a goal worthy of a multi-billion dollar brain project, we have now been offered a motto that is nearly as rousing as “climb every mountain”: “record every action potential from every neuron.” According to recent reporting in the New York Times, this goal, proclaimed in a paper published in 2012, will be the basis of a decade-long “Brain Activity Map” project. Not content with a goal as lofty as this in worms, flies and mice, the press reports imply (and the authors also speculate) that these technologies will be used for comprehensive spike recordings in the human brain, generating a “Brain Activity Map” that will provide the answers to Alzheimers and Schizophrenia and lead us out of the “impenetrable jungles of the brain” that hapless neuroscientists have wandered over the past century. Neuroscience is most certainly in need of integration, and brain research will without doubt benefit from the communal excitement and scaled up funding associated with a Big Brain Initiative. However, success will depend on setting the right goals and guarding against irrational exuberance. Successful big science projects are engineering projects with clear, technically feasible goals: setting a human on the moon, sequencing the Human Genome, finding the Higgs Boson. The technologies proposed in the paper under discussion may or may not be feasible in a given species (they will not be feasible in the normal human brain, since the methods involved are invasive and require that the skull be surgically opened). However, technology development is notoriously difficult to predict, and may carry unforeseen benefits. What we really need to understand is whether the overall goal is meaningful. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 17879 - Posted: 03.09.2013

Meredith Wadman Ron Kalil, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, didn’t expect to see his son among the 28,500 attendees at the meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans last October. And he wondered why Tom Kalil, deputy director for policy at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), was accompanied by Miyoung Chun, vice-president of science programmes at the Kavli Foundation in Oxnard, California. Tom Kalil told his father that the Kavli Foundation had wanted his help in bringing nanoscientists together behind an ambitious idea. Ron Kalil says he thought: “Why are you talking about it at a neuroscience meeting?” He understands now. These two people, neither of them a working scientist, had been quietly pushing into existence the Brain Activity Map (BAM), the largest and most ambitious effort in fundamental biology since the Human Genome Project — and one that would need advances in both nanoscience and neuroscience to achieve its goals. This is the kind of science — big and bold — that politicians like. President Barack Obama praised brain mapping in his State of the Union address on 12 February. Soon after, Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, which will be the lead agency on the project, talked up the idea in a television appearance. The Obama administration is expected to provide more details about the initiative this month, possibly in conjunction with the release of the federal 2014 budget request. But already, some scientists are wondering whether the project, a concept less than two years old and still evolving, can win new funding from Congress, or whether it would crowd out projects pitched by individual scientists. “Creative science is bottom-up, not top-down,” says Cori Bargmann, a neurobiologist at the Rockefeller University in New York. “Are we talking about central planning inside the Beltway?” © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 17875 - Posted: 03.07.2013

By Meghan Rosen Zombies aren’t the only things that feast on brains. Immune cells called microglia gorge on neural stem cells in developing rat and monkey brains, researchers report in the March 6 Journal of Neuroscience. Chewing up neuron-spawning stem cells could help control brain size by pruning away excess growth. Scientists have previously linked abnormal human brain size to autism and schizophrenia. “It shows microglia are very important in the developing brain,” says neuroscientist Joseph Mathew Antony of the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the research. Scientists have long known that in adult brains, microglia hunt for injured cells as well as pathogens. “They mop up all the dead and dying cells,” Antony says. And when the scavengers find a dangerous intruder, they pounce. “These guys are relentless,” says study coauthor Stephen Noctor, of the University of California, Davis MIND Institute in Sacramento. “They seek and destroy bacteria — it’s really quite amazing.” Microglia also lurk in embryonic brains, but the immune cells’ role there is less well understood. Previous studies had found microglia near neural stem cells — tiny factories that pump out new neurons. When Noctor’s team examined slices of embryonic human, monkey and rodent brains, he was struck by just how many microglia crowded around the stem cells and how closely the two cell types touched. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Glia; Aggression
Link ID: 17872 - Posted: 03.07.2013

By JOHN MARKOFF In setting the nation on a course to map the active human brain, President Obama may have picked a challenge even more daunting than ending the war in Afghanistan or finding common ground with his Republican opponents. In more than a century of scientific inquiry into the interwoven cells known as neurons that make up the brain, researchers acknowledge they are only beginning to scratch the surface of a scientific challenge that is certain to prove vastly more complicated than sequencing the human genome. The Obama administration is hoping to announce as soon as next month its intention to assemble the pieces — and, even more challenging, the financing — for a decade-long research project that will have the goal of building a comprehensive map of the brain’s activity. At present, scientists are a long way from doing so. Before they can even begin the process, they have to develop the tools to examine the brain. And before they develop tools that will work on humans, they must succeed in doing so in a number of simpler species — assuming that what they learn can even be applied to humans. Besides the technological and scientific challenges, there are a host of issues involving storing the information researchers gather, and ethical concerns about what can be done with the data. Also highly uncertain is whether the science will advance quickly enough to meet the time frames being considered for what is being called the Brain Activity Map project. Many neuroscientists are skeptical that a multiyear, multibillion dollar effort to unlock the brain’s mysteries will succeed.“I believe the scientific paradigm underlying this mapping project is, at best, out of date and at worst, simply wrong,” said Donald G. Stein, a neurologist at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. “The search for a road map of stable, neural pathways that can represent brain functions is futile.” © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 17850 - Posted: 02.26.2013

By Gary Stix The era of Big Neuroscience has arrived. In late January, The Human Brain Project—an attempt to create a computer simulation of the brain at every scale from the nano nano to the macro biotic—announced that it had successfully arranged a billion Euro funding package for a 10-year run. And then on Feb. 18, an article in The New York Times took the wraps off a plan to spend perhaps billions of dollars for an effort to record large collections of brain cells and figure out what exactly they are doing. Is this the Large Hadron Collider vs. the Superconducting Supercollider redux? Not yet. The billions for the Brain Activity Map, the U.S. project, are still a wish that has yet to be granted. But, despite as-always hazy government finances, brain researchers are thinking large as they never have before, and invoking the attendant rhetoric of moon shots, next-generation Human Genome Projects and the need for humankind to muster the requisite visionary zeal to tackle one of science’s “last frontiers.” Oy, spare me that last part. The challenges these projects have set for themselves, though, illustrate the challenge of going from today’s crude profiles of a biological machine of incomprehensible complexity to an accurate rendering of the goings-on of some 100 billion neurons woven together by a pulsating tapestry of 100 trillion electrical interconnections. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 17849 - Posted: 02.26.2013

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV It's the sequel to fertilisation: the brains of unborn babies have now been imaged in action, showing how connections form. This fMRI movie, produced by Moriah Thomason from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, shows a fly-through of several fetuses in their third trimester. By comparing the scans at slightly different stages of development, Thomason was able to pinpoint when different parts of the brain wire up. "The connection strength increases with fetal age," writes Thomason. By identifying how brain connectivity normally develops, the scans could help diagnose and treat conditions like schizophrenia and autism before birth. For more on this research, read our full-length news story, "First snaps made of fetal brains wiring themselves up". © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Aggression
Link ID: 17834 - Posted: 02.23.2013

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News BOSTON — The brain-mapping project that the Obama administration wants to facilitate isn't necessarily aimed at adding billions of dollars to the money already being spent on research, according to the scientists who inspired the idea. Instead, it's aimed at harnessing new technologies to uncover the secrets of neural function less expensively and more completely. "We can bring down the cost and increase the quality of the technology," said Harvard geneticist George Church, one of the researchers who proposed the Brain Activity Map Project last year. "We are trying to work with current funding [levels] to bring down the cost." The New York Times reported on Monday that the White House has embraced the idea of having the Office of Science and Technology Policy spearhead the project, with participation by the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies. The federal initiative is to be unveiled as early as next month, the Times quoted its sources as saying. The roots of the project go back months if not years earlier: The goals of the BAM Project were outlined last June in a white paper appearing in the journal Neuron. The researchers proposed a 15-year international effort to map the functions of the brain's complex neural circuitry to an unprecedented degree — using traditional tools such as magnetic resonance imaging in combination with novel technologies such as nanosensors and wireless fiber-optic probes that can be implanted into the brain, and genetically engineered cells that can be linked up with brain cells to record their activity. © 2013 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 17822 - Posted: 02.19.2013