Happiness is a warm puppy!!!
Here is what I am reading today:
“According to his study, PET scans identified 93 per cent of people in a minimally conscious state, and that 74 per cent would recover within the next a year. The functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) identified 45 and 56 per cent, respectively.
Soddu’s research, which included colleagues from Belgium and Denmark, was recently published in The Lancet.”
“They’ve seen a lot of change in their lifetime – we all have – but Google Glass is a new tech unlike any other. You have to see how these folks react to this high-tech gadget. They’re saying exactly what we’re thinking!”
“What is the driving engine behind biodiversity? One and a half centuries years ago, Charles Darwin recognized that species are subject to evolutionary change. Now, we know that all aspects defining an organism are encoded in its genome. Yet, how new species emerge from slight genetic changes remains unanswered. Crows, for example, are all black or grey coated, and they exhibit a strong tendency to select partners that look like themselves.”
“The new findings, published June 19 in Cell, may throw light on psychiatric disorders marked by impaired social interaction such as autism, social anxiety, schizophrenia and depression, said the study’s senior author, Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD, a professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. The findings are also significant in that they highlight not merely the role of one or another brain chemical, as pharmacological studies tend to do, but rather the specific components of brain circuits involved in a complex behavior. A combination of cutting-edge techniques developed in Deisseroth’s laboratory permitted unprecedented analysis of how brain activity controls behavior.”
“Last year Karl Deisseroth, a Stanford professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, announced a new way of peering into a brain – removed from the body – that provided spectacular fly-through views of its inner connections. Since then laboratories around the world have begun using the technique, called CLARITY, with some success, to better understand the brain’s wiring.”
“The study was led by Nicholas Marsh-Armstrong, Ph.D., a research scientist at the Kennedy Krieger Institute and an associate professor in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience, together with Mark H. Ellisman, Ph.D., a neuroscience professor at the University of California, San Diego. In a previous study, the two had seen hints that retinal ganglion cells, which transmit visual information from the eye to the brain, might be handing off bits of themselves to astrocytes, cells that surround and support the eye’s signal-transmitting neurons. They appeared to pass them to astrocytes at the optic nerve head, the beginning of the long tendril that connects retinal ganglion cells from the eye to the brain. Specifically, they suspected that the neuronal bits being passed on were mitochondria, which are known as the powerhouses of the cell.”
““Astrocytes are among the most abundant cells in the brain, but we know very little about how they are controlled and how they contribute to brain function,” says Dwight Bergles, Ph.D., professor of neuroscience, who led the study. “Since memory formation and other important functions of the brain require a state of attention, we’re interested in learning more about how astrocytes help create that state.””
“”Since executive functioning is a strong predictor of academic achievement, even more than IQ, we think our findings have strong educational implications,” says study senior investigator Nadine Gaab, PhD, of the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience at Boston Children’s. “While many schools are cutting music programs and spending more and more time on test preparation, our findings suggest that musical training may actually help to set up children for a better academic future.””
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