Discover the Science of Health
In his State of the Union address last month, President Barack Obama reaffirmed the prioritization of science and technology in his plans for the nation’s future. The President’s new economic plan calls for maintaining a commitment to funding research and development that can improve our quality of life.
While ultrasound technology is familiar to most people as a diagnostic imaging technique — it’s what obstetricians use to monitor the health of a developing fetus, for example — the technology has been making recent headlines for an entirely different reason.
Just as clothing styles come in and out of fashion, diagnoses go through fads as well. While this is rarely true of diagnoses issued by traditional healthcare practitioners, health-related Internet sites (particularly those promoting alternative medicine) and some practitioners of alternative medicine may be susceptible to these diagnostic trends. One such fad diagnosis is lactose intolerance, which is sometimes blamed for everything from hyperactivity to joint pain.
Image credit: Pouring milk splash via ShutterstockDuring the President’s Lecture Series at San Diego State University two weeks ago, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said that the company is building a digital human brain. Stating that the brain isn’t programmed but rather taught, Jacobs emphasized that the company’s work was meant to help humanity through the “digital sixth sense” — the merging of the cyber and real worlds.
He described the process of discovery this way:
The team actually started out by building a retina and they came to me and said: ‘Look, it responds to these optical illusions the same way a human does.’ They put another layer of cells behind that [and] it started to find features. They put another layer, it started to find corners or oriented lines or something. Another layer, it started to find patterns.
Jacobs is talking about Brain Corporation, a small research company that is developing novel algorithms based on the functionality of the nervous system, with applications in visual perception, motor control, and autonomous navigation. The intention is to equip consumer devices, such as mobile phones or household robots, with artificial nervous systems. Qualcomm funds Brain Corporation research and hosts the company on its campus in San Diego, California.
Scientists at Brain Corporation are re-creating in the computer the shapes of every one of the billions of nerve cells that make up our brains, the component parts of intricate neural circuits that allow us to move, see and hear, to feel and to think. With this new tool, researchers are beginning to decipher the secrets of the brain’s architecture, which may one day enable us to build smart technologies that surpass the capabilities of anything we have today.
Episode 1: Blueprint for the Brain from Science Bytes on Vimeo.
This video is based on a paper published by neuroscientist Hermann Cuntz, and colleagues in the online journal PLoS Computational Biology.
Study: One Rule to Grow Them All: A General Theory of Neuronal Branching and Its Practical Application
Source: KPBS.org
Scientists have long debated whether Alzheimer’s disease starts in separate regions of the brain independently and at different times, or if it begins in one region and then spreads. Data from researchers at Columbia University Medical Center supports the latter model, showing that abnormal tau protein — a key feature observed in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease — propagates along anatomically connected networks, between connected and vulnerable neurons. The study was published earlier this month in the online journal PLoS ONE [1].
Image credit: Neurons network in human brain via Shutterstock
