neuronal entropy

white noise, black holes.

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A new possibly habitable planet has been found 11 light-years from us, orbiting a red dwarf star in the habitable zone. 

Ross 128b is possibly a rocky world and it save distance to its star, so the temperature is somewhere between -60 and +20°C. It is orbiting its star in 9,9 days and is 20 times closer to Ross 128 than the Earth is to the Sun, but since the star is a cool and dim one. It is 1,35 times the mass of Earth and was detected after 157 observations of its system, since its signal was so faint.

The team used the radial velocity method to find it, which is much more helpful in the search for exoplanets, since it does not require them to orbit in front of their stars. That method uses the Doppler-shift.

The team found Ross 128b thanks to the HARPS instrument. Further details about its possible surface or even biomarkers have yet to be determined though.

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A recent study by the Weizman Institute of Science in collaboration with the Southwest Research Institute suggests that Neptune’s largest moon, Triton,might have disrupted a primordial satellite system around the ice-giant.

For a long time, scientists suspected Triton to having been captured, rather than accumulated like the other moons of Neptune, since it’s so big, inclined, and orbits the planet retrograde; they assumed Triton actually formed in the Kuiper Belt as a binary and was captured by Neptune’s gravity when it passed by.

For the study, the team ran simulations to determine how the moon’s arrival would have altered the previous system; those were based on disruption scaling laws which considered how non-hit-and-run impacts between Triton and the other moons would have led to the distribution of matter in the sub-system; they found, after 200 simulations, that the system which had a mass ratio similar to the Uranian system or smaller would most likely have produced the current sub-system of Neptune. They also found that the interaction of Triton with this system offers an explanation for how the moon’s initial orbit might have been decreased to preserve the orbits of small, irregular satellites, like Nereid, which would have been ejected out of their orbits otherwise.

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A team of scientists from the EPFL found out what happens in our brains when we hear music in our heads.

Listening to music, different parts of the brain process different information, like high or low frequencies, in order to match the auditory perception of the sound to what we hear; while this process is easy to study when the music is “real”, the same process is much more complex to understand when the music is “in your head”. With the help of the institute’s Chair in Human-Machine Interface (CNBI), the team was able to analyze what happens in the latter case.

Together with a team from the University of California in Berkeley, the team worked with an epileptic patient who also is a pianist; in the beginning, the patient played a piece of music on an electric piano with the sound turned on, while his brain activity was recorded. Then, he replayed the same piece, but the sound of the piano was turned off and he was asked to imagine hearing the music in his head. The recorded activity were different to those in the first task.

The study was the first of its kind, and might be one day help develop treatment for people who lost their ability to speak.

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According to a recent study by scientists from Northwestern Medicine, there is a special protein, BRWD2/PHIP, which binds to histone lycine 4 (H§L$) methylation, which is key to gene-expression. This cold help treat diseases in which the protein is over expressed or when it mutates.

As human DNA is wrapped around histones, special proteins, these are modified through histone methylation, which happens at the H3K4-site, being catalyzed by the so-called COMPASS-enzymes. In the current study, the team was able to demonstrate that BRWD2/PHIP directly binds to the COMPASS-implemented H3K4 methylation in human cancer cells, mouse embryonic stem cells and in fruit flies.

Furthermore, they discovered that the protein recognizes the modification through a previously unknown domain called CryptoTudor domain, which gives a molecular function to a gene that is known to play a role in human disease, and for which the scientists provide a mechanism of how it binds to a specific substrate.

They demonstrated their finding through a multi-disciplinary approach, including CRISPR-Cas 9 gene editing, state of the art- sequencing, mass spectrometry and biophysical experiments.

The team suggests that if the COMPASS activity initiates H3K4 methylation, which the protein binds to in the chromatin, then they are most likely part of the same pathway; the next big step will be to understand what exactly the protein does.

Further studies will show that, as well as help scientists understand how the binding-process helps to regulate the process of transcriptional control

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A team from the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute has identified a biomarker that might lead to earlier detection of Alzheimer’s, which might help in the development of specialized medication for the diseased areas of the brain in many neurdegenerative disorders.

The peptide, called DAG, recognizes the protein which is higher in the blood of mice suffering from AD, as well as in human patients; its target, the connective tissue growth factor (CTGF) surfaces in AD-brains before the amyloid plaques, which is the first sign for the disease. It is made in response to inflammation and tissue repair, which suggests the latter plays an important rile in development of Alzheimer’s. 

The team identified DAG by using vivo phage display screening at different stages of the disease in mice; as it was detected in younger ones the  the earliest, this might mean that we can foresee the illness in humans too. The peptide binds to cells and brain from the human patients in a CGTF-dependent manner, which is consisted with an earlier report of high CTGF expression in brains of Alzheimer’s-patients. The study showed that the endothelial cells that form the inner lining of blood vessels bind DAG in parts of the brains of the rodents affected by the disease. Fortunately, those cells are readily accessible for probes injected into the blood-stream, while other cells of the brain are protected by the blood-brain-barrier; this gives scientists the opportunity to create a diagnostic method which can detect AD in earliest stages.

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A new study by scientists from the OHSU School of Medicine in Portland, Oregon, has showed how the brain processes reward and punishing, thus opening up new way for developing treatment of conditions from anxiety to addiction, using a rodent-model to identify the specific network in the brain that is linked to risk assessment.

For making a decision, or brain first has to compare the risk or playing through several varying risks to get to a clear point; this process might be stronger in people with anxiety, where the negative outcome is considered more than in people that show “normal” or impulse and reckless behavior. This distinctions were shown in the level of coordination between a spike in dopamine neurons and activity in the prefrontal cortex: The team also discovered that close coordination between those two regions of the brain was highly active, even if there was no risk of punishment.

The team also measured brain activity in blocks of time when the rodents were given a small shock, which was administered 10 percent of the time; in contrast to the non-punishment-scenario, the coordination between the prefrontal cortex and the dopamine levels collapsed when there was a small risk of being punished, which means that the brain encoded the ingrained assessment of risk as a normal circumstance. They also point out that the balance between “normal” and “abnormal” functions of risk-assessment is quite little. 

The study could help develop new medication for behavioral disorders, by reducing the anxiety or the impulsivity within the physiology of the brain.

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Out-of-body experiences have new been looked at scientifically by researchers from the Marseille Université, together with doctors that see patients with vestibular disorder. 

Some of them reported dizziness from physical causes; from those 210 patients, 14 percent reported to having had out-of-body-experiences, while only 5 percent of the healthy control-group reported the same. Among those who have had one, some reported being attracted by a spiral, entering their bodies from the top and other things. The doctor in charge suggested that those sensations are a result of the mismatch between information coming from the damaged vestibular system and the normal visual system. Previous suggestions already pointed towards a strong vestibular component in this phenomena. Furthermore, previous stimulation of the brain-area integrating vestibular and visual information induced out-of-body illusions as well.

But since also healthy people experience this phenomenon, the authors suggest that it most likely is a combination of several factors. By surveying the participants’ mental states, they found those with anxiety and depression in addition to dizziness were more likely to have an OOB-experience, as well as patients that have other perceptual anomalies. These sensations might also be linked to the specific way the brain tries to make sense of a space; one explanation suggests that the brain automatically builds a bird’s-eye-view of the space around the individual. 

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A new study by the University of California, San Fran, reported that the team had identified specialized brain cells that help the individual to understand what a speaker really means, concentrating on the way he does it. Those cells also keep track of changes in the pitch of the voice of our vis-a-vis.

According to the researchers, those neurons enable us to detect the melody of speech, while others are focussing on identifying vowels and consonants. The intonation is important to us since the same sentence can have multiple meanings without changing a single word. The team studied the brains of ten epilepsy-patients prior to surgery, via electrodes that were placed temporarily on their brains’ surfaces, which helped the surgeons identify the source of their seizures, and allowed the team to monitor the activity of the cells in the individual brain, as the test-subjects listened to a series of sentences spoken by a computer. The computer-voice was modified in terms of intonation, so the participants would hear different versions of one sentence; the cells that were observed to track the pitches did not care about the “gender” and highness of the voice, but the pattern of the pitch changes.  

Processing sounds is one of the most complex tasks of our brain; it’s a skill that some people learn better than others, too. Musicians, for example, were seen to recognize subtle tonal changes in Mandarin Chinese better than non-musicians, although they wre English-speaking. Furthermore, this ability is often impaired in people with autism, therefor they hear what one says, but not how they mean it.

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Breakthrough Initiatives, a program founded by Yuri Milner - aims to out pass NASA in the mission to Saturn’s moon Enceladus to look for extraterrestrial life there. The mission’s goal is to fly through the moon’s plum of water vapor and other material at its southern polar region.

 By doing so, we could get a sample without touching and contaminating the moon’s surface. The initiative further aims for a low-cost, privately funded mission that can be launched relatively soon. The mission NASA plans would be far more expensive and will not launched during the next nine years.

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The Cygnus cargo mission that launched yesterday carried E. coli-bacteria into outer space, to test whether it remains as resistant to antibiotics as it is on Earth. Aboard the E. coli AntiMicrobial Satellite (EcAMSat), it was launched yesterday aboard the Cygnus and will be going to the ISS for experiments.

When they arrive there, the experiment will begin, in which the scientists will examine how microgravity effects the bacteria while exposed to antibiotics. They actually evolved new genes to resist antibiotics. 

The experiment will help prevent or cure sickness related to the bacteria in space, as well as give us insight into its countermeasures during stressful times; the team aims to determine the lowest dose of antibiotic needed to inhibit its growth. The experiment will be housed in a 6U cubesat.

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Pigeons don’t have the very best reputation, but they are smarter than they seem! Crested pigeons, which are found all over Australia, have been now caught to actually communicate through the noises they produce with their feathers when flying. 

The distinctive whistling has been now looked into by a team of the Australian National University, trying to find the reason. While Darwin once proposed that it was a non-vocal communication on directed to each other, the new study proposes that it might be used as an alarm signal for the flock. If it was that way, there would likely be a specific, physical adaption responsible for the noise; so the team started to search for that by taking high-speed videos of crested pigeons taking flight and paired that with acoustic recordings. They found that the noise oscillates between a high note o the wings’ downstroke, as and a low note during upstroke; they found that the wings have one flight feather that is off, compared to the other eight primary flight feathers, being located more narrow to the shoulder than the other ones and roughly half the width of the feathers on each side of it, dubbed p8. To test whether this was the source of the whistling, they ran feather-removal-experiments. Birds without the P8-feathers made whistles that make completely different high notes, which suggests that the modified feather is responsible for the sound.

Furthermore, they found that the whistling does work as an alarm-signal, and that other pigeons actually respond to it. It is handy as an alarm-stimuli because it is hard to fake, compared to vocal communication; it is also the only one among birds.

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A study conducted by researchers from the Lomonosov Moscow State University (LMSU) suggests that we now might be able to simulate the Martian conditions in experiments with microorganisms, which might lead us one step further to actually conquer the Red Planet one day, as well as get new insights in extraterrestrial life.

The team operated with the belief that on Mars, neither the temperature nor the pressure conditions are what makes it hard to live there, but the radiation. They conducted tests in which microbial communities were contained into simulated Martian regolith and then irritated, the regolith consisting of sedimentary rocks that contained permafrost, which might be similar to Mars’ surface due to pressure and temperature. The radiation the prokaryotes were subjected to were the highest ever in experiments, doses of around 100kGy. The team also used an original constant climate chamber, which maintained the low temperature and atmospheric pressure. Then, they exposed the microorganisms to different levels of gamma radiation; they found that the communities showed quite a high resistance to temperatures and pressure, but the probes (one irradiated, one as a control group) differed a lot from each other; the number of cells and the number of metabolically active bacteria cells remained consisted, but the number of irradiated bacteria decreased by two orders of magnitude, while those of the metabolically active cells decreased threefold. Furthermore, in the exposed samples of permafrost, a high biodiversity of bacteria unfolded, which then underwent significant structural changes when exposed to radiation, Some of them became predominant, while the same group was not present in the control samples.

The study revealed that bacteria were able to survive and prosper under Martian conditions; hypothetical Mars-ecosystems could be conserved in an anabiotic state in the surface-layer of regolith, which is shielded from UV-rays) for at least 1.3 million years, and below that even longer. This might be true for other objects in the solar system, as well as within smaller bodies.

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New research by the Washington University in St. Louis offers a new theory on how auditive information is processed in the brain.

In an animal model, the researchers found that auditory cortex neurons might encode sounds differently than previously thought. Belonging to the group of sensory neurons, they respond to the stimulus quite rapidly, while they are unfocussed in the beginning, but get more selective during the phase of the duration, so the old theory. In the beginning of the sound transition, things seem to be diffusely encoded across the neuron population, but as the study points out, sound identity is more accurately encoded, so the individual can identify sounds quicker and act on that information. The more neurons are active, the faster the individual can react to the information - exactly why it comes in handy that the neural populations involved spike most and encode  the beginning of the stimuli most accurately.

The study involved the recording of individual neurons; to test it in humans, the team needed to use noninvasive techniques that gave them the insight in many neurons together. Event-related potential (ERP) techniques were used to record the brain signals and neural activity synchronized at the onset of the stimulus, while fMRI was used to reflect the activity averaged over several seconds. Both techniques revealed neural encoding of stimulus identity.

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A study from the Vanderbilt University proposes that there is something like visual intelligence, which does not correlate with general intelligence, showing for the first time the broad range of differences in visual ability are not related with general intelligence.

The researchers aimed to find out how much visual abilities vary among individuals, by developing a test called the Novel Object Memory Test or NOMT, which measures the ability of test-subjects to identify unfamiliar objects like the ones above. First, the team surveyed 100 participants by using the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service; they found that responders generally consider visual tasks as different from other tasks related to general intelligence, as well as that they feel there was less variation in visual skills than in non-visual ones, like math or verbal ability. 

During the first part of the test it showed that participants were more likely to identify and object as something specific, if they learned a lot about special types of objects beforehand; to avoid that sense of familiarity, they used novel computer-generated creatures. Then, the participants were to take IQ-related tasks, in order to determine that general intelligence is not linked to NOMT-skills.

The study concluded that not only are these two types of intelligence unrelated, but also that people overestimate their visual abilities.

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A new approach in the fight against Parkinson’s disease proposes that replacing the cells that get impaired and eventually die in the substantial nigra might be a new way of treating the lack of mobility and the loss of motoric skills in the disease.

This brings the patient three key advantages; once diagnosed with a loss of dopamine production in their midbrain, the taks at hand is to save the remaining, healthy cells while they need to keep their bodies going. The portion of non-dopamine producing cells is still alive, so they continue to produce dopamine; this might be due to a misfiled protein called alpha-synuclein. In order to stop spreading, the dead cells have to be replaced, which has been most successful by stem cell therapy, which works by placing new dopamine producing cells into the affected part of the brain. If the first two steps are accomplished, the patient might not even need CRT, since they might be able to rescue enough of the damaged but still living cells, which brings back dopamine production at a level that allows normal movement.

As of now, we have IPS cells (induced pluripotent stem cells), which  have been chemically reprogrammed to be able to become every type of cell. Using them for transplantation not only eliminates the need for immune-suppressors, but also does not come with ethical issues.

An international assembly of labs is currently working on CRT for Parkinson’s, including top-research facilities from the US, Japan and England to Sweden.

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Scientists from the Higher School for Economics and Aarhus University have demonstrated that spatial navigation is linked to language comprehension.

The latter is a complicated cognitive function, and is performed by a network of cortical generators in the brain; physical experience, like movement or spatial motion play, play a key-part in psychological experiences as well as cognitive functions, which is related to how one mentally constructs the meaning of a sentence. The team carried out an experiment at the HSE Centre for Cognition and Decision Making, explaining the relation between those two systems by using neurophysiological data and describing the brain mechanisms supporting navigation systems in both domains.

In storytelling, individuals need to be able to jump to another person’s POV; the study is the first attempt to show that the brain simulates sentence perspective by using non-linguistic areas, which are typically in charge of video-spatial thinking. Earlier studies already pointed out that humans have certain spatial preferences, based either on the individual’s body (egocentric) or independent from it (allocentric); although this is not absolute and changes in various situations, those preferences define how one perceives the surrounding space, as well as how they plan and understand navigation in there.

For the experiment, the participants had to solve two types of tasks; the first was a computer-based spatial navigate task, which involved movement through a twisting virtual tunnel, at which’s end they had to indicate the beginning of it. The shape was designed so that participants with egocentric and allocentric perspectives would estimate this starting point differently, which helped the researchers to split them up according to their reference frame predisposition. The second task involved understanding simple sentences and match them with pictures.Those were different in terms of their perspective, and the same narrative could be described using first or second person pronouns. The participants had to choose pictures matched the situation described best by the sentence.

During both tasks, they wore EEG-helmets; spectral perturbation registered by those demonstrated a lot of areas responsible for navigation are also active during the completion of the tasks. Furthermore, the activation of areas when the participants heard the sentences depended on their spatial preferences. The correlation between both functions, which are highly dependent on the participant’s egocentric or allocentric perspective, both prove that this two phenomena are connected, as well as that the process of language comprehension activated brain-navigation systems.

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to everyone who already follows me:

this is Elli,previous owner of minus229k1 and schmunzelkatze/quantumcat369.... i managed to loose both the PW to my main blog (minus229k1) AND the one to my mail-adress i signed in with...so, i hae tried everything possible, from changing my mail-adress to msging tumblr, but so far nothing has worked so... PLEASE: if you can somehow see who i was following on minus229k1,PLEASE send me their links :( i am so desperate and feel really dumb...

thanks.