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YOU ARE THE REASON
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we're not kids anymore.
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Jules of Nature
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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Sweet Seals For You, Always
Origami Around
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One Nice Bug Per Day
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KIROKAZE
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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The Art of Storytelling: Why We Relate to Characters
No matter how a narrative is expressed; through words, gestures or drawings; our brains relate best to the characters, focusing on the thoughts and feelings of the protagonist of each story.
The research is in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. (full access paywall)
These 17 Women Changed The Face Of Physics
Click through to read the rest.
Just thought you should know.
Just rumors
The new record-holding prime number, dubbed “M77232917,” was discovered by Jonathan Pace, a 51-year-old electrical engineer living in Germantown, Tennessee, on December 26, 2017.
Using a computer powered by an off-the-shelf Intel Core i5-6600 processor, a FedEx employee from Tennessee has discovered the largest prime number known to humanity. At 23,249,425 digits long, it’s nearly a million digits longer than the previous record holder.
Continue Reading.
That’s crazy! Who goes around saying... I’m gonna discover a new prime number?! Lol I just wanna find my house keys and cell phone.
(Image caption: The maturation of fibres of a brain structure called the arcuate fascicle (green) between the ages of three and four years establishes a connection between two critical brain regions: a region (brown) at the back of the temporal lobe that supports adults thinking about others and their thoughts, and a region (red) in the frontal lobe that is involved in keeping things at different levels of abstraction and, therefore, helps us to understand what the real world is and what the thoughts of others are. Credit: © MPI CBS)
The importance of relating to others: why we only learn to understand other people after the age of four
When we are around four years old we suddenly start to understand that other people think and that their view of the world is often different from our own. Researchers in Leiden and Leipzig have explored how that works. Publication in Nature Communications on 21 March.
At around the age of four we suddenly do what three-year-olds are unable to do: put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig and at Leiden University have shown how this enormous developmental step occurs: a critical fibre connection in the brain matures. Senior researcher and Leiden developmental psychologist Nikolaus Steinbeis, co-author of the article, took part in the research. Lead author, PhD candidate Charlotte Grosse-Wiesmann, worked under his supervision.
Little Maxi
If you tell a 3-year-old child the following story of little Maxi, they will most probably not understand: Maxi puts his chocolate on the kitchen table, then goes to play outside. While he is gone, his mother puts the chocolate in the cupboard. Where will Maxi look for his chocolate when he comes back? A 3-year-old child will not understand why Maxi would be surprised not to find the chocolate on the table where he left it. It is only by the age of 4 years that a child will correctly predict that Maxi will look for his chocolate where he left it and not in the cupboard where it is now.
Theory of Mind
The researchers observed something similar when they showed a 3-year-old child a chocolate box that contained pencils instead of chocolates. When the child was asked what another child would expect to be in the box, they answered “pencils”, although the other child would not know this. Only a year later, around the age of four years, however, will they understand that the other child had hoped for chocolates. Thus, there is a crucial developmental breakthrough between three and four years: this is when we start to attribute thoughts and beliefs to others and to understand that their beliefs can be different from ours. Before that age, thoughts don’t seem to exist independently of what we see and know about the world. That is, this is when we develop a Theory of Mind.
Independent development
The researchers have now discovered what is behind this breakthrough. The maturation of fibres of a brain structure called the arcuate fascicle between the ages of three and four years establishes a connection between two critical brain regions: a region at the back of the temporal lobe that supports adult thinking about others and their thoughts, and a region in the frontal lobe that is involved in keeping things at different levels of abstraction and, therefore, helps us to understand what the real world is and what the thoughts of others are. Only when these two brain regions are connected through the arcuate fascicle can children start to understand what other people think. This is what allows us to predict where Maxi will look for his chocolate. Interestingly, this new connection in the brain supports this ability independently of other cognitive abilities, such as intelligence, language ability or impulse control.
So interesting!!!
Hahahahaha
But sushi is soooooo goood!? [The Awkward Yeti]
Haha so funny!
Tiny fibers open new windows into the brain
For the first time ever, a single flexible fiber no bigger than a human hair has successfully delivered a combination of optical, electrical, and chemical signals back and forth into the brain, putting into practice an idea first proposed two years ago. With some tweaking to further improve its biocompatibility, the new approach could provide a dramatically improved way to learn about the functions and interconnections of different brain regions.
The new fibers were developed through a collaboration among material scientists, chemists, biologists, and other specialists. The results are reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience, in a paper by Seongjun Park, an MIT graduate student; Polina Anikeeva, the Class of 1942 Career Development Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Yoel Fink, a professor in the departments of Materials Science and Engineering, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Gloria Choi, the Samuel A. Goldblith Career Development Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and 10 others at MIT and elsewhere.
The fibers are designed to mimic the softness and flexibility of brain tissue. This could make it possible to leave implants in place and have them retain their functions over much longer periods than is currently possible with typical stiff, metallic fibers, thus enabling much more extensive data collection. For example, in tests with lab mice, the researchers were able to inject viral vectors that carried genes called opsins, which sensitize neurons to light, through one of two fluid channels in the fiber. They waited for the opsins to take effect, then sent a pulse of light through the optical waveguide in the center, and recorded the resulting neuronal activity, using six electrodes to pinpoint specific reactions. All of this was done through a single flexible fiber just 200 micrometers across — comparable to the width of a human hair.
Previous research efforts in neuroscience have generally relied on separate devices: needles to inject viral vectors for optogenetics, optical fibers for light delivery, and arrays of electrodes for recording, adding a great deal of complication and the need for tricky alignments among the different devices. Getting that alignment right in practice was “somewhat probabilistic,” Anikeeva says. “We said, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a device that could just do it all.”
After years of effort, that’s what the team has now successfully demonstrated. “It can deliver the virus [containing the opsins] straight to the cell, and then stimulate the response and record the activity — and [the fiber] is sufficiently small and biocompatible so it can be kept in for a long time,” Anikeeva says.
Since each fiber is so small, “potentially, we could use many of them to observe different regions of activity,” she says. In their initial tests, the researchers placed probes in two different brain regions at once, varying which regions they used from one experiment to the next, and measuring how long it took for responses to travel between them.
The key ingredient that made this multifunctional fiber possible was the development of conductive “wires” that maintained the needed flexibility while also carrying electrical signals well. After much work, the team was able to engineer a composite of conductive polyethylene doped with graphite flakes. The polyethylene was initially formed into layers, sprinkled with graphite flakes, then compressed; then another pair of layers was added and compressed, and then another, and so on. A member of the team, Benjamin Grena, a recent graduate in materials science and engineering, referred to it as making “mille feuille,” (literally, “a thousand leaves,” the French name for a Napoleon pastry). That method increased the conductivity of the polymer by a factor of four or five, Park says. “That allowed us to reduce the size of the electrodes by the same amount.”
One immediate question that could be addressed through such fibers is that of exactly how long it takes for the neurons to become light-sensitized after injection of the genetic material. Such determinations could only be made by crude approximations before, but now could be pinpointed more clearly, the team says. The specific sensitizing agent used in their initial tests turned out to produce effects after about 11 days.
The team aims to reduce the width of the fibers further, to make their properties even closer to those of the neural tissue. “The next engineering challenge is to use material that is even softer, to really match” the adjacent tissue, Park says. Already, though, dozens of research teams around the world have been requesting samples of the new fibers to test in their own research.
“The authors report some remarkably sophisticated designs and capabilities in multifunctional fiber devices, where they create a single platform for colocalized expression, recording, and illumination in optogenetics studies of brain function,” says John Rogers, professor of materials science and engineering, biomedical engineering, and neurological surgery at Northwestern University, who was not associated with this research. “These types of advances in technologies and tools are essential to progress in neuroscience research,“ he says.
Lol
When you reblog a good post from a fandom you’re not in
No ink required: paper can be printed with light
In an effort to curb the adverse environmental impacts of paper production, researchers in a new study have developed a light-printable paper—paper that can be printed with UV light, erased by heating to 120 °C (250 °F), and rewritten more than 80 times. The secret to printing with light lies in the color-changing chemistry of nanoparticles, a thin coating of which can be easily applied to conventional paper to transform it into the light-printable version.
The researchers, Wenshou Wang and coauthors at Shandong University in China; the University of California, Riverside; and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have published a paper on the light-printable rewritable paper in a recent issue of Nano Letters.
“The greatest significance of our work is the development of a new class of solid-state photoreversible color-switching system to produce an ink-free light-printable rewritable paper that has the same feel and appearance as conventional paper, but can be printed and erased repeatedly without the need for additional ink,” Yadong Yin, Chemistry Professor at the University of California, Riverside, told Phys.org. “Our work is believed to have enormous economic and environmental merits to modern society.”
Read more.
A stop sine…[http://bit.ly/2lc0MwZ]
Brain Connections Which Keep Related Memories Distinct From Each Other Identified
Neuroscientists at the University of Bristol are a step closer to understanding how the connections in our brain which control our episodic memory work in sync to make some memories stronger than others. The findings reveal a previously unsuspected division of memory function in the pathways between two areas of the brain, and suggest that certain subnetworks within the brain work separately, to enhance the distinctiveness of memories.
The research is in Nature Neuroscience. (full access paywall)
So neat!
The Rhythm That Makes Memories Permanent
Scientists at IST Austria identify mechanism that regulates rhythmic brain waves – inhibition at synapses is the key to make memories permanent
The research is in Neuron. (full open access)
Repurposed nuclear waste turned into diamond batteries that last thousands of years
New technology has been developed that uses nuclear waste to generate electricity in a nuclear-powered battery. A team of physicists and chemists from the University of Bristol have grown a man-made diamond that, when placed in a radioactive field, is able to generate a small electrical current.
The development could solve some of the problems of nuclear waste, clean electricity generation and battery life.
READ MORE ON UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL | NEWS
LEARN MORE ON THE CHEMICAL ENGINEER
Total number of neurons—not enlarged prefrontal region—hallmark of human brain
A new scientific study puts the final nail in the coffin of a long-standing theory to explain human’s remarkable cognitive abilities: that human evolution involved the selective expansion of the brain’s prefrontal cortex.
It does so by determining that the prefrontal region of the brain which orchestrates abstract thinking, complex planning and decision making contains the same proportion of neurons and fills the same relative volume in non-human primates as it does in humans.
“People need to drop the idea that the human brain is exceptional,” said Vanderbilt University neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, who directed the study. “Our brain is basically a primate brain. Because it is the largest primate brain, it does have one distinctive feature: It has the highest number of cortical neurons of any primate. Humans have 16 billion compared with 9 billion in gorillas and orangutans and six-to-seven billion in chimpanzees. It is remarkable, but it is not exceptional.”
In her popular science book The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable (MIT Press: March 2016), Herculano-Houzel explains how human brains grew so large, even larger than the brains of gorillas and orangutans, whose bodies are larger than ours. Her answer is surprisingly simple. It is the invention of cooking.
Cooking allowed early humans to overcome the energetic barrier that limits the size of the brains of other primates, she has determined. However, when the human brains grew larger they maintained the basic structure of the primate brain, including the size of the prefrontal cortex, her latest study has found. The comparison of the relative size of the prefrontal region in primate brains is described in a paper titled “No relative expansion of the number of prefrontal neurons in primate and human evolution” by Herculano-Houzel and postdoctoral fellow Mariana Gabi published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences early edition.
The researchers compared the brains of seven non-human primates of varying sizes – pig-tailed and crab-eating macaques, baboon, marmoset, galago, owl monkey and capuchin – with the human brain. They found that both the human and non-human primates devote about 8 percent of their neurons to the prefrontal region of the cortex. In addition, they determined that volumes of human prefrontal gray and white matter match the expected volumes for the number of neurons and other cells in the white matter when compared to other primates.
“Our big brains are very costly. They use 25 percent of all the energy the body needs each day,” Herculano-Houzel said. “Cooking allowed us to overcome an energetic barrier that restricts the size of the brains of other primates.”
Take the case of the gorilla. It must spend at least eight hours per day foraging and eating to support its body and brain. The human brain is three times larger than that of the gorilla. If a gorilla had a brain the size of a human, it would have to spend an additional one and a half hours a day finding food. So there simply aren’t enough hours in the day for the gorilla to support a bigger brain. Likewise, if humans ate like any other primate, we would have to spend nine and a half hours per day eating – every single day.
That’s where cooking comes in. “By cooking, I mean cutting, dicing, smashing–all types of food preparation,” Herculano-Houzel said. “Take a single carrot. If you eat it raw, it will take 10 to 15 minutes of vigorous chewing and your digestive system will only capture about one third of the calories. But, if you cut the carrot up and cook it for a few minutes, it takes only a few minutes to consume and your body gets 100 percent of the calories.”
The origin of cooking, as Herculano-Houzel defines it, dates back about 2.5 million years ago with the development of the first stone tools. Among other things, these stone tools were man’s first food processors, allowing our ancestors to slice and dice and mash their food. Evidence for the controlled use of fire appears about 400,000 years ago.
“Those early tool makers had brains about the same size as gorillas. But, beginning about 1.8 million years ago, the brains of our ancestors began growing steadily, tripling in size over the next 1.5 million years,” said Herculano-Houzel.
“It’s amazing that something we now take for granted, cooking, was such a transformational technology which gave us the big brains that have made us the only species to study ourselves and to generate knowledge that transcends what was observed firsthand; to tamper with itself, fixing imperfections with the likes of glasses, implants and surgery and thus changing the odds of natural selection; and to modify its environment so extensively (for better and for worse), extending its habitat to improbable locations.”
This is so cool!
