Schizophrenia and the Teenage Brain: How Can Imaging Help?

Adolescence is a dangerous time for the onset of mental health problems. Advances in brain imaging are helping to picture how neural changes in these crucial years can lead to chronic debilitating mental illness.

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Space Telescope Tech Miniaturized to Look into the Brain

Optical technologies previously used to look at the stars in the sky will be miniaturized to look inside the brain, and could lead to new treatments for neurological diseases. The technologies once used to make corrections to space telescopes, along with new lasers, will help answer a fundamental question, according to Prakash Kara, Ph.D., a researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina. Kara is part of a team at MUSC that was awarded a $4 million grant from the National Science Foundation through its Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). The grant will fund collaborative research between MUSC and the University of Alabama at Birmingham to map changes in blood flow when specific neurons in the brain fire.

Dr. Prakash Kara says new equipment funded by the grant will dramatically improve researchers' ability to capture images deep in the brain. (Credit: Sarah Pack)

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Paralyzed man drinks beer using his imagination

A man who is paralyzed from the neck down was able to drink from a bottle of beer by using his imagination. Erik Sorto, 34, has been paralyzed for the last 13 years, but was able to use a robotic arm controlled by his thoughts recently via two silicon chips in his brain, which were able to determine what his intentions were and then send those commands to a prosthetic arm on a table nearby.

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Flying a jet via mind control

Jan Scheuermann, a quadriplegic and pioneering patient for an experimental Pentagon robotics program, continues to break ground in freeing the mind from the body. The 55-year-old mother of two in 2012 agreed to let surgeons implant electrodes on her brain to control a robotic arm. More recently, she flew an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter simulator using nothing but her thoughts, an official said.

 

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X-ray vision with safe, visible light

According to Nature, scientists are honing methods to reassemble scattered light that passes through opaque objects to create a usable image on the other side, enabling see-through (super!) vision of objects.

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Stroke Detecting Headset prototype from Samsung

Samsung’s Early Detection Sensor & Algorithm Package (EDSAP), developed by  Se-hoon Lim, is meant to detect early signs of stroke. A multiple sensor headset records electrical impulses in the brain, algorithms determine the likelihood of a stroke in one minute, and results are presented in a mobile app.  EDSAP can also analyze stress and sleep patterns, and potentially be used to monitor heart activity.  The company believes that the system can one day be built into one’s own glasses.

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Flexctrl brain, a new 32-channel BCI headset aims to speed up the development of brain technology

If you support only one BCI crowdfunding campaign this month, make it this one. Flexctrl brain is a stylish 32-channel brain-computer interface (BCI) packed with the latest technology, and will be developed by corwdfunding campaing on Indiegogo.

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Playing action video games can boost learning

In the a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bavelier and her team first used a pattern discrimination task to compare action video game players’ visual performance with that of individuals who do not play action video games.

The action-gamers outperformed the non-action gamers. The key to the action-gamers success, the researchers found, was that their brains used a better template for the task at hand.

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Artificial Retina

Physicists developed an interface to the optical nerve using graphene for an optical prostheses.

Graphene is viewed as a kind of "miracle solution": It is thin, transparent and has a tensile strength greater than that of steel. In addition, it conducts electricity better than copper. Since it comprises only a single layer of carbon atoms it is considered two-dimensional.

 In 2010 the scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize for their ground-breaking work on this material.

In October 2013, the "Graphene" project was selected alongside the "Human Brain Project" as a Flagship Project of the EU FET Initiative (Future and Emerging Technologies).

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Brain controlled car steers, accelerates, brakes

AutoNOMOS and the Freie Universität Berlin  are developing BrainDriver, the first car that steers, accelerates, and brakes based on its driver’s thoughts. In a recent experiment, Henrik Matzke drove a car at speeds up to 31 mph.

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