The latest Encephalon is up at The Primate Diaries. Articles include a cool new imaging technique called “Brainbow”, immune system linked anxiety and Asperger’s correlation to sleep disorders.

Everyone knows there are magnetic fields all over the earth. It is how your compass works. For the first time a map Earth’s entire magnetic field has been made.

The first global map of magnetic peculiarities - or anomalies - on Earth has been assembled by an international team of researchers.

Magnetic anomalies are caused by differences in the magnetisation of the rocks in the Earth’s crust.

The magnetic signature of the Earth’s crust has been measured for many decades by a multitude of groups; but now, for the first time, the data has been combined to give a truly worldwide view of the phenomenon.

It would be interesting if some enterprising avian researcher would combine this magnetic information with migration charts of migratory birds. Birds are well known for their magnetoreception, it would be interesting to see if there is a correlation to magnetic “landmarks” and migratory paths.

More information on the project can be seen at the project home - World Digital Magnetic Anomaly Map

Arizona State University is making some great advances in the field of nanotechnology electronic storage. Their new technique is called programmable metallization cell (PMC). It is apparently one tenth cheaper than equivalently sized flash drives and a whopping 10,000 times more energy efficient. Put together, this means you can have tremendously small storage capacities in tiny packages which use equally tiny amounts of energy.

PMC memory stores information in a fundamentally different way from flash. Instead of storing bits as an electronic charge, the technology creates nanowires from copper atoms the size of a virus to record binary ones and zeros.

In research published in October’s IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, Kozicki and his collaborators from the Jülich Research Center in Germany describe how the PMC builds an on-demand copper bridge between two electrodes. When the technology writes a binary 1, it creates a nanowire bridge between two electrodes. When no wire is present, that state is stored as a 0.

The first thing that came to my mind while reading this was potential neural applications. Imagine taking this tiny storage unit and coupling it with a paper thin battery. Throw in a “Utah” electrode arrays and you have a portable brain imaging implant that can hold hours, days, weeks worth of information. This could be excellent for research in a number of areas, from behavior studies to epilepsy treatment.

The article describes how a terrabyte of information could be stored on a thumbdrive. Imagine how much could be stored on the size of a pin, or a sliver of paper. More than enough for an implant. A mouse could receive one of these paper thin implants and perform some behavioral test (such as running a maze).

Researchers would have an exact readout of the brain areas selected coresponding to time. Include a transmitter in the implant to get data back off the device and you have a mouse that can perform any number of tests and provide excellent data without the need for bulky or interfering equipment.

Hat tip Foresight Nanotech Instititute.

It seems like I’ve got an artistic theme going, so this news article fits in nicely. A study published in Neuropsychologia shows that creative thinkers actually have altered brain activity when compared to others. This occurs both during normal, resting state and while solving problems.

One difference was that the creative solvers exhibited greater activity in several regions of the right hemisphere. Previous research has suggested that the right hemisphere of the brain plays a special role in solving problems with creative insight, likely due to right-hemisphere involvement in the processing of loose or “remote” associations between the elements of a problem, which is understood to be an important component of creative thought. The current study shows that greater right-hemisphere activity occurs even during a “resting” state in those with a tendency to solve problems by creative insight. This finding suggests that even the spontaneous thought of creative individuals, such as in their daydreams, contains more remote associations.

Second, creative and methodical solvers exhibited different activity in areas of the brain that process visual information. The pattern of “alpha” and “beta” brainwaves in creative solvers was consistent with diffuse rather than focused visual attention. This may allow creative individuals to broadly sample the environment for experiences that can trigger remote associations to produce an Aha! Moment.

BPR3 has published the official icons. If you are a blogger, these allow you to identify which of your posts are about peer-reviewed articles. If you are a reader, these let you know that the blogger has read the original publication and isn’t just spewing pre-processed information from the mainstream media.

For more information, check out the announcement.

Currently, the only aggregation of these posts are by hand or using a crude Technorati search. Fret not though, we are rolling out the aggregation soon! As soon as I can finish it, that is. I’ve been making good progress and have a rough working prototype finished. Once we polish off a few more features we plan to roll it out to some beta-testers, then distribute for mass consumption.

Keep an eye out here or at BPR3 for more details as they come.

Want to see Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper up close? Now you can.

A 16 billion pixel image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper has been posted on the internet, giving art lovers a detailed view of the 15th Century work.

Experts will be able to see segments as though just centimetres away and examine otherwise unavailable details.

It is visible at http://www.haltadefinizione.com.

“You can see how Leonardo made the cups transparent, something you can’t ordinarily see,” he said. “You can also note the state of degradation the painting is in.”

I ran across an interesting Wired article discussing the merits of a new initiative: Open Notebook Science. This touches directly on the issue I brought up in a previous post.

So what happens to all the research that doesn’t yield a dramatic outcome — or, worse, the opposite of what researchers had hoped? It ends up stuffed in some lab drawer. The result is a vast body of squandered knowledge that represents a waste of resources and a drag on scientific progress. This information — call it dark data — must be set free.

It is a well written article, if a bit short, expressing why all research data should be open for public viewing. The “dark data”, results that didn’t see the limelight because they failed, were inconclusive or even contrary to the project, may be important to other research labs. Your trash may be my treasure.

In a similar vein, there is a movement called Open Notebook Science, championed by chemist Jean-Claude Bradley. This movement wants to make science completely open and transparent by having scientists post their notebooks. Complete access to notebooks, including the good, bad and ugly, would move science forward at a striking pace. I happen to agree with them. It is the next revolution in science. That said, it might take years to happen. There are a lot of politics and money tied up in the current system. Old habits die hard.

More links:

Jean-Claude Bradley’s blog
UsefulChem on Open Notebook Science
Science in the Open - blog on Open Science
Jeremiah Faith’s Open Notebook - Graduate student at Boston University
Jeremiah’s thoughts on Open Science

I like art. I almost went to an art school to become an artist instead of an engineering school. I was at first intrigued by what my school was doing, a “BioArt” exhibit. Sounds interesting, doesn’t it?

From Lab Work to Artwork: New Initiative Melds Biotechnology, Electronic Art
“Through ongoing art and research exhibitions open to the public, the BioArt program at Rensselaer will bridge the arts and sciences in a very real, very tangible way,” said Kathy High, head of the Arts Department and one of three faculty members leading the initiative. “I see the discipline as a way to allow all people to feel involved and participate in the advances made in biotechnology.”

I was walking through the Biotech building on my way to lab when a large poster caught my eye (it was new). Stopping to take a look, I saw a poster of artist Caitlin Berrigan inserting a butterfly needle into a vein in her arm. Another section of the poster showed her dripping the freshly removed blood over a terrarium of dandelions. The caption detailed how she ate dandelion root as a medicine for Hepatitis C, so she was “giving back” to the dandelions by giving them some of her own blood.

That’s something that makes you stop and go “hmm”. Not a good “this is enlightening me”-hmm. More like a “how did they convince the administration this was a good idea”-hmm.

More details after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry

Deep brain stimulation has been all the rage lately, but not all is not well in Candy Land.

For those who suffer with the debilitating symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, Deep Brain Stimulation offers relief from the tremors and rigidity that can’t be controlled by medicine. A particularly troublesome downside, though, is that these patients often exhibit compulsive behaviors that healthy people, and even those taking medication for Parkinson’s, can easily manage.

DBS implants affect the region of the brain called the subthalamic nucleus (STN), which also modulates decision-making.

“This particular area of the brain is needed for what’s called a ‘hold-your-horses’ signal,” Frank said. “When you’re making a difficult choice, with a conflict between two or more options, an adaptive response for your system to do is to say ‘Hold on for a second. I need to take a little more time to figure out which is the best option.’”

You may have a sweet tooth but your brain doesn’t. More specifically, your neurons don’t especially enjoy storing glycogen. Accumulation of glycogen in neurons leads to cell death. It was widely supported that neurons don’t synthesize or store their own glycogen. Rather, they rely on their neighboring glial cells for nutrition.

A new study in Nature Neuroscience shows that, contrary to popular belief, neurons are capable of synthesizing glycogen. This glycogen synthesis pathway is inhibited by a redundant mechanism. Their research shows that if this mechanism fails, glycogen accumulates in neurons and leads to cell death, a key feature in several neurodegenerative diseases.

Details about the study after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry