A pint and a fight: a great US night
Science Daily
UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers are engaging the help of professional boxers and trainers to study whether a component in red wine and grapes could help reduce the short- and long-term effects of concussions.
Researchers plan to recruit about two dozen professional boxers to take the neuroprotective compound resveratrol after a fight to see if it reduces damage to the brain after impact and helps restore subtle brain functions and connections via its antioxidant effects. If successful, researchers hope the results may be applicable not only to concussions in other sports such as football and hockey, but also to everyday incidents such as falls, auto accidents and other blows to the head.
“We know from animal studies that if we give the drug immediately after or soon after a brain injury, it can dramatically and significantly reduce the damage you see long term,” said Dr. Joshua Gatson, assistant professor of surgery in Burn/Trauma/Critical Care and principal investigator for the study. “There haven’t been any completed human studies yet, so this is really the first look at resveratrol’s effect on traumatic brain injury.”
Uh-oh, it’s begun (part one)
Slashdot
A team of biomedical engineers at the University of Pittsburgh led by Henry Zeringue have managed to grow an active brain in a dish, complete with memories by culturing brain cells capable of forming networks, complete with biological signals. To produce the models, the Pitt team stamped adhesive proteins onto silicon discs. Once the proteins were cultured and dried, cultured hippocampus cells from embryonic rats were fused to the proteins and then given time to grow and connect to form a natural network.
The researchers disabled the cells’ inhibitory response and excited the neurons with an electrical pulse which were then able to sustain the resulting burst of network activity for up to what in neuronal time is 12 long seconds compared to the natural duration of 0.25 seconds. The ability of the brain to hold information ‘online’ long after an initiating stimulus is a hallmark of brain areas such as the prefrontal cortex. The team will next work to understand the underlying factors that govern network communication and stimulation, such as the various electrical pathways between cells and the genetic makeup of individual cells.
Oh God Oh God Oh Darwinian Memetic Morality
ABC
Darrel Ray, raised a fundamentalist Christian in Topeka, Kansas, shed a heavy cloak of guilt surrounding sex after he left the church in the late 1970s and wondered if his experience reflected that of others.
Today, he has finished research that he said bore out his hypotheses – that religion and good sex don’t mix. In an online survey of 14,500 people who had come from a religious background, he discovered that once they had abandoned their churches, their sex lives improved. In his survey, Sex and Secularism, which he publicised last week, Ray drew a direct correlation between guilt and sexual behaviour. Not surprising, but he also learned that guilt eventually subsides.
“We find guilt is a pretty big thing,” said Ray, the author of The God Virus: How God Infects Our Lives and Culture.
Atheists, he concluded, had the best sex of all.
“They can speak with some authority,” he said. “They were raised in very secular homes.”
All his respondents – over 18 and all sexual orientations – had abandoned their churches and described themselves as agnostic or without a religious belief.
Once they left religion, more than 50 per cent saw improvements in their sex lives, 29.6 per cent saw no change and 2.2 percent said it was worse, according to his survey.
Uh-oh, it’s begun (part two)
BBC
Robots are developing their own language to help them navigate and improve their intellectual ability.
The Lingodroid research project lets robots generate random sounds for the places they visit in both simulations and a real office.
The “words” are shared and the robots play games to establish which sound represents which location.
The lexicon has proved so sophisticated that it can be used to help robots find places other robots direct them to.
The machines are being allowed to generate their own words because human language is so loaded with information that robots found it hard to understand, said project leader Dr. Ruth Schulz from the University of Queensland.
“Robot-robot languages take the human out of the loop,” she said. “This is important because the robots demonstrate that they understand the meaning of the words they invent independent of humans.”
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