Madhav Patel

ucresearch: Build your own Lego microscope LegoScope is a DIY...

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 21:16:15 -0400

Build your own Lego microscope

LegoScope is a DIY microscope made out of legos, lenses and a few custom-made pieces. The UCSF grad students behind the project spoke with Synapse about the ways in which LegoScope can demystify microscopy and science education:

How can LegoScope help students learn?

Reid Williams: It’s not what you’re teaching, but how are you teaching. What’s really interesting for us, and what we’ve heard from teachers, is that there’s an advantage in a very hands-on, process-oriented fashion. The underlying need that we’re working towards is learning something by putting together a tool rather than watching someone lecture.

If you are teaching the fifth to eighth grades, LegoScope can help incorporate a more intuitive feel for optics, or just for building and systems-thinking in general. Students would take away more than microscopy and optics, but also the more intangible aspects, like an intuitive understanding of how light behaves. It can be a very powerful exercise.

Harrison Liu: A microscope is seen almost like a “black box,” yet we can take it apart and see how it works with LegoScope. When you build something, then you can take ownership of it, you really learn it well. You have to learn what each part does. It’s different from normal teaching.

laughingsquid: Things Come Apart, Beautiful Photos Of...

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 21:13:05 -0400

laughingsquid:

Things Come Apart, Beautiful Photos Of Disassembled Technology by Todd McLellan

prguitarman: MY...

Sat, 25 May 2013 13:30:26 -0400

prguitarman:

MY BRAIN!!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/minimonkey/monkey-light-pro-bicycle-wheel-display-system

Photo

Sun, 19 May 2013 20:38:10 -0400

llamaramabingbang: The Hindi writing says “Baba Nam Kevalam” -...

Sun, 19 May 2013 20:37:43 -0400

llamaramabingbang:

The Hindi writing says “Baba Nam Kevalam” - a mantra that means ‘Everything is an expression of one infinite, loving Consciousness’.

myampgoesto11: Stargazing At The Elqui Domos Hotel In Chile |...

Sun, 19 May 2013 18:05:58 -0400

myampgoesto11:

Stargazing At The Elqui Domos Hotel In Chile | Designed by RDM Arquitectura | Photos by James Florio

In the heart of the mythical Elqui Valley in Pisco, surrounded by the Andes Mountains, 500km north of Santiago in central Chile, lies a magical place that allows for star-spangled dreams beneath the clear pure sky. Combining stargazing and specialized astronomic tours with night-time horseback riding, meditation and even tarot readings, Elqui Domos is a hotel quite like no other.

It was completed in 2005 to fulfil its owners’ desire to observe and enjoy the grandeur of the one of the world’s most star-filled skies. It is one of only seven astronomic hotels around the world and the only one in the Southern Hemisphere, offering breathtaking views of the magic skies draped over the Elqui Valley (the valley is renowned for its sharp, clear skies, as it happens to sit under one of the clearest atmospheres in the world). The lack of rain and pleasant weather all year round set the perfect conditions for astronomic tourism, where guests can gather to enjoy a unique chance to liaise with the stars.

(via Yatzer)

thatscienceguy: Awesome bubble geometry!

Fri, 03 May 2013 17:37:23 -0400

thatscienceguy:

Awesome bubble geometry!

did-you-kno: Source

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:46:52 -0400

did-you-kno:

Source

earthandanimals: “Leo the lion, Shere Khan the tiger and Baloo...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:16:47 -0400

earthandanimals:

“Leo the lion, Shere Khan the tiger and Baloo the bear were found together as cubs during a police raid of a drug baron’s home in Atlanta. When the young trio moved to Noah’s Ark rescue center in Locust Grove, Ga., zookeepers decided to keep them together, and they all still live and play in their very own habitat. Visitors can watch the 1,000-pound bear, 350-pound lion and 350-pound tiger cuddle, lounge and wrestle together, and zoo Co-Founder Jama Hedgecoth says the animals are oblivious to the fact that they aren’t natural companions.”

neuromorphogenesis: Can Big Science Figure Out...

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 07:25:28 -0400

neuromorphogenesis:

Can Big Science Figure Out Consciousness?

President Obama will soon declare a second ‘decade of the brain.’ The multibillion dollar project, to be run by the Office of Science and Technology, hopes to map the human brain as successfully as the Human Genome Project mapped our DNA code. The considerable resources of the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Department, and the National Science Foundation will be coordinated with universities and private foundations.

The idea is to join the techniques of neuroscience and nanoscience to figure out what causes illness and what creates human consciousness. The scientists involved in project planning are breathlessly excited that this might lead to a paradigm shift. Perhaps we will gain precious insights into alzheimer’s,autism, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. And perhaps we will even understand what makes us most human- how the brain makes mind.

The project is a good idea, but don’t hold your breath that it will lead to any quick clinical breakthroughs or deep insights into human consciousness. We have been down this path before and the clearest lesson is that the brain reveals its secrets reluctantly and in very small packets. The second clearest lesson is the great difficulty translating fantastic basic science into practical gains in clinical diagnosis and care.

The human brain is by far the most complicated thing in the known universe. Its 100 billion neurons each connect to 1000 other neurons and they signal each other constantly through the mediation of dozens of augmenting or inhibiting neurotransmitters. The miracle is not that things sometimes go wrong, but rather that they so often go right.

There won’t be one cause of what we now call schizophrenia or autism- more likely there will be hundreds of different pathways. In figuring all this out, there will be no walks and no home runs- just occasional singles and many strikeouts. This is not wholesale work that can be achieved in any one ‘decade of the brain’; it will be the slow, steady retail slog of many generations of scientists.

We have been this route many times before. The National Institute of Mental Health designated the 1990’s as the Decade of the Brain and much good neuroscience was done. But generally the brain was very selfish in revealing itself and the results failed to live up to expectations.

The neuroscience of the late nineteenth century was similarly brilliant and similarly oversold as being on the cusp of the kind of fundamentalunderstanding that still eludes us- and will for some time.

If you had to bet between the brain’s capacity to hold secrets and our capacity to discover them, the smart short term money should always go on the brain.

That doesn’t mean that President Obama’s project isn’t a great idea. Even if we don’t quickly unlock the mysteries of schizophrenia or consciousness, every little step forward helps. And likely there will be unanticipated gains, particularly in artificial intelligence and brain prosthetics.

Certainly spending money on brain research beats buying yet another aircraft carrier, or continuing tax breaks for oil companies, or perpetuating the monopoly pricing that allows drug companies to rip off billions every year from the government and consumers.

Just don’t expect more than our current tools can deliver. The Human Genome project is one of man’s grandest scientific achievements- but it has had a fairly minimal impact on our nation’s health- much less for instance than the reduction in smoking that has occurred simultaneously.

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Sun, 07 Apr 2013 07:23:06 -0400

wired: Well played, HBO. Just as Jurassic Park 3D hits...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 20:46:33 -0400

wired:

Well played, HBO. Just as Jurassic Park 3D hits theaters, the premium cable channel announced a new movie titled Bone Wars, a period comedy based on the rivalry between two nineteenth-century paleontologists. If an HBO comedy about battlin’ dino-scientists isn’t enough to pique your interest, then just wait until you hear who’s playing the paleontologists: Steve Carell and James Gandolfini, who will also produce the film.

[MORE]

nbctv: Nailed it!

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 20:12:41 -0400

nbctv:

Nailed it!

Human Astrocytes are Different

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 19:39:59 -0400

Human Astrocytes are Different:

neuroticthought:

by Janet Kwazniak

Comparing human brains (and to a lesser extent all primate brains) to other animals like the mouse, we have many more, much bigger and much more complex astrocytes. Astrocytes have contributed to our larger brain by an order of magnitude more than neurons have. Astrocytes make contact and ‘surround’ synapses; one human astrocyte can encompasses 2 million synapses. They seem to look over the communication between neurons and are involved in long-term potentiation, the first stage of memory and learning. They release TNFalpha which increases the strength of synaptic transmissions. One human astrocyte makes contact with more synapses because of their bigger size and longer thin fibrils reaching to more distant synapses.

Astrocytes communicate with neighbouring astrocytes through movement of calcium ions. Waves of calcium pass through groups of astrocytes. These waves are faster and more extensive in human astrocytes. So as a communicating group, astrocytes affect the electrical and chemical environment of neuron synapses. And human astrocytes appear to do it better.

So… clever idea – put human astrocytes in mice and see what happens. Xiaoning Han et al (citation below) injected new born mice with human cells destined to become astrocytes. The human cells florished at the expense of the mouse ones, migrated to the right places and intergrated with each other and the mouse astrocytes. But they were the size and complexity that they would have been in a human brain. So the mice ended up with the more numerous, bigger and more connected human astrocytes amongst their own mouse ones. Like in humans the calcium waves were faster and the TNFalpha more potent. That this procedure worked as well as it did is a bit of a surprise.

When the mice were adult they were tested against control mice that had transplants of mouse rather than human astrocytes. The human astrocytes gave significantly better memories and learning. When the TNFalpha was disrupted, the human astrocyte advantage was much reduced.

What can be done with this development?

First, we could think of the brain differently. Last year, I posted what if? One of the imagined shifts of viewpoint was:

“There is a trickle of new results about the function of glial cells (those ignored cells that outnumber the neurons by factors like 10). What if: more of less all the work in the brain was actually done by very local groups of glial cells and neurons functioned like a kind of telephone system between groups of glia.”

Second, we can stop taking the simpler computer metaphors, ones containing only neurons and weighted connections, as a reasonably detailed model of the brain. “We are our connectome” also becomes less believable. The Neuron Theory has taken a little knock – there is more to brain processing then neurons firing.

Thirdly, these mice can be used to study astrocytes using procedures that are possible in animals but not humans.

Fourthly, they would be good systems to study diseases of the astrocytes and even to show whether a disease involves astrocytes or not.

Here is the paper’s summary:

Human astrocytes are larger and more complex than those of infraprimate mammals, suggesting that their role in neural processing has expanded with evolution. To assess the cell-autonomous and species-selective properties of human glia, we engrafted human glial progenitor cells (GPCs) into neonatal immunodeficient mice. Upon maturation, the recipient brains exhibited large numbers and high proportions of both human glial progenitors and astrocytes. The engrafted human glia were gap-junction-coupled to host astroglia, yet retained the size and pleomorphism of hominid astroglia, and propagated Ca 2+ signals 3-fold faster than their hosts. Long-term potentiation (LTP) was sharply enhanced in the human glial chimeric mice, as was their learning, as assessed by Barnes maze navigation, object-location memory, and both contextual and tone fear conditioning. Mice allografted with murine GPCs showed no enhancement of either LTP or learning. These findings indicate that human glia differentially enhance both activity-dependent plasticity and learning in mice.

Han, X., Chen, M., Wang, F., Windrem, M., Wang, S., Shanz, S., Xu, Q., Oberheim, N., Bekar, L., Betstadt, S., Silva, A., Takano, T., Goldman, S., & Nedergaard, M. (2013). Forebrain Engraftment by Human Glial Progenitor Cells Enhances Synaptic Plasticity and Learning in Adult Mice Cell Stem Cell, 12 (3), 342-353 DOI: 10.1016/j.stem.2012.12.015

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Fri, 08 Mar 2013 17:32:56 -0500

EyeWire - Help Map the Retinal Connectome

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 19:09:15 -0500

EyeWire - Help Map the Retinal Connectome

jtotheizzoe: Creating Order From Chaos This is a little...

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 17:27:30 -0500

jtotheizzoe:

Creating Order From Chaos

This is a little different from the video we saw earlier, where the rainy wooshing of a table full of ball bearings perfectly demonstrates how systems tend toward chaos, simply because there are more ways in which they can take random positions than ordered ones.

In this time-lapse video, a random input (a table vibrating at 20 Hz) allows two intertwined chains to separate. Randomness rears its head here by allowing the two chains to take on multiple arrangements. But because they are limited in a key way (being connected to the rest of their chain), an interesting thing happens. They end up separating from each other rather than becoming even more tangled.

Long molecules like DNA can be randomly unwound in the same way (think heat!). This is still the power of randomness, it’s only the outcome that’s different.

(via io9)

jtotheizzoe: What Do Fish Thoughts Look Like? Like us,...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 19:20:43 -0500

jtotheizzoe:

What Do Fish Thoughts Look Like?

Like us, zebrafish get hungry. But unlike us they have to engage full-on hunting mode instead of just walking to the fridge to get a snack. By observing a fish brain while it hunts for dinner, Japanese scientists have seen exactly what thoughts look like on the scale of single neurons.

Zebrafish, a common model organism used in biology labs around the world, were held in place while a paramecium snack swam in front of their eye. The scientists were able to genetically engineer the fish’s neurons to glow green when activated, and because the fish are nearly transparent, they could use sophisticated microscopes to map which neurons were firing.

What you’re looking at is the thought pattern of a zebrafish tracking its prey! This is the “thought” that represents “yum yum dinner”. It’s super-important to know that no single neuron holds a thought. Anything that we think or feel exists as a network of neurons firing (or not firing) in a very particular pattern. Understanding that pattern can help us map how an abstract thought is written in “meatspace” so to speak.

The only catch is taking the pattern you see and making it understandable. That fish thought above? That’s the thought, but we have no clue what it means yet. Like following a road map without labels, this trip through the brain is still a confusing one.

(via medgadget)

who-is-ryan: Beyonce - “I have all the power…”

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 22:11:39 -0500

who-is-ryan:

Beyonce - “I have all the power…”

quantumaniac: Werner Heisenberg 37 years ago today, the world...

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 22:08:03 -0500

quantumaniac:

Werner Heisenberg

37 years ago today, the world lost one of its greatest minds.

Werner Karl Heisenberg (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist, Nobel Laureate (1932) and total badass. Along with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, he developed the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics in 1925 - one of the most important advancements in the history of physics. However, in 1927 he published an equally, if not more, influential concept - the uncertainty principle, which asserts that there is a fundamental limit to the precision with certain pairs of physical properties of any given particle may be known, most famously momentum and position. Essentially, the more precisely one of the pairs is known - the less so for the other.

But Heisenberg’s genius didn’t stop here, he also made influential contributions to the theories of the atomic nucleus, ferromagnetism and was a key member of the development of the first West German nuclear reactor. Following his controversial nuclear research during World War II, he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, which was soon thereafter renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics.

“Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves.” - Werner Heisenberg