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Yesterday was filled with big doin’s around here. MO did a movie review while, down the hall, BO addressed the importance of having a brain. Lady M, as part of her continuing series of culturally sensitive movie reviews, held a film workshop on the movie “42.” “42” is a biopic about Jackie Robinson, the baseball player who broke the Major League’s color barrier in 1947 (he also was a successful business man after his baseball career butt he didn’t do that on his own). Jackie’s wife, Rachael Robinson, was in attendance along with the film’s stars Harrison Ford, and other...

Reader Scott wrote in to ask, “Does alcohol kill brain cells?”“Oh, Lisa, you and your stories. ‘Bart is a vampire.’ ‘Beer kills brain cells.’ Now let’s go back to that…building…thingy, where our beds and TV…is.” - Homer SimpsonWatch someone after they’ve had a few drinks, and you’ll find evidence that alcohol does something to their brain. They stumble, slur their words, lose control of their emotions, and forget things. Some people have tried to explain this behavior as the aftermath of cell death caused by alcohol. Often, it’s packaged as a neat factoid like “Three beers kill 10,000 brain cells.”Now, ethyl...

President Obama on Tuesday outlined a government-sponsored initiative to map the human brain, casting the proposal as a way to discover new cures for neurological disease and strengthen the economy. “Ideas are what power our economy,” Obama said in announcing the proposal from the White House East Room. “When we invest in the best ideas before anyone else does, our businesses and our workers can make the best products and deliver the best services before anyone else does.” The project would use about $100 million in federal money over the next fiscal year

WASHINGTON — The gun lobby isn’t the only group throwing its weight around trying to thwart President Obama’s plans to combat gun violence. Even a modest proposal to study how violent video games might be affecting young minds has quietly run aground, the victim, sources say, of opposition by the burgeoning video game industry — a $67 billion colossus with increasing clout in Washington.

The flip of a single molecular switch helps create the mature neuronal connections that allow the brain to bridge the gap between adolescent impressionability and adult stability. Now Yale School of Medicine researchers have reversed the process, recreating a youthful brain that facilitated both learning and healing in the adult mouse. Scientists have long known that the young and old brains are very different. Adolescent brains are more malleable or plastic, which allows them to learn languages more quickly than adults and speeds recovery from brain injuries. The comparative rigidity of the adult brain results in part from the function...

Steubenville Convicted Rapist Will Appeal Because His 'Brain Isn't Fully Developed' Alexander Abad-Santos, The Atlantic WireMarch 19,2013Since his defense strategy, claiming that a 16-year-old rape victim wasn't "so" drunk, has failed, the lawyer for one of the two Steubenville football players convicted of rape plans to appeal a guilty verdict, and is now claiming that the 16-year-old rapist's brain wasn't "developed" enough and his client should not have to be on a sex offenders list for life. Walter Madison, the attorney for Ma'lik Richmond, went on Piers Morgan Tonight on Tuesday, explaining why he would appeal Sunday's verdict by 37-year...

Obama has consistently created history, and he did so once again. Brain Activity Map (BAM) is a project that aims to map each neuronal activity and connection in the human brain. The project ever since Obama compared it to the Human Genome Project at his State of union address is widely believed to have garnered funding by the US federal government. The ballpark figure that the Obama administration will allocate to this ambitious project is thought to cross over into a few billion dollars. BAM was first proposed in September 2011 by the Kavli Foundation while they sought to bring...

Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel whose last claim to fame was his expulsion of some 10,000 Jews from their homes in Gush Katif and northern Samaria, is still in a coma, as he has been since 2005. But recent medical treatments show that there is activity in Sharon's brain – specifically when it comes to recognizing photos of family members. Sharon was recently examined by experts at Ben Gurion University and Soroka Hospital, where he underwent an MRI scan, Voice of Israel public radio reported. .....

Blinking Causes Brain To Go Off-Line 03 Jan 2013 New research from Japan suggests that blinking does more than stop our eyes drying out: it is an active process that causes the brain to go off-line, into a more reflective mode, before giving renewed attention. Tamami Nakano of Osaka University and colleagues write about their findings in the 24 December online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, PNAS. In earlier work, where they had invited volunteers to watch Mr Bean videos, Nakano and colleagues discovered that people's eyes blink when they need to pay less attention,...

The connection between mother and child is ever deeper than thought Scientists Discover Children’s Cells Living in Mothers’ Brains The connection between mother and child is ever deeper than thought By Robert Martone | Tuesday, December 4, 2012 | 37 A living connection Image: ock / Анастасия Попова ADVERTISEMENT The link between a mother and child is profound, and new research suggests a physical connection even deeper than anyone thought. The profound psychological and physical bonds shared by the mother and her child begin during gestation when the mother is everything for the developing fetus, supplying warmth and sustenance, while...

The link between a mother and child is profound, and new research suggests a physical connection even deeper than anyone thought. The profound psychological and physical bonds shared by the mother and her child begin during gestation when the mother is everything for the developing fetus, supplying warmth and sustenance, while her heartbeat provides a soothing constant rhythm. The physical connection between mother and fetus is provided by the placenta, an organ, built of cells from both the mother and fetus, which serves as a conduit for the exchange of nutrients, gasses, and wastes. Cells may migrate through the placenta...

Researchers at Boston University have discovered 28 new cases of chronic brain damage in deceased football players — including 15 who played in the NFL — more than doubling the number of documented cases connecting football to long-term brain disease. The NFL players include two Hall of Famers: running back Ollie Matson, who played 14 seasons in the 1950s and 1960s, and Colts tight end John Mackey, who played 10 seasons and once served as the head of the NFL players’ union. Both died last year after suffering from dementia

Researchers at the University of Waterloo, Canada, have built the world’s most sophisticated artificial brain to date. Known as ‘Spaun’, (short for Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network), the model is able to simulate complex brain behaviour and is capable of thinking remembering, seeing and interacting with its environment using a mechanical arm. Although Spaun currently exists in the simulated world inside a computer, it is one of the most advanced models ever created by scientists to understand how the human brain functions. Unlike previous brain models, such as the 'million processor computer', which feature large networks of neurons with generally...

Portions of Albert Einstein’s brain have been found to be unlike those of most people and could be related to his extraordinary cognitive abilities, according to a new study led by Florida State University evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk.

More than 12 years after a car accident left him in a vegetative state, a Canadian man has begun communicating with doctors who are monitoring his brain activity through Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans. The BBC reports that 39-year-old Scott Routley has been able to communicate to doctors that he is not in any pain, marking the first time an uncommunicative, severely brain-damaged patient has been able to give direct answers regarding their care and treatment."Scott has been able to show he has a conscious, thinking mind," British neuroscientist Adrian Owen told the BBC. "We have scanned him several...

With the U.S. presidential election just days away, new research from the University of South Carolina provides fresh evidence that choosing a candidate may depend more on our biological make-up than a careful analysis of issues. That's because the brains of self-identified Democrats and Republicans are hard-wired differently and may be naturally inclined to hold varying, if not opposing, perceptions and values. The USC study, which analyzed MRI scans of 24 USC students, builds on existing research in the emerging field of political neuroscience. "The differences are significant and real," said lead researcher Roger D. Newman-Norlund, an assistant professor of...

A follow up post inspired by my previous post regarding that totally heartless question he posed to the father of Tyrone Woods, one of the Navy Seals killed in Benghazi.

(CNN) -- There's no escaping the fact that the Human Brain Project, with its billion-dollar plan to recreate the human mind inside a supercomputer, sounds like a science fiction nightmare. But those involved hope their ambitious goal of simulating the tangle of neurons and synapses that power our thought processes could offer solutions to tackling conditions such as depression, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's. The Human Brain venture is the next step in a long-running program that has already succeeded in using computers to create a virtual replica of part of a rat's neocortex -- a section of the brain believed...

The Healing Power of Touch: Tickling Reduces Stroke-Induced Brain Damage in Rats Tickling a rat's whiskers after it has a stroke prevents brain damage By Mark LescroartJuly 11, 2011Strokes cripple more people in the U.S. than any other disease. Modern drugs can unblock clogged arteries if patients get to care facilities in time. But the longer the trip to the hospital, the more nerve cells die from lack of blood. Better ways to avert brain damage could dramatically improve patients’ quality of life. Recently a team of neuroscientists stumbled on a very low tech way to completely prevent stroke damage...

We knew liberals were different, but just how different is revealed in a new study of the human brain indicating that not only do liberals and conservatives share different moral sentiments, but that markedly differing brain structures underlie those sentiments. The study’s “findings demonstrate that variation in moral sentiment corresponds to individual differences in brain structure and suggest that moral values possess deep-rooted biological bases distributed across distinct brain regions,” say University of California, Santa Barbara, post-doctoral researcher Gary J. Lewis and three research collaborators in the August 2012 issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (JCN). “People differ in...