By Carrie Arnold, ISNS Contributor

(ISNS)—Hundreds of billions of neurons tangle together into the two pounds of folded, wrinkly tissue we call the brain. Scientists have spent years trying to eavesdrop on electrochemical signals—neuronal chatter—to figure out what happens when a memory is formed or an emotion is felt. Scientists have recently moved beyond implanting electrodes and using functional MRI scans to begin harnessing the power of cell culture and microchips.

They are not only listening to what each neuron is saying, but also starting to talk back.

Growing neurons outside the brain requires two major steps: coaxing the cells to grow on a petri dish and then getting the cells to make connections with each other. Once the neurons have connected, they can "talk" by  sending electrical signals. Researchers, however, have found it difficult to get the neurons to keep talking. Instead of letting the neurons grow haphazardly in cell culture, a group of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh coaxed the growing neurons into a doughnut shape and attached them to a small glass chip. This shape, said first author Ashwin Vishwanathan, let the neurons have a 20 second “conversation” after they were stimulated with a small jolt of electricity. The electrochemical signal circled the doughnut over and over.

The researchers published their results in the journal Lab on a Chip. It might not sound like much, said Vishwanathan, now a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., but it’s a huge step forward in understanding how memories form.

Short-term memory is how we remember a phone number just long enough to dial it, Vishwanathan said. The formation of these brief memories occurs when neurons show persistent activity, just as they did when in the doughnut shape.

“It’s hard to access the part of the brain where persistent activity happens,” Vishwanathan says. Putting the neurons on a chip, however, gives scientists access to the cells without having to open skulls.

Vishwanathan and his colleagues may have gathered large amounts of very important data by eavesdropping on neuronal chatter, but researchers have begun to use microchips to talk back to the neurons. The microchips used by brain researchers are actually very similar to the ones found in most computers. Both neurons and microchips speak the same language since both use electricity to transmit information. This common language enables neurons and microchips to have a two-way conversation, in which the microchip monitors and records neuron activity, as well as telling neurons to fire or stay silent.

“If you want to understand how the brain functions, you need to develop technologies that let you record from large networks of brain cells,” said Naweed Syed, a neuroscientist at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. The neurochip is one of those technologies.

To create a neurochip, scientists use sticky proteins to glue neurons to a microchip that contains large numbers of transistors and capacitors in a square millimeter .  The transistors record the neurons’ electrochemical signals, while the capacitors can provide a small electric current to stimulate the neuron. By watching how neurons send and receive signals on the chip, scientists can identify the activity pattern for different types of brain cells. Knowing how healthy neurons behave may one day allow neurochips to intervene when this activity becomes unhealthy in diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

In Parkinson’s disease, neurons fire incorrectly due to the lack of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that carries the electrical signal across the tiny gap between neurons known as a synapse. People have tried to correct this deficit by supplementing the dopamine in the brain or by using electrodes to stimulate neurons deep in the brain. Although both of these techniques have good short-term effects, they aren’t as effective in the long run. Implanting a neurochip into the brain of a Parkinson’s patient could stimulate the neurons otherwise silenced by the lack of dopamine, but without the side effects of other treatments.

"Implanted chips could help restore lost [brain] function," said Stefano Vassanelli, a physiologist and neurochip expert at the University of Padua in Italy. "With electrical stimulation, you can more or less restore normal activity."

By Peter Gwynne, ISNS Contributor

(ISNS)—As the U.S. women prepare for a showdown with France in Wednesday’s semifinal of the World Cup of soccer, a research group has reported two tantalizing tendencies in the game. Top female soccer players aren’t beyond faking injury to deceive referees and gain an advantage over their opponents. But they don’t do it as much as their male counterparts.

"It looks like there may be some injury simulation in the women’s game," concluded Dr. Daryl Rosenbaum, assistant professor of family and community medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina who headed the study. "But if you compare it with the men’s game, it’s half as much."

The fact that women players simulate injuries doesn’t surprise Lisa Cole, associate head coach of the Women’s Professional Soccer League’s Boston Breakers.

"It comes from getting the referee to make the right call," Cole said. "The best players are getting kicked a lot. But if they don’t go down, the referees aren’t sophisticated enough to give a foul."

Simulation of injuries is common in top-class men’s soccer today. In the 2006 men’s World Cup, only half of the apparent injuries that received treatment on the field corresponded to real injuries, according to team physicians.

In a typical scenario, a player falls to the ground after a hard slide tackle, crying out in apparent agony, perhaps rolling over several times, and staying prone. But once the referee has awarded a free kick and possibly a yellow card against the tackler, the "injured" player miraculously recovers, often getting up with a smirk on his face.

FIFA, the Switzerland-based organization that oversees world soccer, expressed concern about the issue in 2008.

It called for the soccer family "to unite in denouncing simulation and working to eradicate this scourge from the game in order to assist the referee’s identification of serious injuries and, more generally, to uphold the fundamental principles of fair play and preserve the integrity of the game."

Most of the incidents that sparked FIFA’s statement occurred in top-level men’s soccer. Last year, Rosenbaum’s team reported in the International Journal of Sports Medicine, a video study of international men’s tournaments on four continents showed a large majority of questionable injuries.

"Only 7.2 percent of apparent injuries met our definition for a ‘definite injury,’" Rosenbaum said.

Now the same group of researchers has tackled injury simulation in the women’s game.

The team studied videos of 47 games from the 2003 and 2007 women’s World Cup tournaments.

They chose the same criteria for apparent injuries that they had used for the men’s study. "A player had to go to ground, writhing or rolling, grabbing a body part, yelling, having an anguished facial expression, or hiding her face," Rosenbaum said.

To qualify as a definite injury, the team decided that the player would have to experience visible bleeding or leave the field within five minutes of the incident. "All other incidents were labeled as questionable injuries," the team wrote in the journal Research in Sports Medicine.

During the two women’s tournaments, the researchers found that only 13.7 percent of the apparent injuries met the criteria for definite injuries. And for the 2007 World Cup, team physicians reported only 2.3 injuries per game, while the video review of players’ behavior suggested six apparent injuries in each match. In addition, questionable injuries were associated more than definite injuries with situations that led the referee to penalize the team causing the injury.

"So it looks like there may be some simulation in the women’s game," Rosenbaum said. "But this study shows that women are less likely than men to fake soccer injuries."

What might explain the gender differences?

"Men are bigger and faster and playing on same size field as women, so they experience more contact that can cause immediate contusions but do not require a player to withdraw," Rosenbaum says.

The continued growth of cropland and loss of natural habitat have increasingly simplified agricultural landscapes in the Midwest.

In a study supported in part by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Kellogg Biological Station Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site in Michigan—one of 26 such NSF LTER sites around the world–scientists concluded that this simplification is associated with increased crop pest abundance and insecticide use.

"This research suggests that there are simple ecological solutions–such as preservation or restoration of semi-natural lands within large agricultural regions—that could reduce the need for insecticides and contribute to agricultural economies," says Nancy Huntly, NSF program director for the network of LTER sites.

While the relationship between landscape simplification, crop pest pressure and insecticide use has been suggested before, it has not been well supported by empirical evidence, scientists say.

Results of the study, published in this week’s issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are the first to document a link between simplification and increased insecticide use.

"When you replace natural habitat with cropland, you tend to get more crop pest problems," says lead author Tim Meehan, an entomologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison).

He and other authors are affiliated with the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, one of three U.S. Department of Energy Bioenergy Research Centers, and with NSF’s Kellogg Biological Station LTER site.

"Two things drive this pattern," says Meehan. "As you remove natural habitats, you remove habitat for beneficial predatory insects, and when you create more cropland you make a bigger target for pests–giving them what they need to survive and multiply."

Because landscape simplification has long been assumed to increase pest pressure, Meehan and colleagues were not surprised to find that counties with less natural habitat had higher rates of insecticide use.

One striking finding was that landscape simplification was associated with annual insecticide application to an additional 5,400 square miles—an area the size of Connecticut.

Although simplification of agricultural landscapes is likely to continue, the research suggests that the planting of perennial bioenergy crops—like switchgrass and mixed prairie—can offset some negative effects.

"Perennial crops provide year-round habitat for beneficial insects, birds, and other wildlife, and are critical for buffering streams and rivers from soil erosion and preventing nutrient and pesticide pollution," says Doug Landis, a Michigan State University entomologist and landscape ecologist who’s affiliated with the Kellogg Biological Station LTER site.

Perennial grasslands that can be used for bioenergy could also provide biodiversity support, especially beneficial insect support, says Claudio Gratton, a UW-Madison entomologist.

"If we can create agricultural landscapes with increased crop diversity, then perhaps we can increase beneficial insects, reduce pest pressure and reduce the need for chemical inputs into the environment," Gratton says.

"We are at a junction right now," he believes.

"There is increased demand for renewable energy, and one big question is: where it will come from? We hope that these kinds of studies will help us forecast the impacts that bioenergy crops may have on agricultural landscapes."

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Cornell scientists, in collaboration with physicists and physician-scientists in Germany, France and Rochester, N.Y., have developed a new—and much less painful and potentially damaging—method to end life-threatening heart fibrillations.

The new technique, which is reported in the July 14 issue of the journal Nature, cuts the energy required for defibrillation by 84 percent, compared with conventional methods.

In healthy hearts, electrical pulses propagate across the heart muscle in an orderly fashion to control the heart’s contraction and relaxation cycle at regular intervals. However, when the electrical pulses propagate throughout the heart chaotically, it disables the regular heartbeat and prevents the body from getting fresh supplies of blood.

One of these rhythm disturbances, called atrial fibrillation, is the most common sustained cardiac arrhythmia worldwide, affecting about 1 percent of the population, mostly people older than 50 years.

Patients who suffer repeatedly from atrial fibrillation are typically treated with a large electrical pulse (defibrillation), which forces the heart back into its regular beating but is painful and can damage the surrounding tissue. The new method, LEAP (Low-Energy Anti-fibrillation Pacing), developed by a team co-led by Flavio Fenton from the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine, uses a heart catheter to create a sequence of five weak electrical signals in the heart.

"Only a few seconds later, the heart beats regularly again," said the team’s other co-leader, Stefan Luther of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI DS) and a Cornell adjunct professor in biomedical sciences.

"The energy applied to the heart per pulse is on average 84 percent less than in conventional methods," added Fenton.

Even though both methods seem to function similarly at first sight, they stimulate completely different processes within the heart, explains co-author Robert Gilmour, professor of physiology at Cornell. "The classical defibrillator excites all cells of the organ at the same time. For a short moment they can no longer transmit any electrical signals; the life-threatening chaotic activity is terminated. Afterward, the heart resumes its normal, regular beating. The situation can be compared to turning a malfunctioning computer off and on again," said Gilmour.

The new method terminates the turbulent electrical activity within the heart step by step. In experiments and computer simulations, the researchers showed that natural heterogeneities within the heart, particularly blood vessels, can act as the origins for synchronizing waves. "The weak electrical signals are enough to create ‘virtual electrodes’ that stimulate the cells in these regions," said Eberhard Bodenschatz, director at MPI DS and Cornell adjunct professor of physics and mechanical and aerospace engineering.

With every additional pulse, more heterogeneities in the heart are activated and gradually suppress the chaotic activity and "reprogram" the heart.

Because the researchers consider LEAP groundbreaking, they are working to get it to patients as quickly as possible.

Other collaborators include researchers at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France), University Medicine Göttingen (Germany), Rochester Institute of Technology and the Laboratoire Non-Linéaire de Nice (France) collaborated on the work.

The research was conducted under the umbrella of the MPI/Cornell collaboration on Complex Systems and supported by National Science Foundation, the Max Planck Society, the National Institutes of Health, the Indo-French Center for the Promotion of Advanced Research, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme.

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Future computers may rely on magnetic microprocessors that consume the least amount of energy allowed by the laws of physics, according to an analysis by University of California, Berkeley, electrical engineers.

Today’s silicon-based microprocessor chips rely on electric currents, or moving electrons, that generate a lot of waste heat. But microprocessors employing nanometer-sized bar magnets—like tiny refrigerator magnets—for memory, logic and switching operations theoretically would require no moving electrons.

Such chips would dissipate only 18 millielectron volts of energy per operation at room temperature, the minimum allowed by the second law of thermodynamics and called the Landauer limit. That’s 1 million times less energy per operation than consumed by today’s computers.

"Today, computers run on electricity; by moving electrons around a circuit, you can process information," said Brian Lambson, a UC Berkeley graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. "A magnetic computer, on the other hand, doesn’t involve any moving electrons. You store and process information using magnets, and if you make these magnets really small, you can basically pack them very close together so that they interact with one another. This is how we are able to do computations, have memory and conduct all the functions of a computer."

Lambson is working with Jeffrey Bokor, UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, to develop magnetic computers.

"In principle, one could, I think, build real circuits that would operate right at the Landauer limit," said Bokor, who is a codirector of the Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science (E3S), a Science and Technology Center founded last year with a $25 million grant from the National Science Foundation. "Even if we could get within one order of magnitude, a factor of 10, of the Landauer limit, it would represent a huge reduction in energy consumption for electronics. It would be absolutely revolutionary."

One of the center’s goals is to build computers that operate at the Landauer limit.

Lambson, Bokor and UC Berkeley graduate student David Carlton published a paper about their analysis online today (Friday, July 1) in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Fifty years ago, Rolf Landauer used newly developed information theory to calculate the minimum energy a logical operation, such as an AND or OR operation, would dissipate given the limitation imposed by the second law of thermodynamics. (In a standard logic gate with two inputs and one output, an AND operation produces an output when it has two positive inputs, while an OR operation produces an output when one or both inputs are positive.) That law states that an irreversible process—a logical operation or the erasure of a bit of information—dissipates energy that cannot be recovered. In other words, the entropy of any closed system cannot decrease.

In today’s transistors and microprocessors, this limit is far below other energy losses that generate heat, primarily through the electrical resistance of moving electrons. However, researchers such as Bokor are trying to develop computers that don’t rely on moving electrons, and thus could approach the Landauer limit. Lambson decided to theoretically and experimentally test the limiting energy efficiency of a simple magnetic logic circuit and magnetic memory.

The nanomagnets that Bokor, Lambson and his lab use to build magnetic memory and logic devices are about 100 nanometers wide and about 200 nanometers long. Because they have the same north-south polarity as a bar magnet, the up-or-down orientation of the pole can be used to represent the 0 and 1 of binary computer memory. In addition, when multiple nanomagnets are brought together, their north and south poles interact via dipole-dipole forces to exhibit transistor behavior, allowing simple logic operations.

"The magnets themselves are the built-in memory," Lambson said. "The real challenge is getting the wires and transistors working."

Scientists have shown for the first time that the loudest animal on earth, relative to its body size, is the tiny water boatman, Micronecta scholtzi. At 99.2 decibels, this represents the equivalent of listening to an orchestra play loudly while sitting in the front row.

The frequency of the sound (around 10 kHz) is within human hearing range and Dr. James Windmill of the University of Strathclyde, explains one clue as to how loud the animals are: "Remarkably, even though 99% of sound is lost when transferring from water to air, the song is so loud that a person walking along the bank can actually hear these tiny creatures singing from the bottom of the river."

The song, used by males to attract mates, is produced by rubbing two body parts together, in a process called stridulation. In water boatmen the area used for stridulation is only about 50 micrometres across, roughly the width of a human hair. "We really don’t know how they make such a loud sound using such a small area," says Dr. Windmill.

The researchers, who will be presenting their work at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Conference in Glasgow on Saturday the 2nd of July, are now keen to bring together aspects of biology and engineering to clarify how and why such a small animal makes such a loud noise, and to explore the practical applications. Dr. Windmill explains: "Biologically this work could be helpful in conservation as recordings of insect sounds could be used to monitor biodiversity. From the engineering side it could be used to inform our work in acoustics, such as in sonar systems"

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New research has shown that feral, untrained pigeons can recognize individual people and are not fooled by a change of clothes.

Researchers, who will be presenting their work at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Conference in Glasgow on Sunday the 3rd of July, have shown that urban pigeons that have never been caught or handled can recognize individuals, probably by using facial characteristics.

Although pigeons have shown remarkable feats of perception when given training in the lab this is the first research showing similar abilities in untrained feral pigeons.

In a park in Paris city center, pigeons were fed by two researchers, of similar build and skin color, wearing different colored lab coats. One individual simply ignored the pigeons, allowing them to feed while the other was hostile, and chased them away. This was followed by a second session when neither chased away the pigeons.

The experiment, which was repeated several times, showed that pigeons were able to recognize the individuals and continued to avoid the researcher who had chased them away even when they no longer did so. Swapping lab coats during the experiments did not confuse the pigeons and they continued shun the researcher who had been initially hostile.

"It is very likely that the pigeons recognized the researchers by their faces, since the individuals were both female and of a similar age, build and skin color," says Dr. Dalila Bovet a co-author of this work from the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. "Interestingly, the pigeons, without training, spontaneously used the most relevant characteristics of the individuals (probably facial traits), instead of the lab coats that covered 90% of the body."

The fact that the pigeons appeared to know that clothing color was not a good way of telling humans apart suggests that the birds have developed abilities to discriminate between humans in particular. This specialized ability may have come about over the long period of association with humans, from early domestication to many years of living in cities.

Future work will focus on identifying whether pigeons learn that humans often change clothes and so use more stable characteristics for recognition, or if there is a genetic basis for this ability, linked to domestication or to having evolved in an urban environment.

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Any time a blood clot develops inside a problematic artery, the affliction is recognized as thrombosis. if the clot is large enough it may possibly bring about serious injury. If the blood clot is large enough it will likely restrict the supply of oxygen along with other vital ingredients that could possibly end up killing cells. A hemorrhoid is to be brief swollen problematic veins inside rectum or on the exterior of the anus as a result of too much pressure to the anal canal, in most cases during a bowel movement. When blood clots develop inside these problematic veins it is has become a thrombosed hemorrhoid.

If you believe you may have thrombosed hemorrhoids then you can examine your anus through the help of a looking glass. Look and see if there exist Try to identify any bulbs on the exterior of your anus, specially bulbs having a bluish coloring. They can be fairly hard whenever you touch them. They are also apt to trigger significant discomfort and itching. But Even if you’re not able to see any lumps on your anus you may possibly have hemorrhoids nonetheless. Often times hemorrhoids may not be on the exterior of the anus , they are inside the rectum. Internal hemorrhoids are not seen on the anus. They also aren’t going to result in pain or itching so consequently they’re usually fairly problematic to diagnose.

Don’t find yourself with a serious case of hemorrhoids which got infected, specially internal hemorrhoids. If you happen to have external bleeding hemorrhoids, then you realize how horribly unpleasant they can be. . They might just get infected which would likely elevate the condition significantly. All the same, it really is rather easy to spot infections on the exterior of your anus and you can get it healed quickly. Internal infections conversely are critical. Not just are they really troublesome to sense, they are troublesome to cure. Internal infections might become blood poisoning which is sometimes fatal.

Some good research on the Internet for hemorrhoid treatment selections will probably make known numerous distinct forms of hemorrhoid treatment options. For more extreme conditions you may desire to undergo a surgical treatment. In most circumstances however, your body system can cure the affliction alone with A little bit of help from you. Hygiene, eating nourishing dinners and physical exercise are essentially the most successful hemorrhoid treatment strategies attainable to cure your hemorrhoids and to assist avoid long term hemorrhoids. You must keep your rear-end nice and clean as that is a hemorrhoid treatment . Use topical antiseptics fairly often Eat plenty of fiber, specifically fresh fruits and veggies as they have plenty of vitamins in them. Walk several miles everyday or persue an activity that demands strenuous exercising. Drink plenty of fluids but avoid alcohol. You’ll be able to apply creams and salves to your anus to assist ease the discomfort and itching related to them. Just understand that these are temporary relief as opposed to hemorrhoid treatment solutions. Not even a surgical treatment is a hemorrhoid treatment that can permanently remedy hemorroids. The only way you can honestly remedy hemorrhoids is by changing your life-style.

If you feel treating hemorrhoids once for all is easy to do, you better reconsider. The majority of people imagine one can pretty much find a hemorrhoid treatment to treat hemorrhoids and so they cannot keep recurring. This just could not be more mistaken. Still, one can treat hemorrhoids once for all. To realize success you have to learn about what is producing hemorrhoids first of all and quit doing them.

If you can’t reform your habits it’s not going to very much make a difference which sort of hemorroid treatment you end up getting including medical operations, your hemorrhoids will very likely come back. hemorrhoids are due to a lot of pressure to one’s anuspelvis which forces the problematic arteries into a bunch. This is in most cases the consequence of an insufficient diet routine, one which includes little fiber. Food regimesn which include fresh fruits and green veggies can overcome that. Too little regular exercise will cause the development of hemorrhoids caused by diminished blood flow. Whenever the blood isn’t flowing with a good deal of pressure it cannot propel waste through your blood vessels. Do not be impatient when defecating.

If you’ve been looking out for a strategy to treat your hemorrhoids once for all and you might be able to do the required steps then you are a lucky one. With any luck, this information has presented you the insight you need to have to arrive at that end goal. To summarize, take good care of your body.

Bleeding hemorrhoids may well be rather daunting in some instances. A Hemorrhoid is a health problem wherein veinous tissue in the anus are enlarged, and in the event that they expel fresh blood inside or from the outside, it is classified as a bleeding hemorrhoid. Due to the fact this sort is significantly more critical than established hemorrhoids, you will need to be checked out by a health care provider rather quickly, so you might find required hemorrhoid treatment. There exist a number of hemorrhoid treatment strategies that you might possibly consider for your bleeding hemorrhoids.

In the event that you are afflicted with bleeding hemorrhoids, odds are you are going to be getting surgery. That is why you really should look after this health problem at the earliest stage possible to prevent further complicating your health problem . Hemorrhoid surgery is recognized for significant pain after surgery, and it more often than not takes quite a very long time to recover.

There is a common hemorrhoid treatment which involves surgery called a stapled hemorrhoidectomy. Of the surgical varieties of hemorrhoid treatment this procedure is definitely the most successful considering that it is the least debilitating. In simple terms the health care provider will staple your anus using a circular staple and that will help halt the bleeding. This kind of hemorrhoid treatment is traditionally applied for prolapsed hemorrhoids but it works quite well for any bleeding hemorrhoids. Another successful type of surgery for bleeding hemorrhoids is identified as hemorrhoidal artery ligation. This plan makes use of a proctoscope in addition to a Doppler transducer. The process essentially involves locating and ligating the bleeding veinous tissue. Ligation aids substantially in treating the pressure on the abnormal veins and therefore lessens the discomfort significantly. This approach is also to some degree painless.

Other treatments exist for bleeding hemorrhoids, for example all-natural cures for example gels along with various other hemorrhoid treatment. The vast majority of of these work by revitalizing your colon health, along with remedying hemorrhoid discomforts like itching, pain, swelling. Most importantly, stop the bleeding. So if ever you suffer the pain of a health problem like bleeding hemorrhoids, you can find countless hemorrhoid treatment strategies that you could study.