Promising Alzheimer’s Treatment Under Study February 10, 2012
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In astounding good news for seniors (and soon-to-be seniors, like me), neuroscientists at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have published in the journal Science, a study that shows that use of a drug in mice appears to quickly reverse the pathological, cognitive and memory deficits caused by the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. The medication, bexarotene, could help the five million Americans suffering from the progressive brain disease and gods know how many others elsewhere. The best part is that bexarotene is already approved for oncology, with a good safety and side-effect profile.
Bexarotene clears amyloid plaques by removing soluble amyloid beta proteins, which are (currently) thought to produce the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. And this little study (in mice) backs up the hypothesis nicely; major hunks of cognitive function returned to Alzheimer’s-model mice in 72 hours. Not just one, but three different mouse models. It appears that the bexarotene reprogrammed the brain’s immune cells to "eat" or phagocytose the amyloid deposits as well as the soluble forms. This observation demonstrated that the drug addresses the amount of both soluble and deposited forms of amyloid beta within the brain and reverses the pathological features of the disease in mice.
I’m impressed, and quite hopeful. Gary Landreth, PhD, of Case Western Reserve is the man to watch for future investigations, is the author of this study and the discoverer that apolipoprotein E is the mechanism by which the plaques are cleared (and bexarotene amps up production of this).
Antonio Damasio – Self Comes to Mind October 10, 2011
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I have been listening to Dr. Antonio Damasio’s audiobook, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain
Wonderful stuff, but not light reading/listening. Just assembling this careful picture of the functioning of the structures of the brain is more work than anyone can do in a lifetime, and then to carefully explain it to a thoughtful listener is probably more than anyone should ever have to attempt. The good doctor has a little series of videos on YouTube.com with better introductions to his book than I can write, and I do urge you to visit:
The Ware Tetrology, by Rudy Rucker August 23, 2011
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Sometimes I am aghast at how little I can express some things, like my appreciation of this set of novels by CSUSJ computer science professor Rudy Rucker. Funny, complex, mystic, psychedelic and yet down-to-earth are all descriptions that apply to this work equally. Surreal works pretty well here, too.
The first book, Software, deals with Cobb Anderson, a retired computer scientist dying of a cheap knock-off heart wearing out, who is offered immortality by robots living on the moon (they revere him as the programmer who gave them sentience and independence from the Three Laws). Since he did that, however, he’s considered a traitor to the human race and has police problems, which forms part of the (non-philosophical) plot. The other part is the method of immortality: chop up his brain and encode it digitally. The robots don’t mention this aspect of it, since they themselves get copied over to new bodies frequently and don’t see it as frightening in any way. Anderson recognizes that consciousness is software plus the body to put it in…the robots give him a robot body.
This novel has some really surreal bits in it, notably that Florida is a reservation for elderly baby boomers (much like today) and is pretty much a squalid hell-hole for anything more than subsistence.
The second book, Wetware, is largely about the efforts of robots on the moon to incarnate robot consciousness into meat bodies on Earth, a plan which goes badly awry and results in the extermination of the robots by a human-engineered chipmold which kills their silicon chips…but infests the plastics they use to communicate with and creates a different sentient race (“moldies”). Interesting action and all that, and subtle philosophical stuff (what is consciousness, what is evolution)—did I mention Rucker is the great-great-great-grandson of Hegel?
The third book, Freeware, concerns alien invasion by radio waves, which encode the information for personality and embodiment. Some of the aliens are benign…others not so much. I had the notion while reading this book that alien signals are being sent to Earth all the time, but we have trouble detecting and interpreting neutrino streams (I was very sunburned and had a little whiskey. This sort of thing doesn’t happen that often, I swear).
The fourth book, Realware, concerns the benign aliens’ gift to humanity—basically, anything anyone wants—and the effects on primitives of sufficiently advanced technology. This is sort of the end of all of this train of thought as well, since it introduces a four-dimensional god of sorts which takes Cobb Anderson (now a “moldie”) into this higher dimension in a mystical kind of way. I’m not sure I consider this lame or not; people sort of run out of ideas when confronting infinity as a concept (see also “God”, elsewhere—in fact, anywhere else). This is hardly an uncommon problem; in one of the dialogues of Plato Socrates, when asked to describe love stops being logical and clear and gets all mystic and shit. When the greatest mind of his time has trouble with this, why shouldn’t everyone else?
Game Changer, Part II July 22, 2011
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Research published in Nature Materials describes a synthetic synapse that more or less accurately mimics a human synapse, at least to a first approximation. This (silver sulfide, nanoscale) synapse responds to electrical signals repeated at different rates by changing its conduction state briefly (so-called “short-term plasticity”). At higher rates, the higher conduction state is permanent—just like a human synapse (“long-term potentiation”, or as laymen refer to it “remembering stuff”).
Image memorizing into an inorganic synapse array:
This should make the modeling of human memory and possibly cognition processes much easier. “Our Ag2S element indicates a breakthrough in mimicking synaptic behaviour essential for the further creation of artificial neural systems that emulate characteristics of human memory.”
Obviously this is a long way from being ready to be manufactured on chips, but the potential (heh) is there.
Game Changer July 7, 2011
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Scientists at IBM Research have demonstrated that phase-change memory (PCM) can reliably store multiple data bits per cell over extended periods of time. PCM can write and fetch data up to 100 times faster than current flash memory and not lose data when power is turned off. PCM is more durable than flash memory and can manage about 10 million write cycles (vs 30,000 cycles at best).
The upshot of this is that larger, durable (probably eventually cheaper) non-volatile memory is coming in the next five to ten years, and it may be a game changer, although not as anticipated. Sure, it will make ordinary applications work faster and more robustly, but it will enable new fundamental programming strategies…because it stores up to four bits per cell instead of two. This storage is something like the functioning of neurons in a brain, and I predict it will lead to better modeling of intelligence in the future.
I, for one, welcome our PCM-based overlords.
From “Drift-tolerant Multilevel Phase-Change Memory” by N. Papandreou, H. Pozidis, T. Mittelholzer, G.F. Close, M. Breitwisch, C. Lam and E. Eleftheriou, presented at the 3rd IEEE International Memory Workshop.
A Sexy New Implant June 30, 2011
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Researchers have developed the first memory prosthetic device—a neural implant that, in rats, restored lost brain function and improved short-term memory retention, evidence that the brain’s complex neural code can be both interpreted and reproduced to aid memory conversion from short-term to long-term storage.
Neurophysiologist Samuel Deadwyler of Wake Forest University first trained the rats to press two different levers in succession. The animals learned to press one lever as it was presented to them and then, after a delay, remember which they’d pressed and choose the other one the second time around while the two sets of tiny electrodes recorded the activity of individual neurons on the right and left sides of the hippocampus, an area of the brain that consolidates short-term memory by processing information as it passes through multiple layers. Another set of electrodes—eight on the right, eight on the left—monitored signals being sent from neurons in the CA3 layer area of the hippocampus and another 16 monitored the outgoing signals received by neurons in the CA1 layer.
Biomedical engineer/neuroscientist Theodore Berger (U. of So. Cal.) and Deadwyler decoded the neuron’s activity during a correct sequence, hinting at the formation of a real short-term memory. They then stimulated the nerves with the implant in the same pattern and retested the rats. This time, the animals made fewer mistakes and could remember which lever to press even after long delays. The researchers blocked memory formation with drugs, and found that the rats could still remember which lever to press if they were juiced with the correct neural impulse pattern—nice proof of concept.
The chip (and its set of electrodes) holds an program that deciphers and the reproduces the neural messages that the CA3 layer of the brain sends to CA1. Its creators believe that an implant built on the same principles with gnarlier hardware could improve memory in people with brain damage. And, of course, there’s the Jeopardy! show.
Berger and Deadwyler plan to move their research into nonhuman primates.
Tai Chi and Arthritis, Strength and Balance November 8, 2010
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More than three hundred patients recruited from North Carolina and New Jersey were randomly assigned to two groups. The first group received an eight-week, twice-weekly Tai Chi course immediately while the other group was a delayed control group (they started eight weeks later). At the end of eight weeks the individuals who had received the early course showed moderate improvements in pain, fatigue and stiffness. They also had an increased sense of well being, as measured by the psychosocial variables, and they had improved reach or balance as measured by timed chair stands, gait speed and two measures of balance: a single leg stance and a reach test.
"Our study shows that there are significant benefits of the Tai Chi course for individuals with all types of arthritis, including fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis," said Leigh Callahan, Ph.D., the study’s lead author, associate professor in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine and a member of UNC’s Thurston Arthritis Research Center.
This is mostly plagiarized from ScienceDaily.com, who bring you further studies of backing evidence (below), and should be at least glanced at every day.
Tai Chi Benefits For Arthritis Shown (June 17, 2009)
Tai Chi Improves Pain In Arthritis Sufferers (June 2, 2009)
Tai Chi Exercise Reduces Knee Osteoarthritis Pain In The Elderly, Research Shows (Nov. 1, 2009)
Stroke Survivors Improve Balance With Tai Chi (Mar. 24, 2009)
Tai Chi Program Helps Prevent Falls Among Older Adults (Aug. 13, 2008)
“’Data’ is more than the plural of ‘anecdote’.” —Anonymous, Greek philosopher (date uncertain).
Toxoplasma gondii and Traffic Accidents September 19, 2010
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From Wikipedia: T. gondii infections have the ability to change the behavior of rats and mice, making them drawn to, rather than fearful of, the scent of cats. This effect is advantageous to the parasite, which will be able to sexually reproduce if its host is eaten by a cat. The infection is highly precise, as it does not affect a rat’s other fears such as the fear of open spaces or of unfamiliar smelling food.
Studies have also shown behavioral changes in humans, including slower reaction times and a six-fold increased risk of traffic accidents among infected males as well as links to schizophrenia including hallucinations and reckless behavior.
It turns out this knowledge is dependent on a study[1] of male draftees at the Central Military Hospital in Prague. If the Czech military is anything like the US military, there isn’t a lot of wiggle room in the data (like the US military, there is probably a LOT of wiggle room in the conclusions). It seems as if RH positive blood defends against the disease: “Our results show that RhD-negative subjects with high titers of anti-Toxoplasma antibodies had a probability of a traffic accident of about 16.7%, i.e. a more than six times higher rate than Toxoplasma-free or RhD-positive subjects.” T. gondii apparently clusters in human brains similar to the way it clusters in rats and mice. No mention is made of the infected liking the company of cats…maybe T. gondii is counting on cats eating our mangled corpses after horrible accidents.
The data are sound; it seems as if a T. gondii infection can cause really slow reactions and consequent danger in driving situations…6X is no joke, and not a coincidence. I wonder how long it will take before insurance companies require an antibody test (or Rh negative blood) to get collision insurance?
The reckless behaviour and hallucinations do sound like fun, however.
[1] BMC Infectious Diseases 2009, 9:72doi:10.1186/1471-2334-9-72
