John Hewitt

(Medical Xpress)—Once the brain has fully developed, its neurons and astrocytes remain relatively fixed. There are a few select migratory streams that replenish vulnerable populations with dedicated stem cell recruits, but ...

(Phys.org) —In the brave new world of three-parent embryos several inherited mitochondrial diseases can potentially be solved. One slightly dubious argument used by its champions to assuage equally dubious traditional ethical ...

(Phys.org) —Defining the essential character of the action potential of neurons has proven to be an elusive task. As typically happens, the biggest advances seem to have been made early on. In this case it was Hodgkin and ...

(Medical Xpress)—Neuroscience typically proceeds by trimming back previous overly dogmatic statements. Such is the case with new findings that proteins are locally manufactured to order throughout an extended neuronal tree. ...

(Phys.org) —Imagination is perhaps the most powerful tool we have for creating the future. The same might be said when it comes to creating the past, especially as it pertains to origin of life. Under what conditions did ...

(Medical Xpress)—There is no mystery in the way that computers store information. It is straightforward to determine how much memory they have and what is contained in that memory. Brains don't really have memory in this ...

(Medical Xpress)—A fundamental difference between neurons in real brains and those in artificial neural networks is the way the neurons in each are connected. In artificial nets, the synapses between neurons often have adjustable ...

(Medical Xpress)—When something bad happens to otherwise healthy neurons it's easy to blame the usual suspects—the mitochondria. In some cases the nucleus might be the one at fault, as in a de novo mutation in a critical ...

(Medical Xpress)—In their quest to build better BMIs, or brain-machine-interfaces, researchers have recently begun to look closer at the sub-threshold activity of neurons. The reason for this trend is that with only a limited ...

(Medical Xpress)—It is widely know that the grey matter of the brain is grey because it is dense with cell bodies and capillaries. The white matter is almost entirely composed of lipid-based myelin, but there is also a little ...

(Medical Xpress)—Despite early optimistic studies, the promise of curing neurological conditions using transplants remains unfulfilled. While researchers have exhaustively cataloged different types of cells in the brain, ...

(Medical Xpress)—In many ways humans are universal machines. We can generate an answer to any question asked of us or move our body into any configuration our joints permit. We can do this near-instantaneously, and with ...

(Medical Xpress)—The egregious presumption of universal fact has a long history in science. The ever popular Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in the year 1600 for crimes against the state; namely, declaring not only ...

(Medical Xpress) —The spectrum of visible light, like that of audible sound, spans a range of frequencies that is easy to define. There is both a minimum, and a maximum, that we can perceive. Our perception of color, while ...

(Medical Xpress)—Animals experiments primarily serve two main functions. They give us insight into how biological systems might work, and they also act as test beds for treatments and devices we want to use on ourselves. ...