NEWRON Volume VI, Issue IX
NEWRON Admin
NeuroEngineering Weekly Review of News
Hey NEWRON Subscribers,
Get out and enjoy some of that warm weather that's finally headed to Baltimore this weekend...and while you're at it skim some of this week's NEWRON reviews!
Enjoy,
Mike Batista
NEWRON Editor and Manager
Reviews
Wireless, implanted sensor broadens range of brain research
A compact, self-contained sensor recorded and transmitted brain activity data wirelessly for more than a year in early stage animal tests, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. In addition to allowing for more natural studies of brain activity in moving subjects, this implantable device represents a potential major step toward cord-free control of advanced prosthetics that move with the power of thought. The report will be in the April 2013 issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering.
Read more:
http://www.nih.gov/news/health/mar2013/nibib-19.htm
Down's syndrome 'linked to brain protein loss'
Writing in Nature Medicine, a team led by California-based Prof. Huaxi Hu from the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute found that an extra copy of chromosome 21 triggered the protein loss. Their study found that restoring the protein in Down's syndrome mice improved cognitive function and behaviour. “…in Down's syndrome, we believe lack of SNX27 is at least partly to blame for developmental and cognitive defects," Prof Xu said.
Read more:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-21900954
New nanotechnology research study turns brain tumors blue
In an article published this week in the journal Drug Delivery and Translational Medicine, researchers from Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and the Georgia Institute of Technology have reported the development of a technique that assists in identifying tumors from normal brain tissue during surgery by staining tumor cells blue. This key finding, developed by a team led by Dr. Barun Brahma, M.D., Children's neurosurgeon and biomedical engineer, and Prof. Ravi Bellamkonda, the Carol Ann and David D. Flanagan Chair in Biomedical Engineering at the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, could be a critical technique used in hospitals lacking sophisticated equipment like an MRI, which guides in tumor removal, in preserving the maximum amount of normal tissue and brain function during surgery.
Read more:
http://www.choa.org/About-Childrens/Newsroom/News-and-Announcements/Turning-Tumors-Blue-2013
Article:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13346-013-0139-x