The exact Nature of Long COVID Is Still Coming To Light, But We Just Got Some Of The Best Evidence

The purest form of love is consideration. When someone thinks about how things would make you feel. Pays attention to detail. Holds you in regard when making decisions that could affect you. In any bond, how much they care about you can be found in how much they consider you

Good News Network

A Paralyzed Man Walks Again Using Device that Connects His Thoughts to His Spinal Cord

It's long been supposed that implants could connect prosthetics to the brain in a way that stimulates nervous system commands.

"It’s long been supposed that implants could connect prosthetics to the brain in a way that stimulates nervous system commands with electrical signals.

Now, this idea is closer than ever to realization in a meaningful way, as one man paralyzed from the hips down is able to walk unsupported, even up stairs, thanks to such electrical nerve stimulation.

The patient, Gert-Jan Oskam, lost all movement in his legs after suffering a spinal cord injury in a motorbike accident. After using a precursor technology to gain back a little bit of mobility, Oskam enrolled in a proof of concept study to perhaps make further advances...

Now, with an implant in his brain, when Oskam thinks about moving his legs, it sends a signal to a computer he wears in a backpack that calculates how much current to send to a new pacemaker in his abdomen. It in turn sends a signal to the older implant in his spinal cord that prompts his legs to move in a more controllable manner. A helmet with antennae helps coordinate the signals.

The scientists developing the technology and working with him detail that he can walk around 200 meters a day, and stand unassisted for around 2-3 minutes. Once, Oskam details, there was some painting that needed to be done, but no one was around to help him. With the new technology, he simply took his crutch and did it himself.

Incredibly, after less than a year, and completely unexpectedly, scientists believe the technology closed the gap in his nervous system, and he can now lift himself out of a chair, and even walk with the help of a crutch, even when the device is turned off.

The scientists are planning in the future to work with patients with paralyzed arms and hands, and even with stroke victims, as the “digital bridge” is a massive advancement in nervous system stimulation technology."

-via Good News Network, June 16, 2023. Video via NBC News, May 24, 2023

people who work/study in quantitative bio-adjacent fields, rise up. computational neuroscience where you get to see someone's thoughts in feelings in graph form??? so cool. biophysics where you can pass blood plasma through an electric field to determine whether a patient has cancer or not?? unbelievable. biomedical engineering where you can literally build a device to pump someone's heart and be the difference between their life and death??? oh my god. disease modelling, being able to predict AND prevent communities being affected by disease on a large scale through your analysis of data??? i love science

- 𝚕𝚘𝚟𝚎 𝚎𝚕𝚒𝚣𝚊𝚋𝚎𝚝𝚑 𝚜.

Lee Krasner // Franz Kafka

Susan Nathiel, Daughters of Madness

this essay by joan didion has completely changed my life i'm planning to print the whole thing and tape it to my work desk so i can stare at it all day

"To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home."

why neuroscience is cool

space & the brain are like the two final frontiers

we know just enough to know we know nothing

there are radically new theories all. the. time. and even just in my research assistant work i've been able to meet with, talk to, and work with the people making them

it's such a philosophical science

potential to do a lot of good in fighting neurological diseases

things like BCI (brain computer interface) and OI (organoid intelligence) are soooooo new and anyone's game - motivation to study hard and be successful so i can take back my field from elon musk

machine learning is going to rapidly increase neuroscience progress i promise you. we get so caught up in AI stealing jobs but yes please steal my job of manually analyzing fMRI scans please i would much prefer to work on the science PLUS computational simulations will soon >>> animal testing to make all drug testing safer and more ethical !! we love ethical AI <3

collab with...everyone under the sun - psychologists, philosophers, ethicists, physicists, molecular biologists, chemists, drug development, machine learning, traditional computing, business, history, education, literally try to name a field we don't work with

it's the brain eeeeee

ScienceAlert

For The First Time, Scientists Show Structural, Brain-Wide Changes During Menstruation

The constant ebb and flow of hormones that guide the menstrual cycle don't just affect reproductive anatomy.

The constant ebb and flow of hormones that guide the menstrual cycle don't just affect reproductive anatomy. They also reshape the brain, and a new study has given us insight into how this happens. Led by neuroscientists Elizabeth Rizor and Viktoriya Babenko of the University of California Santa Barbara, a team of researchers tracked 30 women who menstruate over their cycles, documenting in detail the structural changes that take place in the brain as hormonal profiles fluctuate. The results, which are yet to be peer-reviewed but can be found on preprint server bioRxiv, suggest that structural changes in the brain during menstruation may not be limited to those regions associated with the menstrual cycle. "These results are the first to report simultaneous brain-wide changes in human white matter microstructure and cortical thickness coinciding with menstrual cycle-driven hormone rhythms," the researchers write.

Continue Reading.

Scan of 1 cubic millimeter of the human brain

Full scan of 1 cubic millimeter of brain tissue that took 1.4 petabytes of data, equivalent to 14,000 4K movies.