This three-dimensional reconstruction of an amyloid fibril (found at Discover) was created by Nikolaus Grigorieff and his colleagues at Brandeis University, by computer processing of a transmission electron cryomicroscopy image. It is the most detailed image yet of the abnormally folded protein which accumulates to form the senile plaques that are a pathological hallmark of Alzheimer's Disease. The fibrils consist of a protein fragment called amyloid-beta 1-40, an insoluble forty amino acid polypeptide generated by the sequential actions of a number of enzymes on the amyloid precursor…

This coming Friday is my 34th birthday, and the lovely people from ScienceBlogs/ Seed Media Group have given me a fantastic present: they're sending me on an all expenses paid long weekend to Barcelona to cover ESOF2008. The mission of the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) is to provide both the European and the international science and business communities with an open platform for debate and communication. It presents and profiles Europe's leading research trends in the sciences, humanities and social sciences. It is an opportunity to discuss and influence the future of research and…

Back in January, the Daily Mail reported on "the helmet that could turn back the symptoms of Alzheimer's." The device is pictured above, held by its inventor, a British GP called Gordon Dougal. It consists of 700 light-emitting diodes which transmit near-infrared light into the brain and can, according to Dougal, stimulate hippocampal neurogenesis, and therefore reverse the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer's, if worn for 10 minutes a day for about a month. When the story first came out, David Gorski did a brilliant job of explaining why it is probably too good to be true: Dougal'…

As I mentioned last month, the British Psychological Society (BPS) recently commissioned a report into the implications of memory research for the legal profession. The report, written by the Memory and Law Working Party, a research board established by the BPS and chaired by cognitive psychologist Martin Conway of the University of Leeds, has now been published. The BPS has just issued a set of recommendations based on the report. These guidelines, which are available as a PDF, are intended to inform those who work in criminal and civil law - for example, the police as they try to extract…

Dave Bonta has found this advertisement, which appeared on the back cover of an anthology of English poetry published in 1884 by Funk & Wagnalls: BRAIN AND NERVE FOOD VITALIZED PHOS-PHITES COMPOSED OF THE Nerve-Giving Principles of the Ox-Brain and Wheat-Germ. It restores the energy lost by Nervousness or Indigestion; relieves Lassitude and Neuralgia; refreshes the nerves tired by worry, excitement or excessive brain fatigue; strengthens a failing memory, and gives renewed vigor in all diseases of Nervous Exhaustion or Debility. It is the only PREVENTIVE OF CONSUMPTION. It aids in…

In the July issue of the magazine Literary Review, Philip Davis discusses the effect of William Shakespeare's use of language on cognitive function. Davis, a professor of English at the University of Liverpool, and editor of The Reader is working with psychologist Guillaume Thierry and cognitive neuroscientist Neil Roberts to explore how the brain responds to a linguistic trick called functional shift, or word-class conversion, in which the structure of a sentence is changed so that one part of speech (say a noun) is transformed into another (such as a verb). Functional shift was often…

A hilarious scene from The Man With Two Brains.

Later on today, I'll be travelling to Bristol to meet Heather Perry and interview her about the self-trepanation she performed. If you have a question for Ms. Perry, submit it here. The first migraine-plagued caveman who countered his aching cranium with crudely pounded flint (and lived) surely shared his medical breakthrough. Headcutting is old as woodcutting. Aztec shaman or Greek physician, a good doctor knew the value of airing out a fevered brain. In dark ages before Lister and Pasteur, chirurgeons didn't know a virus, from a curse, but they needed a name for the rusty saw they used to…

A new study, published today in the open access journal PLoS One, provides evidence that remaining mentally active throughout life reduces the rate of age-related neurodegeneration and may therefore stave off Alzheimer's Disease and other forms of dementia. Valenzuela et al used the Lifetime of Experiences Questionnaire (LEQ) to estimate the extent to which 37 healthy older individuals had engaged in complex mental activity throughout their lives. They also performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure hippocampal volume in the participants, at the beginning of the study…

The humble nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a millimeter-long roundworm which eeks out its existence in the soil and feeds on bacteria. Because it lives in a dark environment, and lacks specialized light-sensing organs, the nematode has always been assumed to be completely blind. However, a new study published online in Nature Neuroscience shows that C. elegans they possess neurons which are sensitive to light. As well as showing for the first time that C. elegans has a rudimentary sense of vision, the findings also shed some light on the evolution of the eye. Despite lacking eyes,…

Over the last two months, Nature has published a series of essays about the latest scientific research into music, and now that the series is complete, it has been made available as a free PDF. Among the authors of the essays are Aniruddh D. Patel, a theoretical neurobiologist at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, who discusses the brain's response to different varieties of music, and Laurel Trainor, director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind, who explains the neural basis of music perception. Nature also has a special podcast featuring a discussion between science writer…

The 49th edition of Encephalon, which is online now at Neuroscientifically Challenged, includes entries on the limitations of the use of gene therapy for psychiatric disorders, the sensationalization of neuroimaging data by the mass media, and how the relationship between music and movement is manifested in the drumming that accompanies Sudanese martial arts demonstrations.

The Kaibo Zonshinzu is a beautiful collection of 83 anatomical illustrations on two scrolls, by a doctor named Yasukazu Minagaki from the Kyoto area. Painted in 1819, they are based on the observations he made during his dissections of more than 40 executed criminals. Minagaki adopted the style of illustrators such as Johann Adam Kulmus. His drawings were seen by Philipp von Siebold, the Dutch anatomist who is believed to have been the first European to teach Western medicine in Japan; he was so impressed by them that he made a complimentary inscription on the first scroll. The…

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a neurological condition that is acquired following a stroke or some other form of brain injury. It occurs as a result of damage to the brain's speech motor centres, so that syllables are mispronounced, making one sound as if they are speaking their native language in a foreign accent. FAS is extremely rare, with only around 50 reported cases since 1941. Two of these were reported in stroke victims in recent years: Linda Walker, a 62-year-old woman from Newcastle, began speaking in an accent that was described as a mixture of Jamaican, Canadian and Slovakian,…

Hollywood actress Sharon Stone hit the headlines recently, following her remarks that the massive earthquake which struck south-west China on May 12th could have occurred as a result of "bad karma" produced by Beijing's policy towards Tibet. Now, according to LA Times celebrity gossip blog The Dish Rag, animal rights group PETA has offered Stone a free brain scan to determine whether her apparent lack of empathy can be attributed to frontal lobe damage. In a letter addressed to the actress, dated July 1st, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk writes: Scientific studies suggest that the prefrontal…

The latest Seed Salon features highlights from an interesting discussion between Tom Wolfe and Michael Gazzaniga, one of the founders of cognitive neuroscience, who is best known for the work he carried out with Roger Sperry on split brain patients. Gazzaniga and Wolfe discuss, among other things, the implications of neuroscience for our concept of free will. The transcript of the whole discussion has just been published in the current issue of Seed, and is now available online. I love this anecdote from the transcript, about how Jose Delgado controlled an angry bull by electrical…

During a cerebrovascular accident (or stroke), the blood supply to part of the brain is interrupted. This is often caused by a blood clot which blocks an artery that carries blood to the brain. Consequently, neurons in the affected region of the brain die because they are deprived of oxygen. Stroke has several characteristic symptoms: slurred speech, paralysis and weakness on the right side of the body, and weakness and drooping of the face. These typically develop within minutes, and occur because stroke often affects the motor cortex in the left hemisphere, which controls the movements of…

I was recently contacted by Heather Perry, one of the few people in the world who has performed self-trepanation. Ms. Perry has kindly agreed to let me interview her, so I'll be traveling to Gloucestershire later this month to meet her, ask her some questions about the experience, and perhaps take a few photographs. If you have a serious question you'd like me to ask Ms. Perry, please submit it in the comments below. I'll post the interview here at some time in the near future.

It's been exactly one year since I moved to ScienceBlogs.com. In that time, I've written 540 posts which have generated over half a million page views and about 1,800 comments. Below is a brief summary of other blog stats, including my top ten posts and referrers. My ten most popular posts are: 1. Amazing boomerang photo (15,433 page views) 2. The rise & fall of the prefrontal lobotomy (14,605) 3. Unusual penetrating brain injuries (13,875) 4. An illustrated history of trepanation (10,175) 5. The left brain/ right brain myth (7,497) 6. Experimenting with a four-headed penis (6,669) 7.…

In a very cool paper published yesterday in the open access journal PLoS Biology, an international team of researchers report that they have produced the most detailed and comprehensive map yet of the connections in the human cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex contains hundreds of billions of cells organized into thousands of discrete functional modules which act in parallel to generate all human behaviours and cognitive processes. The new study uses neuroimaging to visualize more than 14,000 connections between nearly 1,000 of these modules, and reveals what the researchers call the brain…