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IN THE SPOTLIGHT:
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| Date: |
June 24, 2013 2:00 PM
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| Location: |
CNSI Executive Conference Rooms |
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| Speaker: |
Jurriaan Huskens
University of Twente, MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology, Molecular Nanofabrication group, Enschede, The Netherlands |
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Source: Kavli Foundation
May 31, 2013
The BRAIN Initiative seeks to measure how the brain’s billions of neurons organize themselves into neural circuits and communicate with one another. Four experts discuss how nanotechnology can change the way we measure brain activity.
TO DO THIS, WE WILL NEED TO CREATE A NEW GENERATION OF TOOLS for probing the brains of living animals, so we can map the activity of neurons as the brain senses, thinks, and directs action. We have already begun to do this, implanting electrodes that measure the spikes of electrical currents created as neurons pass information along their networks. Yet even our best implants can interrogate no more than 200 nearby neurons. To understand the language of the brain, we will need to monitor thousands and then tens and even hundreds of thousands of neurons networked across the brain. Nanotechnology promises to make this – and more – possible.
The Kavli Foundation brought together four experts to discuss how nanotechnology is changing the way we measure brain activity. Our participants are:
- Paul Alivisatos – Director, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, American Physical Society, and American Association for the Advancement of Science.
- Anne Andrews – Richard Metzner Chair in Clinical Neuropharmacology, Professor of Psychiatry and Chemistry & Biochemistry, and member of the California NanoSystems Institute at University of California, Los Angeles. She is a Fellow of the American and International Colleges of Neuropsychopharmacology.
- Arto Nurmikko – L. Herbert Ballou University Professor, Engineering and Physics at Brown University and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and Optical Society of America.
- Hongkun Park – Professor, Chemistry, Chemical Biology, and Physics, associate member of the Broad Institute, and affiliate at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and Harvard Center for Brain Science. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
To read the full article on the Kavli Foundation's website click here
The Brain Initiative is combining neuroscience with nanotechnology in the world's biggest project to understand the mind.
By Katharine Sanderson | May 30, 2013
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
In April this year President Obama announced a hugely ambitious science project, the "Brain" Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies). Obama was giving his support, and the promise of hard cash –$100m (£65m) in 2014 and up to billions of dollars in total – to a project that will last at least 10 years. The aim is to unpick exactly what goes on in the brain at the level of individual neurons, to see how the human brain deals with emotions, memories, actions, and consciousness.
To understand these complex phenomena, it turns out that nanotechnology is going to be crucial. "The brain has always been nano," says Paul Weiss, a nanoscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and one of the original instigators of the project. The brain's 100m neurons, and 100tn connections all work over nanometres, so to study the brain on its own scale nano-sized measuring techniques are absolutely necessary. But many of the technologies and tools that will be needed to probe the brain haven't even been dreamed up yet. Nanotechnologists need to get busy.
This unknown element of the Brain project is quite a contrast to other large collaborative science ventures, such as the Human Genome Project for example, which worked out the sequence of all the base pairs in the complete set of human DNA known as the genome. "The Human Genome Project had a fixed endpoint," says Anne Andrews, a nanotechnologist and neuroscientist also at UCLA. That isn't the case with the Brain Initiative: "We don't really know what we're going to find," she says. "We have to trust we'll know it when we see it." . . . . . Read the full article here - http://www.guardian.co.uk/what-is-nano/mapping-the-mind-with-nanotechnology
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