MIT neuroscientists were among the recipients of new grants for brain research from the National Institutes of Health, reports Jon Hamilton for NPR. Hamilton explains that as part of one grant, “Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will try to adapt functional MRI so that it can show the activity of individual brain cells.”
Amy Robinson of Scientific American presents the first installment of a new series on emerging neurotechnologies, which will feature lectures and lab tours from MIT’s Center for Neurobiological Engineering. “The more we know about the brain, the better we are equipped to prevent dysfunctions and fix it when things go wrong,” writes Robinson.
Neel V. Patel writes for Popular Science about the online game Eyewire developed by MIT researchers. The game has allowed neuroscientists to gather data that is helping them to map the eye’s neural network.
Lenny Bernstein of The Washington Post writes about a new study conducted by researchers from MIT and Johns Hopkins University that showed that sightless people, “understand how others see the world in the same way that sighted people do — though they have never personally experienced a single visual image.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Ed Silverman interviews Professor Andrew Lo about his proposal that a public-private partnership could solve funding issues for drugs research and development. “Right now, the risk of failure [in developing an Alzheimer’s treatment] is far too high for any single pharmaceutical company to take on,” Lo explains.
“Based on the current rates of success in creating new drugs for Alzheimer's disease, it could take 260 years until the next one is approved,” writes The Boston Globe’s Carolyn Johnson on the rationale for why Professor Andrew Lo is proposing a new, portfolio-based approach to Alzheimer's research.
Rachel Zimmerman of WBUR reports on how neuroscientists have located a neural pathway that could transform how dyslexia is addressed. “In preliminary findings, researchers report that brain measures taken in kindergartners — even before the kids can read — can “significantly” improve predictions of how well, or poorly, the children can master reading later on,” Zimmerman reports.
Carey Goldberg of WBUR features Prof. Ed Boyden’s optogenetics research in a segment on neuroscience advances. “We might be in a golden age of making such tools because most fields of engineering had not been applied to the brain, so there’s just a gold rush of possibility,” says Boyden.
In this compilation of WBUR videos, 11 neuroscientists from MIT, Harvard, and Boston University discuss their current research and the importance of their work. The videos feature five researchers from MIT: Ben Bartelle, Claire O’Connell, Anna Beyeler, Emily Mackevicius, and Neville Sanjana.
MIT scientists have compared the brain activity of adults who had ADHD as children and adults who still have the disorder, reports Melissa Malamut in Boston Magazine. Researchers uncovered, “key differences in a brain communication network that is active when the brain is at wakeful rest and not focused on a particular task,” Malamut writes.
Los Angeles Times reporter Amina Khan features new MIT research examining a child’s ability to decipher when adults are committing “sins of omission.” Researchers found that, “kids can tell when someone isn’t giving them the whole story – and they learn not to trust the information that person gives them,” Khan reports.
Reporting for Wired, Chris Higgins writes about how researchers from MIT have uncovered the mystery of how the human eye detects motion thanks to the efforts of thousands of people from around the world who played the citizen science computer game EyeWire.
NPR’s Joe Palca reports on EyeWire, a computer game developed by MIT researchers to help map nerve connections in the eye. Palca reports that over “120,000 citizen neuroscientists from 140 countries” played the game, helping to produce a map that shows that the eye’s retina detects motion.
Klint Finley, a reporter for Wired, reports on Open Ephys, a project for sharing open-source neuroscience hardware designs founded by MIT and Brown University researchers.