Sunday, February 26, 2017

Beating Monday Morning Blues with Weekend Camping! Interview with Ellen Stothard on regulation of body clock by natural light.


Surely you have bing-watched your favorite series on Netflix, tucked inside a blanket with a hot cup of chocolate during a lazy weekend. We keep our eyes glued to the computer screen deep into the night, and shift bed time. But then comes Monday, and the body wants to remain inside the same warm blanket. Our body clock shifts and it wants to sleep late, and wake up later. Is there any way to reset the body to normal time? Get it refreshed for the week?

Ellen, Andrew and colleagues from University of Colorado find that exposing the body to natural light is an easy fix for the disrupted body rhythm. They find that spending a weekend under artificial light shifts the body clock to a later period, but that such delay can be prevented by weekend camping under natural sunlight. So to all people who feel the blues on Monday, pitch a tent. To know in detail on this phenomena, please listen to Ellen.


For further information, please refer to:
Circadian Entrainment to the Natural Light-Dark Cycle across Seasons and the Weekend
Stothard, McHill et al., Current Biology, 2017


Friday, February 10, 2017

Mind reading! Interview on Brain-computer interface for the completely locked-in by Ujwal Chaudhary.

Stephen Hawkins uses a special computer technology which translates the movements of his cheek muscles to communicate with the outside world. His inability to move any other muscle is due to loss of muscular function from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) disease. Unfortunately, some patients with ALS do not even retain a single musclular function, while retaining all mental functions; a state called locked-in syndrome. It would be great to help such people with a technology that could directly read the thoughts of the unfortunate patient.

With this inspiration, Ujwal and colleagues developed a brain-computer interface capable of reading simple 'yes' or 'no' thoughts of completely locked-in individuals. The interface is completely non-invasive and can be trained to read thoughts to any question. With this they can increase the interactions with the patients, stimulating and enriching their time, and increasing contact with the outside world.


This generates a nucleus that can be expanded to read full sentences, a technology out of sci-fi, but surely of great use to the unfortunately paralyzed. Please listen to Ujwal on this amazing technology.


To know further on the research, please read:
Brain–Computer Interface–Based Communication in the Completely Locked-In State.
Chaudhary et al., PLoS Biology, 2017





Saturday, February 4, 2017

Sex is in the details! Interview with Esther Saiz on gender influencing neuronal circuitry.

'Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.' But what differs between Mars and Venus. According to the author of the book, John Gray, the difference lies in the psyche. These differences could stem from different wiring inside the brain of individual sexes. With 100 billion neurons in the brain of typical human, and maybe as many as 1,000 trillion total connections, its a daunting task to answer this question.

Enter Esther and colleagues with their powerful model system C. elegans, which is a small transparent worm whose each and every cell in the body is accurately mapped along with most of cell's interacting partners. When they looked carefully at one neuron that differed between the sexes in C. elegans, they found a machinery that influenced the sex-specific maturation and behavior of that cell. Strikingly, this influence was not due to sexual hormones, but was wired inside the identity of the cell. So, just changing this one cell changed certain behaviors of the animal from one sex to another! To know more, please listen to Esther.


For further information, please refer to:
Sexually Dimorphic Differentiation of a C. elegans Hub Neuron Is Cell Autonomously Controlled by a Conserved Transcription Factor.
Saiz et al., Current Biology, 2017.
BioRxiv Link.