Mini LED Probes To Manipulate the Brain With Light

Technology advancement for the health and advancement of humans - in the mini form. Scientists to the rescue! :)

Extracted from Wired.com

Figure 1: LED probes that are small enough to fit through the eye of  needle.

Tiny, glowing probes packed with LEDs and sensors are scientists’ newest tool for measuring and manipulating the brain and other living tissues. They’re flexible, they can operate wirelessly, and yes, they’re small enough to fit through the eye of a needle.

This kind of device could potentially improve researchers’ ability to influence neural activity in live animals and measure a variety of physiological and biochemical processes, says applied physicist and neuroscientist Mark Schnitzer of Stanford University, who was not involved in the work. Such bio-compatible electronics also offer new possibilities for manipulating living tissue based on rapid feedback from sensors embedded in the tissue.

One obvious application in brain research is for optogenetics experiments, which involve genetically modifying neurons to make them fire in response to light. In recent years neuroscientists have used these methods to examine the neural circuits involved in everything from drug addiction, to depression, to Parkinson’s disease. But getting light to areas deep inside the brain is tricky.

 Figure 2: Illuminated brain - an LED probe lights up a mouse brain.

In one experiment, the researchers implanted a probe into the brain of a mouse. Then they used pulses of light to stimulate neurons in a part of the brain’s reward pathway. Mice who received pulses in a particular arm of a Y-shaped maze soon learned to spend more time there, just as they would if they’d been rewarded with food.

In any case, tweaking neural activity is just a small part of what the probes can do. In addition to LED arrays, they also contain photodetectors, electrodes for stimulating and recording electrical activity, and temperature sensors that double as microheaters. 

To read more, click here.

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"Sugar, not fat, exposed as deadly villain in obesity epidemic"

We've always known all along that obesity is due to overloading of calories. But is it just really just because of our fat intake? This article explains it. 

Excerpts from The Guardian:

Sugar – given to children by adults, lacing our breakfast cereals and a major part of our fizzy drinks – is the real villain in the obesity epidemic, and not fat as people used to think, according to a leading US doctor who is taking on governments and the food industry.

Dr Robert Lustig, who was this month in London and Oxford for a series of talks about his research, likens sugar to controlled drugs. Cocaine and heroin are deadly because they are addictive and toxic – and so is sugar, he says. "We need to wean ourselves off. We need to de-sweeten our lives. We need to make sugar a treat, not a diet staple," he said.

"The food industry has made it into a diet staple because they know when they do you buy more. This is their hook. If some unscrupulous cereal manufacturer went out and laced your breakfast cereal with morphine to get you to buy more, what would you think of that? They do it with sugar instead." 

As a paediatrician who specialises in treating overweight children in San Francisco, he has spent 16 years studying the effects of sugar on the central nervous system, metabolism and disease. His conclusion is that the rivers of Coca-Cola and Pepsi consumed by young people today have as much to do with obesity as the mountains of burgers.

It has been added to your diet, "kids have access" to it, and it is there in all sorts of foods that don't need it, he says. When high-fat foods were blamed for making us overweight, manufacturers tumbled over each other to produce low-fat products. But to make them palatable, they added sugar, causing much greater problems.

Cutting calories is not the answer because "a calorie is not a calorie". The effect of a calorie in sugar is different from the effect of a calorie in lean grass-fed beef. And added sugar is often disguised in food labelling under carbohydrates and myriad different names, from glucose to diastatic malt and dextrose. Fructose – contained in many different types of sugar – is the biggest problem, and high-fructose corn syrup, used extensively by food manufacturers in the US, is the main source of it.

It is not a case of eradicating sugar from the diet, just getting it down to levels that are not toxic, he says. The American Heart Association in 2009 published a statement, of which Lustig was a co-author, saying Americans consumed 22 teaspoons of it a day. That needs to come down to six for women and nine for men.

"That's a reduction by two thirds to three quarters. Is that zero? No. But that's a big reduction. That gets us below our toxic threshold. Our livers have a capacity to metabolise some fructose, they just can't metabolise the glut that we've been exposed to by the food industry. And so the goal is to get sugar out of foods that don't need it, like salad dressing, like bread, like barbecue sauce." There is a simple way to do it. "Eat real food."

Lustig's food advice 

• Oranges. Eat the fruit, don't drink the juice. Fruit juice in cartons has had all the fibre squeezed out of it, making its sugars more dangerous.

• Beef. Beef from grass-fed cattle as in Argentina is fine, but not from corn-fed cattle as in the US.

• Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other sweetened beverages. These deliver sugar but with no nutritional added value. Water and milk are the best drinks, especially for children.

• Bread. Watch out for added sugar in foods where you would not expect it.

• Alcohol. Just like sugar, it pushes up the body's insulin levels, which tells the liver to store energy in fat cells. Alcohol is a recognised cause of fatty liver disease.

• Home-baked cookies and cakes. If you must eat them, bake them yourself with one third less sugar than the recipe says. Lustig says they even taste better that way.

Do you think you will be able to reduce your daily sugar intake? Read the whole article here.

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Lantern Festival 2012 - Organised by the Bioscience Club!

Written by: Ricky Chia

Lantern Festival is hosted in celebration of the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, which is one of the major holidays and festivals to be celebrated on the Chinese calendar. It is typically a night filled with candle lights and music, with families gathering under the full moon, gazing upon the stars, with the elders telling a story about the legend of Chang Er and the children listening intently. The atmosphere of this time of the year would cause some of the students currently residing in Subang Jaya for their studies, far away from home, become homesick and making them feel poignant.

That was one of the main reasons why we hosted this event on the 5^th of October 2012, to make them and everyone else experience the enjoyment of being around loved ones and people that appreciate the festival. We think that everyone should have the experience or relive the experience of celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Another reason we hosted this event is for the 1 Taylor’s Community – BARIO project, which is a charity project to construct hostels and to increase the chances of orphans in Sarawak to enter primary school. All of the profits gained from the sales of tickets were donated to this project and hopefully this would brighten the future of those orphans. In addition, we had also set up booths in front of LT1 to sell food that are typically eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival such as mooncakes, tang yuan, and herbal jelly to further enhance the students’ experience with the event and to make further profits. We would also like to thank Overseas for sponsoring the mooncakes for the day and Yeo’s for sponsoring the packet drinks. 

Two other blogshops, Sparkles Fly in The Sky and Egg² Yolk, also joined in their effort for this project, donating part of their profit from the sales of their products to the BARIO project.

The itinerary of the day was as follows:

Time	Activity
12pm-2pm	Candle making
2pm-4.30pm	Break
4.30pm-5pm	Paper lilies making
5pm-6pm	Mini games
6pm-7pm	Dinner
7pm-8pm	Performance
8pm-9pm	Celebration

During the candle making session, the participants were divided into several groups and were allocated different time slots to accommodate all of them. Four separate stoves were set up so four separate teams could make candles simultaneously. The participants used vinegar and shredded soap to make the candles. Although majority of the participants failed to make a proper candle, most of them had fun and enjoyed the process in the end.

After the long break, the event moved onto the Experimental Theatre at Level 2. Although few participants turned up for the paper lily making activity, only a fraction of those who signed up, the activity still went on. It involved making paper lilies that could be the base of their candles if it were let to float in the lake, to create an effect as if the paper lilies were glowing in the darkness. The paper lilies were made from different coloured papers which were cut into squares that can be folded into the shape of a lily.

During the mini games, the participants were divided into 4 groups and a total of two games were played instead of 3 due to time constraint. In the first game, the participants had to face their back towards a faraway bucket filled with ice and candy, where their team members needed to guide them towards the bucket in order to take the candy. The first team to gather 5 green, 5 purple and 5 pink candies from the bucket wins. However, the catch was that there was another 15 white candies inside the bucket along with the other 15, and each participant was only allowed 5 tries, where during each try, participants could only take one candy out of the bucket. It was a challenging game but nonetheless, many of the participants enjoyed themselves and some even found the cold water soothing from the scorching heat of the afternoon. On top of that, the participants were allowed to eat the candy as soon as they finish gathering the candy from the bucket, which was a little prize in itself from completing this mini game.

The second game played for that day is a game called “Chain of Charades” where the members of a team would stand together in a line, and the first person was given something to act out - for example, “James Bond doing Gangnam Style”, to the next person. The second person will then need to act out what the first person acted out to the third person. The person standing at the back will then have to guess what the phrase is. The groups came out one by one with the other three groups being the audience. Needless to say, laughter from everyone echoed across the small Experiment Theatre where the game was held. Even though there was no prize given out for the teams that successfully guessed the correct answer, everybody had a good time and a good laugh together.

After the mini games ended, it was dinner time which consisted of fried rice, vegetables and fried chicken and packet drinks sponsored by Yeo’s. While the participants took a break and had their dinner, the event helpers then prepared for the much awaited performances, which were provided by our Taylor’s University Music Club, Chinese Society Club and the Bioscience Club as well.

The performance started off with the Music Club, performing two Chinese songs for our audience. The second act for the night was a number performed by a member of the Chinese Society Club, a very popular pop song, “Call Me Maybe” originally performed by Carly Rae Jepsen. While the performance was ongoing with the audience joining in the fun of singing along to the melody, they had no idea what was in store for them. After the emcee came out to introduce the second act, a mysterious man came out dressed in a hoodie, shushed the emcee and chased the emcee off the spotlight just to put a radio on the floor.

Then he pressed the play button.

A resounding “Para-para Sakura” by Aaron Kwok came out from the system speakers.

Pumped up by this suddenly change of events, the crowd went crazy and a tremendous round of applause roared from the crowd along with whistles and screams from our lovely ladies in the audience for the night. Five students from the Bioscience Club then performed the dance number and heated up the atmosphere for the night.

After their dance number, while they were celebrating, the emcee who was annoyed by their interruption and their dancing of something so “old-schooled”, the emcee came out and mocked them of living in the wrong generation, and ordered the people backstage to start something a little more 21^st-century-ish. Something more recent, more happening and something more.. Korean.

“Gangnam Style” by the internationally renowned singer PSY started playing off the speakers of the Experimental Theatre. The crowd created a roar of applause once again accompanied with screams and whistles. Just when you think the crowd was already loud enough, when the emcee asked his “girls” to come out from backstage, the roars went even louder than before (although most of the voices that contributed to this were from the males)!

The girls then started out with the dance, and completely - in the urban slang - owned the guys with their performance of the “Gangnam Style”!

Not to be trumped by the girls, the guy dancers soon joined in the dance with them.

The atmosphere instantaneously went through the roof! The crowd simply couldn’t contain their excitement and joined in singing to the melody of the pop song that had swept through the entire world. Even after the dance ended, the crowd chanted “Encore! Encore!”, wanting more. Happy that the crowd enjoyed their performance so much, the dance crew danced once more for the crowd, much to their delight. Some lecturers were also dragged out to join the dance and in particular, the Dean of the School of Biosciences joined in the fun as well. How sporting!

After the heated atmosphere of the dance, the crowd was serenaded with two songs by two members of the Chinese society, singing “Sunday Morning” and “This Love” from Maroon 5.

But the dance crew from just now didn’t want the atmosphere to die down, so they asked the crowd whether they wanted another encore after the songs and danced yet another time for the entertainment of the crowd and the performance timeslot ended with a bang.

Once the performance ended, mooncakes and dessert as well as lanterns were distributed to the crowd. Everyone gathered at the lakeside to end the night in a traditional way of the Mid-Autumn Festival - sitting under the stars and playing lanterns in the darkness, enjoying mooncakes.

I believe this event was enjoyed not just by the participants, but the organizers of the event as well. Looking at the satisfied faces of the people that enjoyed the event at a home away from home, and looking at new bonds being formed and old bonds strengthened, and to add on the fact that this was a charity event had caused the organizers to feel warmth within them as well. This event was considered a success despite the lack of experience in organizing such events and the lack of time. We will definitely provide you with another event like this next year that will be bigger and better! Look out for it!

              

  Peace! 

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