Last fall, Deb Roy, one of the US’s foremost experts on social media, attended a series of roundtables in small towns in middle America—places like Platteville, Wisconsin, and Anamosa, Iowa. It wasn’t what Roy, who runs the Laboratory for Social Machines at …Continue reading
The Rogue Immune Cells That Wreck the Brain
In the first years of her career in brain research, Beth Stevens thought of microglia with annoyance if she thought of them at all. When she gazed into a microscope and saw these ubiquitous cells with their spidery tentacles, she did what …Continue reading
To Study the Brain, a Doctor Puts Himself Under the Knife
Phil Kennedy no longer saw any other way to get the data. That was how one day he came to lie blissfully unconscious on an operating table in Belize while a neurosurgeon sawed off the top of his skull. Last year, Kennedy, …Continue reading
Immune System Offers Major Clue to Schizophrenia
Winning a rare insight into the cause of schizophrenia and possible ways to treat it, scientists in Boston say they have identified a biochemical pathway that contributes to the disease by altering connections between brain cells. The link between schizophrenia and a …Continue reading
For Cocaine Addicts, Treatment with Magnets May Stop Craving
Stefano, a 46-year-old cocaine addict from Padua, Italy, had all but accepted that he might die from his habit. He’d just relapsed after a seven-month stay at a rehab facility, his third failed attempt at getting clean. Stefano (who asked that his …Continue reading
A Shocking Way to Fix the Brain
Researchers in Jaron Lanier’s lab at Microsoft are exploring ways for people to share the experience of mixed reality. Augmented or mixed reality, which renders virtual images in a view of the real world, can be spectacular to experience. But it may …Continue reading