Bequest

Participate in Brain Awareness Week every March and other outreach events throughout the year.

Participate in Brain Awareness Week every March and other outreach events throughout the year.

Participate in Brain Awareness Week every March and other outreach events throughout the year.

According to the U.S. National Report Card, only one out of three middle schoolers scores at or above proficiency in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), and the statistics are even worse for low-income children who attend Title I schools....

To fully understand the principles of motor control or how motor control recovers after brain injuries, motor output must be quantified and analyzed. This approach helps distinguish such effects as compensation vs true recovery and to begin to relate ac...

Read science policy and advocacy news from the week of March 30, 2018

Forebrain neurons deprived of activity become hyperactive when activity is restored. Rebound activity has been linked to spontaneous seizures in vivo following prolonged activity blockade. Here, we measured the time course of rebound activity and the contributing circuit mechanisms using calcium imaging, synaptic staining, and whole-cell patch clamp in organotypic slice cultures of mouse neocortex. Calcium imaging revealed hypersynchronous activity increasing in intensity with longer periods of deprivation. While activity partially recovered 3 d after slices were released from 5 d of deprivation, they were less able to recover after 10 d of deprivation. However, even after the longer period of deprivation, activity patterns eventually returned to baseline levels. The degree of deprivation-induced rebound was age-dependent, with the greatest effects occurring when silencing began in the second week. Pharmacological blockade of NMDA receptors indicated that hypersynchronous rebound activity did not require a...

Read science policy and advocacy news from the week of March 23, 2018

Principal neurons (PNs) of the lateral superior olive (LSO) are a critical component of brain circuits that compare information between the two ears to extract sound source-location-related cues. LSO PNs are not a homogenous group but differ in their transmitter type, intrinsic membrane properties, and projection pattern to higher processing centers in the inferior colliculus. Glycinergic inhibitory LSO PNs have higher input resistance than glutamatergic excitatory LSO PNs (∼double). This suggests that the inhibitory cell type has a lower minimum input or signal intensity required to produce an output (activation threshold) which may impact how they integrate binaural inputs. However, cell type-specific differences in the strength of synaptic drive could offset or accentuate differences in intrinsic excitability and have not been assessed. To evaluate this possibility, we used a knock-in mouse model to examine spontaneous and electrically stimulated (evoked) synaptic events in LSO PN types using voltage-cl...