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Neuroscience, Mini Brains, and Your Health
“All the best models are the ones that you can improve in complexity to get closer and closer to the reality.” The idea of a brain in a dish may sound like science fiction to some but scientists are becoming more and more adept at creating cortical organoids in the lab. The organoids are models…
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Dreams That You Dare to Dream
The annual Lytle Scholarship Concerts were inaugurated in 1996 to benefit the Preuss School at UC San Diego, a public college prep charter school for grades 6 through 12. The concerts are specific to a composer (e.g., Chopin, Schubert, Beethoven, Liszt) or to a musical concept or genre (e.g., gospel tunes, tangos, ragtime, Latin jazz).…
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Recommended for You
We use recommender system all the time. A website will recommend something to you based on what you’ve watched, listened to, bought or who you’ve friended on Facebook. These systems attempt to predict your preferences based on past interactions. The systems range from simple statistical approaches like Amazon’s people who bought X also bought Y…
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Shaping Our Dynamic Microbiomes for Lifelong Health
Our life-spans are ever-increasing, but our health-spans are not, leading to long periods of unpleasant and expensive suffering with chronic conditions. Many of these conditions have recently been linked to the microbiome. We are constantly shaping our microbiomes through the foods we eat, the environments we experience, even the people we live and work with.…
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Combatting the Scourge
Malaria has been described as “the perennial scourge of mankind,” with over 200 million cases reported annually resulting in up to 750,000 deaths and incalculable misery. The disease is most common in the tropical and subtropical regions that surround the equator, including Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia, but it may be found in any…
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Your Brain on Advertisements
Advertisers are always looking to better understand consumers’ preferences and decision making. The application of neuroscience knowledge and techniques to answer market and media research questions is not new but in our digital age, the practice raises new questions about privacy, informed consent, and consumer autonomy in decision making. Dr. Carl Marci, Chief Neuroscientist at…
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What Happened When Modern Humans Met Neanderthals?
In short, they interbred, according to Svante Pääbo, a Swedish biologist and pioneer of paleogenetics, the study of preserved genetic material from the remains of ancient organisms, including ancient human DNA. He has served as director of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, since 1997.…
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Gwyneth Paltrow at UCSB
If anyone could be said to have been “born into show business,” it’s Gwyneth Paltrow. Her parents were film & television producer-director Bruce Paltrow and actress Blythe Danner, whom Gwyneth cites as her main inspiration to pursue acting. Her brother, Jake, is a director and screenwriter; her uncle Harry Danner is an opera singer; her…