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Unlocking the Mysteries of the Brain Through Stem Cell Research
Inside a lab at the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, researchers are doing something truly remarkable. They are growing tiny versions of developing human brains in order to study everything from Alzheimer’s disease to the Zika virus. Alysson Muotri is the co-director of the UC San Diego Stem Cell Program and leads the team researching […]
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Brain-Powered Robot
It sounds like the plot of a science fiction movie. Scientists grow brains in a lab and use them to power robots. But, it’s really happening at UC San Diego – to a degree. Stem cell researcher Alysson Muotri has teamed up with a high school student for the groundbreaking project. It’s called the Neurobot, […]
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Searching for a Cure for Blindness
There are a number of diseases that can lead to blindness. But, a researcher at UC San Diego thinks there might be one way to cure them all. It’s called endogenous regeneration. Think of a lizard re-growing a lost tail. Zebrafish can do something similar with retinal tissue. Researcher Karl Wahlin says there is evidence […]
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Building the Brain With Alysson Muotri
Inside of each brain, there is the possibility to understand how trillions of neural connections come to sense the world, record memories, create an individual, and shape who you are and who you will become. Can we ever learn how this happens? By using cortical organoids – self organized clusters of neurons generated by stem […]
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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 […]