With Evolved Brains, Robots Creep Closer To Animal-Like Learning

The most nightmare-inducing characteristic of Big Dog, DARPA’s robotic military mule, might be the way it moves so stiffly, yet unrelentingly, over treacherous battleground. Turns out the repetitive mechanical gait that calls to mind some coming robopocalypse is also a huge headache for Big Dog’s makers—and lots of the big thinkers behind walking bots envisioned for everyday domestic use.

Units like Big Dog move so awkwardly because of their rudimentary brains, which require pre-programming for every little action. A four-legged walking bot could jump smoothly over rocks or weave through trees with the fluid grace and reflexes of a cheetah—if it only had a better brain. One that was more animal-like. Thanks to breakthroughs in understanding how biological brains evolve, a team of robotic researchers say they’re close.

“We are working on evolving brains that can be downloaded onto a robot, wake up, and begin exploring their environment to figure out how to accomplish the high-level objectives we give them (e.g. avoid getting damaged, find recharging stations, locate survivors, pick up trash, etc.),” says Jeffrey Clune, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wyoming, who is part of the robotics team.

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City Life Changes How Our Brains Deal With Distractions

City life requires a lot of attention. Navigating a busy sidewalk while processing loud storefronts and avoiding rogue pigeons may feel like second-nature at times, but it’s actually quite a bit of work for the human brain. Psychologists do know that quick walks through the park can restore our focus, but they’re still getting a handle on just what urbanization means for human cognition.

A new series of behavioral studies offers some of the richest evidence to date on the mental exhaustion of urban living. In an upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, a group of British psychologists reports that people who live in cities show diminished powers of general attention compared to people from remote areas. With so much going on around them, urbanites don’t pay much attention to surroundings unless they’re highly engaging.

Mapping the living cell

To get a clear picture of what’s happening inside a cell, scientists need to know the locations of thousands of proteins and other molecules. MIT chemists have now developed a technique that can tag all of the proteins in a particular region of a cell, allowing them to more accurately map those proteins.

“That’s a holy grail for biology — to be able to get spatially and temporally resolved molecular maps of living cells,” says Alice Ting, the Ellen Swallow Richards Associate Professor of Chemistry at MIT. “We’re still really far from that goal, but the overarching motivation is to get closer to that goal.”

Ting’s new method, developed with researchers from the Broad Institute and Harvard Medical School, combines the strengths of two existing techniques — microscopic imaging and mass spectrometry — to tag proteins in a specific cell location and generate a comprehensive list of all the proteins in that area.

In a paper appearing in the Jan. 31 online edition of Science, Ting and colleagues used the new technique to identify nearly 500 proteins located in the mitochondrial matrix — the innermost compartment of the cellular organelle where energy is generated.

Using fluorescence or electron microscopy, scientists can determine protein locations with high resolution, but only a handful of a cell’s approximately 20,000 proteins can be imaged at once. “It’s a bandwidth problem,” Ting says. “You certainly couldn’t image all the proteins in the proteome at once in a single cell, because there’s no way to spectrally separate that many channels of information.”

With mass spectrometry, which uses ionization to detect the mass and chemical structure of a compound, scientists can analyze a cell’s entire complement of proteins in a single experiment. However, the process requires dissolving the cell membrane to release a cell’s contents, which jumbles all of the proteins together. By purifying the mixture and extracting specific organelles, it is then possible to figure out which proteins were in those organelles, but the process is messy and often unreliable.

The new MIT approach tags proteins within living cells before mass spectrometry is done, allowing spatial information to be captured before the cell is broken apart. This information is then reconstructed during analysis by noting which proteins carry the location tag.

Kynurenines in the CNS: recent advances and new questions

Various pathologies of the central nervous system (CNS) are accompanied by alterations in tryptophan metabolism. The main metabolic route of tryptophan degradation is the kynurenine pathway; its metabolites are responsible for a broad spectrum of effects, including the endogenous regulation of neuronal excitability and the initiation of immune tolerance. This Review highlights the involvement of the kynurenine system in the pathology of neurodegenerative disorders, pain syndromes and autoimmune diseases through a detailed discussion of its potential implications in Huntington’s disease, migraine and multiple sclerosis. The most effective preclinical drug candidates are discussed and attention is paid to currently under-investigated roles of the kynurenine pathway in the CNS, where modulation of kynurenine metabolism might be of therapeutic value.

Even the brains of people with anxiety states can get used to fear

Fear is a protective function against possible dangers that is designed to save our lives. Where there are problems with this fear mechanism, its positive effects are cancelled out: patients who have a social phobia become afraid of perfectly normal, everyday social situations because they are worried about behaving inappropriately or being thought of as stupid by other people. Scientists from the Centre for Medical Physics and Biomedical Technology and the University Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the MedUni Vienna have now discovered that this fear circuit can be deactivated, at least in part.

In a study by Ronald Sladky, led by Christian Windischberger (Centre for Medical Physics and Biomedical Technology), which has recently been published in the magazine PLOS One, functional magnetic resonance tomography was used to measure the changes in the brain activity of socially phobic patients and healthy test subjects while they were looking at faces. This experiment simulates social confrontation with other people without actually placing the individual in an intolerable situation of anxiety.

Permanent confrontation has a diminishing effect on anxiety
“The study demonstrated that people with social phobia initially exhibit greater activity in the amygdala and in the medial, prefrontal cortex of the brain, however after a few faces this activity recedes,” says Sladky. This contradicts the assumption made thus far that the emotional circuit of socially phobic individuals is unable to adapt adequately to this stress-inducing situation.

Permanent confrontation with the test task not only led to a solution to the “problem” being found more quickly among the patients with anxiety, but also to some areas of the brain being bypassed which otherwise were over-stimulated, a characteristic typical of anxiety. Says Sladky: “We therefore concluded that there are functional control strategies even in the emotional circuits of people with social phobia, although the mechanisms take longer to take effect in these individuals. The misregulation of these parts of the brain can therefore be compensated to a degree.”

These findings could, according to Sladky, provide a starting point for the development of personalised training programmes that will help affected individuals to conquer unpleasant situations in their everyday lives more effectively. In Austria, around 200,000 people a year are affected by some form of social phobia. The number of people who suffer this condition without seeking help for it is likely to be very high, since many affected individuals fail to seek assistance or do so only too late as a result of their anxiety.

Treatment to prevent Alzheimer’s disease moves a step closer

A new drug to prevent the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease could enter clinical trials in a few years’ time according to scientists.

Alzheimer’s is the most common type of dementia, which currently affects 820,000 people in the UK, with numbers expected to more than double by 2050. One in three people over 65 will die with dementia.

The disease begins when a protein called amyloid-β (Aβ) starts to clump together in senile plaques in the brain, damaging nerve cells and leading to memory loss and confusion.

Professor David Allsop and Dr Mark Taylor at Lancaster University have successfully created a new drug which can reduce the number of senile plaques by a third, as well as more than doubling the number of new nerve cells in a particular region of the brain associated with memory.  It also markedly reduced the amount of brain inflammation and oxidative damage associated with the disease.

The drug was tested on transgenic mice containing two mutant human genes linked to inherited forms of Alzheimer’s, so that they would develop some of the changes associated with the illness. The drug is designed to cross the blood-brain barrier and prevent the Aβ molecules from sticking together to form plaques.

Professor Allsop, who led the research and was the first scientist to isolate senile plaques from human brain, said: “When we got the test results back, we were highly encouraged. The amount of plaque in the brain had been reduced by a third and this could be improved if we gave a larger dose of the drug, because at this stage, we don’t know what the optimal dose is.”

The drug needs to be tested for safety before it can enter human trials, but, if it passes this hurdle, the aim would be to give the drug to people with mild symptoms of memory loss before they develop the illness.

“Many people who are mildly forgetful may go on to develop the disease because these senile plaques start forming years before any symptoms manifest themselves. The ultimate aim is to give the drug at that stage to stop any more damage to the brain, before it’s too late.”

Support for the research was given by Alzheimer’s Research UK, and the results are published in the open access journal PLOS ONE.

Expert psychologist suggests the era of genius scientists is over

Dean Keith Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California, has published a comment piece in the journal Nature, where he argues that it’s unlikely mankind will ever produce another Einstein, Newton, Darwin, etc. This is because, he says, we’ve already discovered all the most basic ideas that describe how the natural world works. Any new work, will involve little more than adding to our knowledge base.

Simonton’s comments are likely to draw a strong reaction, both in and out of the science world. It’s been the geniuses among us that have driven science forward for thousands of years, after all. If no more geniuses appear to offer an entirely new way of looking at things, how will the human race ever reach new heights?

Simonton has been studying geniuses and their contributions to science for more than 30 years and has even written books on them. He also writes that he hopes he is wrong in his assessment, even as he clearly doesn’t think he is. Sadly, the past several decades only offer proof. Since the time of Einstein, he says, no one has really come up with anything that would mark them as a giant in the field, to be looked up to hundreds, if not thousands of years from now. Worse perhaps, he details how the way modern science is conducted is only adding to the problem. Rather than fostering lone wolves pondering the universe in isolation, the new paradigm has researchers working together as teams, efficiently going about their way, marching towards incremental increases in knowledge. That doesn’t leave much room for true insight, which is of course, a necessary ingredient for genius level discoveries.

Simonton could be wrong of course – there might yet be some person that looks at all that has been discovered and compares it with his or her own observations, and finds that what we think we know, is completely wrong, and offers evidence of something truly groundbreaking as an alternative. The study of astrophysics, for example, appears ripe for a new approach. Scientists are becoming increasingly frustrated in trying to explain why the universe is not just expanding, but is doing so at an increasing rate. Perhaps most of the theories put forth over the past half-century or so, are completely off base. Modern science can’t even explain gravity, after all. Isn’t it possible that there is something at work that will need the intelligence, insight and courage of an Einstein to figure out? It appears we as a species are counting on it, even as we wonder if it’s even possible.