A Leap for All Life: World’s Lead­ing Sci­en­tists Announce Cre­ation of Ency­clo­pe­dia of Life (a data­base of all liv­ing things)

Press Release: Bio­di­ver­sity, Sci­ence Com­mu­ni­ties Unite Behind Epic Effort To Pro­mote Bio­di­ver­sity, Doc­u­ment All 1.8 Mil­lion Named Species on Planet

• WASHINGTON (May 9, 2007) – Many of the world’s lead­ing sci­en­tific insti­tu­tions today announced the launch of the Ency­clo­pe­dia of Life, an unprece­dented global effort to doc­u­ment all 1.8 mil­lion named species of ani­mals, plants, and other forms of life on Earth. For the first time in the his­tory of the planet, sci­en­tists, stu­dents, and cit­i­zens will have multi-media access to all known liv­ing species, even those that have just been discovered.
• Over the next 10 years, the Ency­clo­pe­dia of Life will cre­ate Inter­net pages for Read the rest of this entry »

PZ Myers, the VV Cephei of sci­ence blogging, is 50 years old today. If you are inter­ested in biol­ogy and evo­lu­tion, give him the birth­day present of a visit to Pharyn­gula!

If you are won­der­ing what VV Cephei means, and how poor mor­tals view PZ…please enjoy this short clip.

(Thanks to Michelle for the lead to the video) 

We hope you are enjoy­ing the grow­ing cov­er­age of Brain Fit­ness as much as we are. Below you have the Brain Fit­ness Newslet­ter we sent a few days ago-you can sub­scribe to this monthly email update in the box on the right hand side.

In this post, we will briefly cover:

I. Press: see what CBS and Time Mag­a­zine are talk­ing about. Sharp­Brains was intro­duced in the Birm­ing­ham News, Chicago Tri­bune and in a quick note car­ried by the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion news service.

II. Events: we are out­reach part­ners for the Learn­ing & the Brain con­fer­ence, which will gather neu­ro­sci­en­tists and edu­ca­tors, and for the Dana Foundation’s Brain Aware­ness Week.

III. Pro­gram Reviews: The Wall Street Jour­nal reviewed six dif­fer­ent pro­grams for brain exer­cise and aging, and the one we offer is one of the two win­ners. A college-level coun­sel­ing cen­ter starts offer­ing our stress man­age­ment one. And we inter­view a Notre Dame sci­en­tist who has con­ducted a repli­ca­tion study for the work­ing mem­ory train­ing pro­gram for kids with ADD/ ADHD.

IV. New Offer­ings: we have started to offer two infor­ma­tion pack­ages that can be very use­ful for peo­ple who want to bet­ter under­stand this field before they com­mit to any par­tic­u­lar pro­gram: learn more about our Brain Fit­ness 101 guide and Exer­cise Your Brain DVD.

V. Web­site and Blog Sum­mary: we revamped our home page and have had a very busy month writ­ing many good arti­cles. We also hosted two “Blog Car­ni­vals”- don’t you want to know what that means?
Read the rest of this entry »

BBC News reports that Brain cre­ates ‘new’ nerve cells:

• “Researchers have dis­cov­ered a type of brain cell that con­tin­u­ously regen­er­ates in humans.”
• “Experts said the find­ings, pub­lished in Sci­ence, opened up the poten­tial for research into repair­ing brains in con­di­tions such as Alzheimer’s disease”
• “Dr Mark Bax­ter, Well­come Trust senior research fel­low at Oxford Uni­ver­sity, said: “This study is excit­ing because it reveals a group of brain cells in the adult human brain that are con­tin­u­ously regenerating.”

Two of the best blog carnivals:

• For edu­ca­tion The Car­ni­val Of Education
• For all things sci­ence: Tan­gled Bank

And a very infor­ma­tive post via Mind­Hacks on what Sin­gu­lar­ity is and a tech­ni­cal guide to key terms of tran­shu­man­ism — “an opti­mistic move­ment that seeks to apply cur­rent and future sci­en­tific dis­cov­er­ies to extend­ing human expe­ri­ence and abilities”.

First, here’s the new edi­tion of Encephalon hosted by MindHacks.

Sec­ond, you can’t miss this short clip: Col­bert asks Steven Pinker, “How does the brain work…in 5 words or less”. Think what you’d answer, while the video uploads…

As brought to our atten­tion by Edge.

 

In case you can’t wait, in reverse order: (pat­terns in fire cells brain)

 

For infor­ma­tion on the 2008 Con­fer­ence, and the dis­count for Sharp­Brains read­ers, visit: Learn­ing & The Brain Con­fer­ence: dis­count for Sharp­Brains read­ers.

The post below refers to the 2007 Conference:

————————-

The orga­niz­ers of this amaz­ing con­fer­ence, whose reg­is­tra­tion is about to expire, just extended their very kind offer to Sharp­Brains read­ers: you can reg­is­ter at the reduced price of $475 (right now the nor­mal price is $545) if you do so by Feb­ru­ary 9nd. You can reg­is­ter here http://www.edupr.com/reg.html, mak­ing sure to write SharpBrains1 in the com­ments section

…a few ques­tions: how did you find us, what we are doing well, what we can do better?

We have just found out that more than 600 people are receiv­ing our feeds, but we only know-and just a bit– the 50–60 who leave com­ments and link to us. We enjoy hav­ing so many read­ers not just in the US but in Europe, the Mid­dle East, Asia, Australia…(thanks Google Analytics!).

Would you mind writ­ing a com­ment to allow us to learn about you and your inter­ests, and also include your feed­back for us? If you have a blog, please write the URL so we can pay a visit.

Enjoy the week­end, and thanks a lot for your time and attention!

Car­o­line and Alvaro

Given the grow­ing aware­ness of this emerg­ing field, let’s review some of the most rel­e­vant concepts:

Brain Fit­ness: the gen­eral state of good, sharp, brain and mind, espe­cially as the result of men­tal and phys­i­cal exer­cise and proper nutrition.

Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram: struc­tured set of brain exer­cises, usu­ally computer-based, designed to train spe­cific brain areas and func­tions in tar­geted ways, and mea­sured by brain fit­ness assessments.

Chronic Stress: ongo­ing, long-term stress. Con­tin­ued phys­i­o­log­i­cal arousal where stres­sors block the for­ma­tion of new neu­rons and neg­a­tively impact the immune system’s defenses.

Cog­ni­tive train­ing (or Brain Train­ing): vari­ety of brain exer­cises designed to help work out spe­cific “men­tal mus­cles”. The prin­ci­ple under­ly­ing cog­ni­tive train­ing is to help improve “core” abil­i­ties, such as atten­tion, mem­ory, problem-solving, which many peo­ple con­sider as fixed.

Cog­ni­tive Reserve (or Brain Reserve): the­ory that addresses the fact that indi­vid­u­als vary con­sid­er­ably in the sever­ity of cog­ni­tive aging and clin­i­cal demen­tia. Men­tal stim­u­la­tion, edu­ca­tion and occu­pa­tional level are believed to be major active com­po­nents of build­ing a cog­ni­tive reserve that can help resist the attacks of men­tal disease.

fMRI: func­tional mag­netic res­o­nance imag­ing (fMRI) is a non-invasive neu­roimag­ing Read the rest of this entry »

The Dana Alliance for Brain Ini­tia­tives is keep­ing up its great out­reach initiatives:

1- Check their blog with posts such as Resolve to be good to your brain, too. Tip: “Brain change takes time; allow your brain time to get used to new cir­cum­stance” (from the Dana Guide to Brain Health). 

You can read our The Dana Guide to Brain Health book review.

2– The Brain Aware­ness Week 2007, March 12-18th, with many activ­i­ties around the world to “advance pub­lic aware­ness about the progress and ben­e­fits of brain research. The Dana Alliance is joined in the cam­paign by part­ners in the United States and around the world, includ­ing med­ical and research orga­ni­za­tions; patient advo­cacy groups; the National Insti­tutes of Health, and other gov­ern­ment agen­cies; ser­vice groups; hos­pi­tals and uni­ver­si­ties; K-12 schools; and pro­fes­sional organizations.”

Learn how you can participate!