2020-06-17
- Okada and colleagues videotaped more than a dozen hours of fights between 17 pairs of fish and then analyzed what happened—and when—in each fight. The longer the fight, the more the fish synchronize their behavior, timing their circling, striking, and biting more than anyone had ever realized, the researchers report today in PLOS Genetics.
Simple Aesthetic Sense and Addiction Emerge in Neural Relations of Cost-Benefit Decision in Foraging2020-06-15 - A rudimentary aesthetic sense is found in the stimulus valuations and cost-benefit decisions made by primitive generalist foragers. These are based on factors governing personal economic decisions: incentive, appetite, and learning. We find that the addictive process is an extreme expression of aesthetic dynamics. An interactive, agent-based model, ASIMOV, reproduces a simple aesthetic sense from...
2020-04-30 - “These are the beginnings of a direction toward interactive biological devices that could have applications for neurocomputing and for restorative medicine,” Gillette said. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers developed the tiny walking “spinobots,” powered by rat muscle and spinal cord tissue on a soft, 3D-printed hydrogel skeleton. While previous generations of biological...
2020-04-25 - Study Finds (Los Angeles, April 25) – There’s no shortage of scientific evidence that aerobic exercise is good for the brain. Not nearly as many studies have investigated the benefits of yoga exercise, but scientists from the U. of I. say a review of published research shows that yoga strengthens many of the same brain networks as aerobic exercise. “From these 11 studies, we identified some brain...
2020-04-08 - A team led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Grainger College of Engineering and Carle Health has produced a prototype emergency ventilator to help address the expected surge in the need for respiratory care associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Find out more about the prototype at http://rapidvent.grainger.illinois.edu. “Our team is living the Apollo 13 movie,” said William...
2020-04-08 - CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Researchers used accelerometers to measure daily physical activity in 30 stroke survivors for a week, assessing how much the participants moved and how well they performed routine physical tasks. The study revealed that stroke survivors who engaged in a lot of light physical activity – taking leisurely walks or attending to nonstrenuous household chores, for example – also...
2020-04-08 - URBANA, Ill. – You know that feeling in your gut? We think of it as an innate intuition that sparks deep in the belly and helps guide our actions, if we let it. It’s also a metaphor for what scientists call the “gut-brain axis,” a biological reality in which the gut and its microbial inhabitants send signals to the brain, and vice versa.
2020-04-06 - A new study found that the bird’s distinct warning call for Brown-headed Cowbirds might also benefit eavesdropping neighbors.
2020-03-26 - New Atlas, March 24, 2020 - Scrunching graphene up into a wrinkled mess rather than a neat, flat sheet is a technique being explored by researchers pursuing a number of new technologies. These have included using crumpled balls as components for better batteries, combining them with rubber to form artificial muscles, or bunching crumpled graphene balls together for next-...
2020-03-20 - The Wildlife Society, March 20, 2020: "We always wanted to know, how does a host start to recognize a new threat?” said Matt Louder, lead author of the study published in Scientific Reports, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois. Louder, who is now an ecologist at the environmental consulting firm H.T. Harvey and Associates, said they already knew...
2020-03-09 - blog posts CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A diet including daily avocado consumption improves the ability to focus attention in adults whose measurements of height and weight are categorized as overweight or obese, a new randomized control trial found. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign conducted the 12-week study, published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology. “...
2020-03-04 - Nutrition, Wellness, and the Brain is a free 6-part series taught by Corinne Cannavale, a graduate student in the Neuroscience Program at the University of Illinois. Attend all 6 sessions, or simply drop in on the sessions that fit your schedule. This program will be hosted at Lodgic, if you are in need of daycare or lunch, please check out their services. They do offer Kids Camp which...
2020-03-03 - CSL Assistant Professor Lav R Varshney is featured in a new YouTube Originals series “The Age of A.I.” Varshney shares his expertise as the episode explores using artificial intelligence to build a better human. Hosted by Robert Downey Jr., the episode investigates augmenting human abilities with A.I. and our reliance on A.I. to make decisions for us.
2020-02-28 - Neuroscience Program alumna, Jill Becker is being honored at the upcoming 30th Anniversary Annual Awards Dinner for the Society for Women's Health Research (SWHR). She received her PhD at the Urbana-Champaign campus while working with Victor Rameriz in the early stages of the Neuroscience Program when it was known as “Neural & Behavioral Biology”. Her research focused then on the effects of...
2020-02-27 - Naiman Khan, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health and principal investigator of the Body Composition & Nutritional Neuroscience Laboratory. His research utilizes a multidisciplinary approach to integrate knowledge in the disciplines of dietetics, body composition, and cognitive neuroscience to understand the interactions between nutrition,...