Stunning 3D Movie Shows How Brains Lose Consciousness

If you have ever taken sedatives or been sedated for a surgery, you know that strange, fuzzy feeling of losing consciousness. Your brain gets cloudier and cloudier until everything just goes dark. It is a process that we know how to initiate, but that we don’t yet understand completely. Scientists have held conflicting theories about consciousness over the years: some think it depends on a single region of the brain – a “seat” of consciousness – that can turn the brain off or on like a light switch.

Another school of thought holds that our consciousness is maintained by interactions between groups of brain cells. When the interactions are inhibited, consciousness is lost – like a dimmer switch rather than an on-off switch. Now for the first time, a real-time video shows exactly how the brain looks when losing consciousness. Using a method called functional electrical impedance tomography by evoked response (fEITER), a team at the University of Manchester, UK, recorded the brain activity of 20 people as they were given a general anesthetic.

The video shows a significant increase in the activity between certain neuron clusters as the subjects lose consciousness, suggesting that there is no on-off switch. If that were the case, one area would show activity and then all activity would stop. But the activity shown in the video appears to be inhibitory signaling that takes place just before the brain shuts off. More analysis and research of the results are needed to determine just what is happening in the brain before consciousness is lost, but this video is an exciting jump-start for future studies.

Organs Made to Order: First Lab-Grown Trachea Transplant

Lab-grown body parts are plentiful in science fiction, but they haven’t yet made it into the everyday practices of real-life surgeons. A groundbreaking surgery in Sweden might change that after a patient received a transplanted trachea that was grown from his very own stem cells. In an incredible cooperation between surgeons at Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden and University College in London, a man whose own windpipe was ruined by cancer was the recipient of the first donor-less transplant in June 2011.

The surgeons started off by creating 3-D scans of the patient’s windpipe. Researchers at the University College in London then created a glass scaffold that was an exact replica of the original windpipe. The scaffold was soaked in the patient’s own stem cells from his bone marrow, which quickly took hold and created a brand new trachea in just two days. Thanks to the fact that the trachea was made from his own stem cells and did not come from a donor, there was no chance of rejection by his body and no need for the typical anti-rejection drugs needed by other transplant recipients. The best news to come out of this milestone is that people who desperately need organ transplants may not have to wait for a suitable donor in the future; this technology could be used to grow almost anything they need in a lab within just a few days.

Dynamic Diagnostic: Tiny Plastic Card IDs HIV in Minutes

Dynamic Diagnostic: Tiny Plastic Card IDs HIV in Minutes

The awesome science of microfluidics has the potential to revolutionize diagnostics, particularly in developing countries where well-equipped labs are hard to come by. Small, inexpensive and accurate diagnostic tools like this one from Columbia University researchers could save countless lives by detecting deadly diseases like HIV without the need for complicated equipment.

The credit card-size device is called mChip. It requires only a tiny drop of blood to detect HIV – and maybe most exciting of all is the fact that the device only costs around $1. Conventional HIV tests require a skilled person to draw blood and lab equipment to test it, but the mChip is like a self-contained lab that detected 100% of HIV and syphilis cases in studies.

While the availability of drugs to treat HIV and other STDs has been improving in recent years, the professor who spearheaded the mChip project says that the real challenge lies in the diagnosis. Many people in developing nations live too far away from hospitals to travel for the tests; and if they do, many of them don’t return for the results. The mChip offers reliable results in just 15 minutes. In undeveloped and developed countries alike, detection of serious diseases is the first step toward treatment, making the mChip a very important innovation.