CU News
News from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
CU RESEARCHERS DEVELOP NEW SOFTWARE TO ADVANCE BRAIN IMAGE RESEARCH
Jun 26th
A University of Colorado Boulder research team has developed a new software program allowing neuroscientists to produce single brain images pulled from hundreds of individual studies, trimming weeks and even months from what can be a tedious, time-consuming research process.
The development of noninvasive neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, spurred a huge amount of scientific research and led to substantial advances in the understanding of the human brain and cognitive function. However, instead of having too little data, researchers are besieged with too much, according to Tal Yarkoni, a postdoctoral fellow in CU-Boulder’s psychology and neuroscience department.
The new software developed by Yarkoni and his colleagues can be programmed to comb scientific literature for published articles relevant to a particular topic, and then to extract all of the brain scan images from those articles. Using a statistical process called “meta-analysis,” researchers are then able to produce a consensus “brain activation image” reflecting hundreds of studies at a time.
“Because the new approach is entirely automated, it can analyze hundreds of different experimental tasks or mental states nearly instantaneously instead of requiring researchers to spend weeks or months conducting just one analysis,” said Yarkoni.
Yarkoni is the lead author on a paper introducing the new approach to analyzing brain imaging data that appears in the June 26 edition of the journal Nature Methods. Russell Poldrack of the University of Texas at Austin, Thomas Nichols of the University of Warwick in England, David Van Essen of Washington University in St. Louis and Tor Wager of CU-Boulder contributed to the paper.
Brain scanning techniques such as fMRI have revolutionized scientists’ understanding of the human mind by allowing researchers to peer deep into people’s brains as they engage in mental activities as diverse as reciting numbers, making financial decisions or simply daydreaming. But interpreting the results of brain imaging studies is often more difficult, according to Yarkoni.
“There’s often the perception that what we’re doing when we scan someone’s brain is literally seeing their thoughts and feelings in action, but it’s actually much more complicated,” Yarkoni said. “The colorful images we see are really just estimates, because each study gives us a somewhat different picture. It’s only by combining the results of many different studies that we get a really clear picture of what’s going on.”
The ability to look at many different mental states simultaneously allows researchers to ask interesting new questions. For instance, researchers can pick out a specific brain region they’re interested in and determine which mental states are most likely to produce activation in that region, he said. Or they can calculate how likely a person is to be performing a particular task given their pattern of brain activity.
In their study, the research team was able to distinguish people who were experiencing physical pain during brain scanning from people who were performing a difficult memory task or viewing emotional pictures with nearly 80 percent accuracy. The team expects performance levels to improve as their software develops, and believes their tools will improve researchers’ ability to decode mental states from brain activity.
“We don’t expect to be able to tell what people are thinking or feeling at a very detailed level,” Yarkoni said. “But we think we’ll be able to distinguish relatively broad mental states from one another. And we’re hopeful that might even eventually extend to mental health disorders, so that these tools will be useful for clinical diagnosis.”
LINGUISTICS INSTITUTE TO OFFER FREE FILMS, WORKSHOPS AT CU-BOULDER
Jun 20th
The biennial event has never been held in Colorado and is expected to attract about 500 people to CU-Boulder. The previous three institutes were held at the University of California, Berkeley (2009), Stanford (2007) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2005).
In addition to the free and public events, the institute will offer 80 courses taught by distinguished faculty, with enrollment available to the public through CU-Boulder’s Continuing Education and Professional Studies.
For one class, Field Methods in Linguistics, a speaker of the Idi language of Papua New Guinea will travel to Boulder. The Idi language is spoken by only about 1,600 people and is barely documented. Students in the class led by Professor Nicholas Evans of Australian National University will work intensively for one month to provide the first extensive documentation of this language.
On July 13 at 7 p.m. in Muenzinger Psychology and Biopsychology room E050 will be a free showing of “We Are Still Here,” a film examining language and culture revitalization efforts of the Wampanoag Native Americans in Massachusetts.
And on July 20 at 7 p.m. in Muenzinger Psychology and Biopsychology room E050 there will be a free showing of “Speaking in Tongues,” a film following four children through the world of bilingualism and bilingual education in the United States.
“Language is fundamental to virtually everything we do in life, and it is perhaps the single most important thing that separates humans from all other life forms,” said Andrew Cowell, associate director of the institute and a CU-Boulder professor of linguistics. “We take it for granted so much of the time until someone makes the smallest misstatement, a machine translation produces something goofy or we pick up on a subtle accent we recognize — and then political careers can be compromised, corporate initiatives can become the target of worldwide mockery or lifelong friendships can be initiated.
“The institute will focus specifically on ‘Language in the World’ and the interdisciplinary connections between linguistics and other fields such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, law, computer science and the media,” he said.
The institute is sponsored by the Linguistic Society of America, which is the main professional body for linguists in the United States, with major support from CU-Boulder.
Students enrolled in a Colorado university, college or community college are eligible to register for the institute at about half the usual price, as are Colorado faculty. Information about this offer is posted at https://verbs.colorado.edu/LSA2011/registration-cofund.html.
For more information and a complete schedule of events visit
http://verbs.colorado.edu/LSA2011/.
NSF AWARDS CU-BOULDER $5.9 MILLION GRANT FOR ALPINE ECOSYSTEM RESEARCH
Jun 16th
The National Science Foundation has awarded the University of Colorado Boulder a six-year, $5.9 million grant to continue intensive studies of long-term ecological changes in Colorado’s high mountains, both natural and human-caused, over decades and centuries.
Awarded to CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, the renewal grant will allow faculty and students, including undergraduates, to continue key environmental studies at the Niwot Ridge Long-Term Ecological Research, or LTER, site west of Boulder. The study site, considered extremely sensitive to climate change, is adjacent to CU-Boulder’s Mountain Research Station and encompasses several thousand acres of tundra, talus slopes, glacial lakes and wetlands stretching to the top of the Continental Divide.
The grant is the largest environmental sciences award in CU-Boulder history, said INSTAAR Fellow Mark Williams, principal investigator on the grant. In 2005, NSF awarded CU-Boulder a $4.9 million renewal grant for environmental studies at the Niwot Ridge site. As one of five initial LTER sites selected by NSF in 1980, Niwot Ridge is now one of 25 such sites in North America and the only one located in an alpine environment, said Williams.
“CU-Boulder has a worldwide reputation for monitoring global climate change from Greenland to Antarctica and its impacts on natural ecosystems and human populations,” said Vice Chancellor for Research Stein Sture. “To direct such a key program in our own backyard for the National Science Foundation is crucial from an environmental science standpoint and unique in that it provides a spectacular training ground for our students to work side-by-side with some of the world’s best climate change scientists.”
Recent climate studies have predicted the mountainous areas of the American West will become both hotter and drier in the coming years, and long-term meteorological measurements on Niwot Ridge indicate the alpine climate there has warmed slightly in recent decades, said Williams, also a professor in the geography department. The temperatures are significant because even small changes in alpine ecosystems can cascade down and have negative effects on other ecosystems, he said.
CU-Boulder researchers also have charted a doubling in atmospheric nitrogen deposition on Niwot Ridge in the past several decades — primarily from automobile, agriculture, ranching and industrial activity — that is now adversely affecting some aquatic and terrestrial life on the ridge, said Williams.
In addition, researchers are keeping a close eye on existing populations of the American pika, a potato-sized animal related to rabbits and found in rocky talus slopes as high as 13,000 feet on Niwot Ridge. Of 25 populations of pikas in the Great Basin of Nevada documented between 1898 to 1990, nine had disappeared by 2008, apparently the result of warming temperatures. Pikas in Colorado require deep snowpack during winter that serves to insulate them from extremely cold air temperatures, Williams said.
“Many consider the American pika a ‘sentinel species’ in terms of measuring the effects of climate change,” said Williams. “Niwot Ridge has a cold, short growing season, and the biological activity that occurs there is on the razor’s edge of environmental tolerance.”
Despite a long-term warming and drying trend in mountainous areas of the West, 2011 was a striking anomaly, said Williams. “What we have seen around here is one of the largest and latest snowfall years on record in the high country and extreme dryness accompanied by an inordinate amount of winter wildfires around Boulder, which is only 15 miles as the crow flies from the Niwot Ridge study area. What has happened from Boulder west to the Continental Divide has been a total disconnect in terms of weather.”
“The primary climate driver of the Niwot Ridge site is snow, and the mountains are our water towers,” said Williams. “As the alpine climate changes, one of the biggest impacts on humans will be a change in water resources. Even if we end up with the same amount of precipitation, in the form of less snow and more rain, we are going to end up with less usable water for municipalities.”
There already are some indications that the snowline in the Rocky Mountains is moving upward, which will affect the abundance and distribution of plants and animals and likely shorten the annual ski seasons at resorts throughout the West in the future, he said.
The Niwot Ridge site is a huge benefit to CU-Boulder students, said Williams. “I have five undergraduates working in my chemistry lab this summer. Not only do they get paid, but they learn valuable research skills.” The LTER grant funds research for about 15 CU-Boulder graduate students and 25 to 30 undergraduates annually, Williams said, and there are more than a dozen CU-Boulder faculty members that are co-investigators on the new Niwot Ridge LTER program grant.
CU-Boulder ecology and environmental biology department Professor William Bowman, director of CU-Boulder’s Mountain Research Station for the past 20 years, said the Niwot Ridge site has been gaining momentum in stature from its beginnings by the consistent, high-quality research that has resulted in many publications in top-tier science journals.
More than half of the research on Niwot Ridge is by scientists and students from around the world that are not associated with the LTER program, said Bowman, also an INSTAAR fellow and who leads a team studying how air pollution, including nitrogen deposition, threatens biological and aquatic communities in U.S. national parks. There are currently 12 undergraduates conducting research at the Niwot Ridge site as part of the NSF’s Research Experience for Undergraduates program, said Bowman, who also is mentoring a student researcher at Niwot Ridge from Fairview High School in Boulder.