Posts tagged results
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.”
Grant to allow Youth Corps to hire 12 for land stewardship
Jun 16th
Boulder County, Colo. – The Boulder County Youth Corps will hire 12 additional people next summer thanks to funding approved on Wednesday by Great Outdoors Colorado.
The GOCO board voted to disperse $500,000 in lottery funds statewide to local government and open space organizations for critical outdoor recreation and land conservation projects that will enhance Colorado’s trails, parks, open spaces and wildlife habitat. The BCYC will receive $20,093 of those funds for local projects in support of the City of Longmont’s Button Rock Preserve Watershed.
The funding results in 12 jobs for young people in Longmont to help with much needed forestry work, noxious weed removal and fire prevention activities at Button Rock Preserve.
Statewide, local governments will receive a total of $250,000 and open space organizations will receive $250,000 to hire youth corps to implement land stewardship projects.
“This is good news for our youth, who gain valuable transferable skills and get a great outdoors experience,” BCYC program manager Judy Wolfe said. “And it’s good news for our community and environment, which can reap the benefits of our young people’s dedication and hard work for generations to come.”
About Boulder County Youth Corps
The BCYC provides opportunities for Boulder County youth to develop a sense of community involvement through personal accomplishment, teamwork and service to the County. BCYC delivers the most ambitious and highest quality entry-level work experience available to Boulder County youth. It provides an experience of excellence by recruiting and training a staff committed to accomplishment through hard work, respect for people and the environment, and belief in an ideal that work can be fun. We ensure the betterment of our community by providing work opportunities for youth that contribute to the legacy of Boulder County while providing a proving ground for young leaders that challenges them to inspire the youth entrusted to their guidance. More information is available at www.bouldercounty.org/youthcorps.
About Colorado Youth Corps Association
The CYCA is a statewide coalition of 10 accredited youth conservation corps that employ and train youth and young adults on land, water and energy conservation projects. Youth corps is a proven strategy for engaging young people in service to their communities and stewardship of their environment while cultivating valuable skills to meet the challenges of the 21st century. For more information about CYCA or the statewide youth corps coalition, visit www.CYCA.org.
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CU-BOULDER PART OF INTERNATIONAL TEAM TO DISCOVER NEUTRINOS CAN CHANGE ‘FLAVORS’
Jun 15th
June 15, 2011
An international research team led by Japan and including the University of Colorado Boulder may have taken a significant step in discovering why matter trumped antimatter at the time of the Big Bang, helping to create virtually all of the galaxies and stars in the universe.
The experiment, known as the Tokai to Kamioka experiment, or T2K, included shooting a beam of neutrinos underground from the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex, or J-PARC, on the country’s east coast to a detector near Japan’s west coast, a distance of about 185 miles. Elementary particles that are fundamental building blocks of nature, neutrinos generally travel at the speed of light and can pass through ordinary matter, like Earth’s crust, with ease. Neutrinos come in three types: muon, electron and tau.
The T2K team discovered that muon neutrinos can spontaneously change their “flavor” to electron neutrinos, a finding that may help explain why the universe is made up mostly of matter rather than antimatter, said CU-Boulder Assistant Professor Alysia Marino of the physics department, who is part of a university contingent that participated in the experiment. Scientists had previously measured the change of muon neutrinos to tau neutrinos and electron neutrinos to muon neutrinos or tau neutrinos, she said.
The shift of muon neutrinos to electron neutrinos detected in the new experiment is a new type of neutron oscillation that opens the way for new studies of a matter-antimatter symmetry called charge-parity, or CP violation, said Marino. “This CP violation phenomenon has not yet been observed in a neutrino, but may be the reason that our universe today is made up mostly of matter and not antimatter,” she said.
Scientists believe matter and antimatter were present in nearly equal proportions at the onset of the Big Bang. Since matter and antimatter particles cancel each other out, it has been proposed that there must have been CP violation in the early universe that produced slightly more matter than antimatter, which accounts for all the stars, galaxies, planets and life present today.
The T2K project is a collaboration of roughly 500 scientists from 12 nations. Other participating U.S. institutions include Boston University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, the University of California-Irvine, Colorado State University, Duke University, Louisiana State University, Stony Brook University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Rochester and the University of Washington. The United States contingent is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
The CU-Boulder group includes Marino, physics Associate Professor Eric D. Zimmerman, postdoctoral researchers Stephen Coleman and Robert Johnson, graduate students Andrew Missert and Tianlu Yuan, and former undergraduates Christopher Vanek, Bryan Kaufman, Eric Hansen, Zhon Butcher and Joshua Spitz.
The CU-Boulder team designed and built one of three magnetic horns used to generate neutrino beams. The horns are large aluminum conductors that use very high electrical currents to produce a magnetic field. The magnetic field focuses on short-lived neutrino-producing particles called pions and kaons, enhancing the intensity of the neutrino beam, said Zimmerman.
The CU-Boulder researchers also developed a device to monitor the position of the proton beam that creates the neutrinos. In addition, they contributed to the installation and operation of a T2K detector at the J-PARC site 60 miles northeast of Tokyo that measures the neutrinos right after they are produced, Marino said.
Zimmerman said more data will be required to confirm the new results. The J-PARC accelerator is being repaired following damage from the earthquake that hit Japan on March 11. The accelerator and experiment are expected to be operational again by the end of the year, said Zimmerman.
