Sound wave neurosurgery

The procedure has been used before to remove uterine fibroids (or small, benign tumors in the uterus), and looks like a promising candidate to eliminate tumors from breasts and, hopefully, the brain. The biggest challenge when tackling the brain is getting the ultrasonic beams through the skull with any intensity, but that's handled by a head harness developed by InSightec, which is equipped with 1,000 ultrasound transducers and even built-in cooling to keep the skull from overheating.

Source: http://dvice.com/archives/2009/07/sound-wave-neur.php

Brain Encodes Complex Plumes of Odors with a Simple Code

In the real world, odors don't happen one puff at a time. Animals move through, and subsequently distort, plumes of odor molecules that constantly drift, changing direction as the wind disperses them. Now, by exploring how animals smell odors under naturalistic conditions, Rockefeller University scientist Maria Neimark Geffen and her colleagues reveal that the brain encodes these swirling and complex patterns of molecules using surprisingly little neural machinery. The findings suggest a new theory of how animals smell.

Source

Ants and Collective decision-making

By analyzing models from neuroscience and insect socio-biology, Dr James Marshall from the University of Bristol and colleagues show how colonies of house-hunting social insects could collectively compromise between the speed and accuracy of decision-making, using mechanisms similar to those used by neurons in the primate brain.

Source

Reverse-Engineer the Mind

"The plan is to engineer the mind by reverse-engineering the brain," says Dharmendra Modha, manager of the cognitive computing project at IBM Almaden Research Center. The researchers' goal is first to simulate a human brain on a supercomputer. Then they plan to use new nano-materials to create logic gates and transistor-based equivalents of neurons and synapses, in order to build a hardware-based, brain-like system. It's the first attempt of its kind.

Source

Stem cell therapy reversing brain birth defects

Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have succeeded in reversing brain birth defects in animal models, using stem cells to replace defective brain cells.
The work of Prof. Joseph Yanai and his associates at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School was presented at the Tel Aviv Stem Cells Conference last spring and is expected to be presented and published nest year at the seventh annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Barcelona, Spain.

Source