Via @extramadness

Some sketches of the wild Raven while he is still in the park, he is a joy to sit with and draw. Even if he tries to steal my sketchbook at every opportunity. 

One day a voice rings out from everywhere at once: “Thank you all for participating in the LIFE beta. The servers will be shutting down and undergo a wipe in preparation for a full release of the game.”

Terraforming Mars

Can we romanticize video games the way we do books?

Like you hear all these things about how you can curl up with a book on a rainy day and drink tea and smother yourself in blankets but anytime you hear things about video games it’s always about how you’re wasting your life away yelling into a headset as you play Call of Duty in a basement?

Imagine bundling yourself up on the couch, the sound of rain hitting the roof, and putting on Fable for a few hours. Or getting home after a long day of work. You make yourself a cup of cocoa, put on fuzzy pjs, and play Viva Piñata for hours not giving a second thought to the outside world. Semester just got out? Throw on some Fallout and just take a night to breathe and enjoy.

You aren’t wasting your life away, you’re enjoying it. Games can be just as much an escape as books, except you get to be part of the story.

Is an immunization for stress on the horizon?

Can probiotics fend off mood disorders?

It’s too early to say with scientific certainty, but a new study by CU Boulder researchers suggests that one particular beneficial bacteria can have long-lasting anti-inflammatory effects on the brain, making it more resilient to the physical and behavioral effects of stress.

The findings, if replicated in clinical trials could ultimately lead to new probiotic-based immunizations to protect against posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and anxiety or new treatments for depression, the authors say.

“We found that in rodents this particular bacterium, Mycobacterium vaccae, actually shifts the environment in the brain toward an anti-inflammatory state,” said lead author Matthew Frank, a senior research associate in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. “If you could do that in people, it could have broad implications for a number of neuroinflammatory diseases.”

Anxiety, PTSD and other stress-related mental disorders impact as many as one in four people in their lifetime. Mounting research suggests that stress-induced brain inflammation can boost risk of such disorders, in part by impacting mood-influencing neurotransmitters like norepinephrine or dopamine.

“There is a robust literature that shows if you induce an inflammatory immune response in people, they quickly show signs of depression and anxiety,” said Frank. “Just think about how you feel when you get the flu.”

Research also suggests that trauma, illness or surgery can sensitize certain regions of the brain, setting up a hair-trigger inflammatory response to subsequent stressors which can lead to mood disorders and cognitive decline.

“We found that Mycobacterium vaccae blocked those sensitizing effects of stress too, creating a lasting stress-resilient phenotype in the brain,” Frank said.

A previous CU Boulder study, found that mice injected with a heat-killed preparation of M. vaccae and then placed with a larger aggressive male for 19 days exhibited less anxiety-like behavior and were less likely to suffer colitis or inflammation in their peripheral tissues. For the new study, published in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity, the researchers set out to determine what exactly M. vaccae does in the brain.

Male rats injected with the bacterium three times, one week apart, had significantly higher levels of the anti-inflammatory protein interleukin-4 in the hippocampus — a brain region responsible for modulating cognitive function, anxiety and fear — eight days after the final injection.

After exposure to a stressor, the immunized animals also showed lower levels of a stress-induced protein, or alarmin, called HMGB1, believed to play a role in sensitizing the brain to inflammation, and higher expression of CD200R1, a receptor key for keeping glial cells (the brain’s immune cells) in an anti-inflammatory state. As in the first study, the immunized rats exhibited less anxious behavior after being stressed.

Mood-modulating microbes

“If you look at the field of probiotics generally, they have been shown to have strong effects in the domains of cognitive function, anxiety and fear,” said senior author Christopher Lowry, an associate professor in integrative physiology. “This paper helps make sense of that by suggesting that these beneficial microbes, or signals derived from these microbes, somehow make their way to the hippocampus, inducing an anti-inflammatory state.”

M. vaccae was first discovered on the shores of Lake Kyoga in Uganda in the 1990s by immunologists who realized that people who lived in the area responded better to certain tuberculosis vaccines. They later realized that the bacterium found in the lakeshore soil had immune-modulating properties that were enhancing the vaccine’s efficacy. Researchers set out to study it in lung cancer patients and found that, while it did not prolong life, it somehow improved mood.

M. vaccae is not commercially available but is the subject of numerous ongoing studies.

Lowry, who has been studying it for 17 years, envisions a day when it or another beneficial bacteria could be administered to people at high risk of PTSD – such as soldiers preparing to be deployed or emergency room workers – to buffer the effects of stress on the brain and body. It could also possibly be used to prevent sepsis-induced cognitive impairment, he said.

Meanwhile, he is working with researchers at University of Colorado Denver on a study exploring whether veterans with PTSD can benefit from an oral probiotic consisting of a different bacterial strain, Lactobacillus reuteri.

“More research is necessary, but it’s possible that other strains of beneficial bacteria or probiotics may have a similar effect on the brain,” he said.

Neurons have the right shape for deep learning

Deep learning has brought about machines that can ‘see’ the world more like humans can, and recognize language. And while deep learning was inspired by the human brain, the question remains: Does the brain actually learn this way? The answer has the potential to create more powerful artificial intelligence and unlock the mysteries of human intelligence.

In a study published in eLife, CIFAR Fellow Blake Richards and his colleagues unveiled an algorithm that simulates how deep learning could work in our brains. The network shows that certain mammalian neurons have the shape and electrical properties that are well-suited for deep learning. Furthermore, it represents a more biologically realistic way of how real brains could do deep learning.

Research was conducted by Richards and his graduate student Jordan Guerguiev, at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, in collaboration with Timothy Lillicrap at Google DeepMind. Their algorithm was based on neurons in the neocortex, which is responsible for higher order thought.

“Most of these neurons are shaped like trees, with ‘roots’ deep in the brain and ‘branches’ close to the surface,” says Richards. “What’s interesting is that these roots receive a different set of inputs than the branches that are way up at the top of the tree.”

Using this knowledge of the neurons’ structure, Richards and Guerguiev built a model that similarly received signals in segregated compartments. These sections allowed simulated neurons in different layers to collaborate, achieving deep learning.

“It’s just a set of simulations so it can’t tell us exactly what our brains are doing, but it does suggest enough to warrant further experimental examination if our own brains may use the same sort of algorithms that they use in AI,” Richards says.

This research idea goes back to AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton, a CIFAR Distinguished Fellow and founder of the Learning in Machines & Brains program, and program Co-Director Yoshua Bengio, and was one of the main motivations for founding the program in the first place. These researchers sought not only to develop artificial intelligence, but also to understand how the human brain learns, says Richards.

In the early 2000s, Richards and Lillicrap took a course with Hinton at the University of Toronto and were convinced deep learning models were capturing “something real” about how human brains work. At the time, there were several challenges to testing that idea. Firstly, it wasn’t clear that deep learning could achieve human-level skill. Secondly, the algorithms violated biological facts proven by neuroscientists.

Now, Richards and a number of researchers are looking to bridge the gap between neuroscience and AI. This paper builds on research from Bengio’s lab on a more biologically plausible way to train neural nets and an algorithm developed by Lillicrap that further relaxes some of the rules for training neural nets. The paper also incorporates research from Matthew Larkam on the structure of neurons in the neocortex. By combining neurological insights with existing algorithms, Richards’ team was able to create a better and more realistic algorithm simulating learning in the brain.

The tree-like neocortex neurons are only one of many types of cells in the brain. Richards says future research should model different brain cells and examine how they could interact together to achieve deep learning. In the long-term, he hopes researchers can overcome major challenges, such as how to learn through experience without receiving feedback.

“What we might see in the next decade or so is a real virtuous cycle of research between neuroscience and AI, where neuroscience discoveries help us to develop new AI and AI can help us interpret and understand our experimental data in neuroscience,” Richards says.

Everyone has the name of their supposed soulmate printed on the inside of your wrist. You, however, are defiant, and begin dating someone that’s not your soulmate. It turns out that not meeting someone with the magic expectation that you’re ‘meant to be for each other and will get married and live happily ever after’ actually made you two get along pretty well, and you’re now deeply in love with them. However, after several years of dating this person, both your and your S.O.’s real ‘soulmates’ find you, and they’re both furious that you didn’t wait for them.

Just thought you should know I was browsing Archive Of Our Own and came across an actual fanfic about PIE. The fandom was listed as "languages (anthropomorphic)" and it had pairings such as "Mycenaean Greek/Minoan", "Gothic/Gaulic Latin" and "Pregermanic/Maglemosian". I just about died.

oh my god???!?