That's mostly because peer-reviewed granting agencies want the best chance of success when they send you money, and currently the hippocampus is one of the only areas that has consistently shown evidence of new neuron growth throughout life... we suspect that our compounds are working elsewhere as well. Frontal lobes are definitely good candidates...

True - this is a finding that keeps emerging across many labs and many experimental models. Although the public (and scientists) want and get excited about "breakthroughs", the fact is that the vast majority of science consists of slowly and methodically confirming / rejecting ideas over and over again until a general consensus begins to emerge. Understanding that many types of brain injuries induce risk-taking behaviors will slowly but surely develop an understanding of the behavior itself. We are using compounds from plants, as well as exercise, to show that a "well-maintained" brain is less susceptible to brain damage and behavioral impairments. This in itself is clearly not a "breakthrough" - however, our experiments are designed to assess the mechanism(s) by which nutrition and exercise impact the brain, which may ultimately lead to breakthroughs about how to treat these disorders.

only in the sense that our damage models often induce epileptic seizures. If epilepsy interests you, maybe you could google some scientists working in that area and email them with an offer to donate. I doubt that any scientist with daily lab expenses would turn down such an offer once they realize how easy it is to set up a wallet and exchange account.

we have actually generated some data showing that traumatic brain injuries (TBI) induce risk-taking behaviors (which are very similar in nature to addictive behaviors) and that reducing that damage seems to reduce the behavioral impairment (not that everyone with addictive personalities has brain damage, but having brain damage can dramatically increase your chances of developing these behaviors)

We have currently only looked for it in the hippocampus - that was what our original funding payed for... It should be noted that increasing neurogenesis in the hippocampus using plant-based compounds is pretty cool! We have some ideas about other areas that we want to check, though, and this is exactly the type of exploratory (e.g., somewhat risky in terms of return-on-investment) pilot data that could be generated with these donations. Last week we got a little over 2.5 BTC, which is enough to buy about 700 slides (which is about enough to mount slices of these other brain areas from 1 experiment). A few more would cover the histology reagents and cutting blade costs - with these, we could generate some (potentially) innovative data with micro-donations that a peer-reviewed grant would not have funded (the hippocampus has a much higher chance of success when looking for neurogenesis)....

The computing power required to analyze the data for my experiments is relatively trivial - it's collecting the data that takes all the resources. The best part of any scientist's day is analyzing the data at the end of an experiment and observing a result that has never been demonstrated before

Good point - I included my publication list to show the types of projects that we publish. We currently have data showing that polyphenolic compounds found in many plants (typically those with red/blue pigmentation) can dramatically increase neurogenesis (birth of new neurons) in adults, along with improving learning, memory, and other cognitive abilities (indirectly suggestive of increased neuroplasticity). Our current main project involves figuring out how to use these chemicals to help prevent or reduce damage in Alzheimer's, stroke, TBI, etc... as well as general cognitive enhancers (which is what many of us are actually interested in, but it's most difficult to get funding for improving performance of normal individuals)

2005 - 2011 was www.behavioral-neuroscience.org
since then it's been www.behavioralneuroscience.org (no dash)

Hey all,

I'm a neuroscientist at Loma Linda University with a lab focused on finding treatments for brain disorders like Alzheimer's disease, stroke and traumatic brain injury (my lab's publications are listed here: www.behavioralneuroscience.org/publications). Given the current paucity of funding opportunities for science, I have decided to solicit individually-sourced micro-donations for everyday lab expenses to keep the lab running between funding acquisitions. I think that it could help my students wrap up various projects or generate some pilot data that we would ultimately use to acquire larger, peer-reviewed grants. The donators would know that they directly supported some actual scientific grunt-work in a specific lab by a specific scientist. I posted this in the newbies section last week and got some good advice along with enough BTC to purchase about 700 microscope slides (enough to complete about 1 project)... here is the thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=225440.msg2371327#msg2371327

I would be happy to set up a "donations" page thanking individuals for helping to support our science - however, since the donations are anonymous, you would need to email me in advance of any donation to let me know your info.

lab BTC address: 1KxqK9w8uH8gvYNxDAg4FS8Soij2RwnhWE
lab LTC address: LV1CpYdJcQXKyZvD3HkaaEu1oMBpGkbBNZ

Thanks!
Rich

--
Rich Hartman, PhD
Associate Professor
School of Behavioral Health
Loma Linda University

hahaha! if i get enough funding, I'll hire a postdoc to work on that!

actually, I was thinking of removing the widget and just replacing it with a link to the address page at blockchain.info:
https://blockchain.info/address/1KxqK9w8uH8gvYNxDAg4FS8Soij2RwnhWE

does that seem reasonable? anything I should be concerned about?

thanks for all of your help and support!
Rich

awesome - what a great mathematical constant! that's equivalent to a box of 700 slides, so that's a huge help

yeah, I was thinking pretty much the same thing.... parsimony - the widget's getting the axe tonight! (is the QR code thing widely used?)

Instead of asking which alt-coins are the best or which will survive, I figured I'd ask which are already for dead or on their way out and why? the closest I could find is this list, which is a little dated at this point:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=187969.0

interesting - thanks! maybe i'll just have a page with a running total of donations along with a list of lab supplies bought with said BTCs....

well, that was quick

Newbie question - unless a donator explicitly sends me an email stating that they've deposited some BTC, is there any way for me to identify and "thank" them on my website? it seems not?

Rich

I responded to someone from my LLU.edu address - not sure if that was you.... nothing has been received at my gmail address

fascinating - thanks, I'll check it out!

...and that as well - gracias!

haha! i'll take that as a complement! I haven't had much time to update my webpage building skills since the early 2000's

well, I'm sure I'm not the first, but maybe *among* the 1st (?) I'll have to check out those links above to see how far behind the curve I am at this point... Regarding the Crabbe experiment, it's a great study and one that I often cite to my students. One of the intents of the paper was to demonstrate that *1* paper proves nothing - science is a slow process of carefully and methodically clearing out wrong ideas until something resembling a relatively unassailable "truth" remains. Neuroscience happens to be one of the "slower" disciplines in that regard, due to the enormous complexity of the brain. The general public gets excited when a study "proves" something and then gets dismayed when the next study attacks the problem from a different perspective and disproves it. One of the repercussions of the Crabbe study is that many neuroscience labs, including mine, routinely replicate studies *within* the lab several times before publishing the data. More often than not, even intra-lab differences are usually due to the magnitude of an effect, but the overall pattern remains the same. Even though rodents are individuals and their behavior can be maddenly variable (like people, and mice are much more so than rats), most of the tests used in behavioral neuroscience have "face validity" - e.g., transgenic mice engineered to develop Alzheimer's-like neuropathology as they age are *usually* dumber in learning / memory tasks than control mice, but they are *never* smarter

(regarding variability and wasted effort in science, an even larger issue is that journals usually do not publish "negative" findings, so there is a clear publication bias toward studies in which an effect was found.... this will hopefully get better as more scientists use blogs and other "alternative" methods to spread their research)

Hey all,

New here - howdy! I am a neuroscientist with a lab focused on finding treatments for brain disorders like Alzheimer's disease, stroke and traumatic brain injury. Given the current paucity of funding opportunities for science, I have decided to set up a lab bitcoin address to accept crowd-sourced donations for everyday lab expenses to keep the lab running between larger grant acquisitions... If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to set up a "donations" page thanking individuals for helping to support our science.

lab web address: www.behavioralneuroscience.org
lab BTC address: 1KxqK9w8uH8gvYNxDAg4FS8Soij2RwnhWE

Thanks!
Rich

--
Rich Hartman, PhD
Associate Professor
School of Behavioral Health
Loma Linda University