Dana Foundation Blog

The Law to Neuroscience: Hold Up

If you were unable to attend the Neuroscience and Law event in D.C. in April, you can now watch it in its entirety by viewing the webcast on the Dana Foundation website. Focusing on the use of neuroscience research in the courtroom, the event was part of the Neuroscience & Society series sponsored by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Dana Foundation.

Featured panelists included Dana Alliance and Dana Foundation Board member Steve Hyman, director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Owen Jones, director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience and a law professor at Vanderbilt University; and Honorable Barbara Rothstein, U.S. District Judge from the Western District of Washington state.

Photo of Steven E. Hyman, Owen D. Jones, and Judge Barbara Rothstein [Credit: AAAS]

 

Report on Progress: Vision

In the May edition of the Report on Progress, “Artificial Sight: Restoration of Sight through Use of Argus II, a Bioelectronic Retinal Implant,” Mark S. Humayun, M.D., Ph.D., discusses restoring sight to blind patients through a retinal implant:

More than 1 million Americans are legally blind and another 10% cannot detect light. With increased mean lifespan, the frequency of age-related eye disease will double in the next 30 years. A significant percentage of the non-treatable blindness stems from loss of photoreceptors (the rods and cones). Once photoreceptors are lost, restoring useful vision to blind patients has been impossible. However, after nearly a century of research into the use of electrical stimulation to restore sight, the Argus II system (Second Sight Medical Products, Inc. Sylmar, CA) was just approved by the FDA as the first medical implant to restore sight to patients who are blind from near total loss of their photoreceptors.

Spoiler Alert: Don't Worry

I recently finished watching the television series Friday Night Lights, which originally aired from 2006-2011. It is a great show, one definitely worth watching, but I’m not here to make recommendations. Instead, I’ll reassure anyone who has had key plot elements of a show, movie, or book “spoiled” by someone else: It doesn’t matter. (By the way, in case you’re hesitant to read further for fear of spoilers, none are provided here.)

I was given the entire series of Friday Night Lights as a DVD box set, complete with photos from the show. Whoever put this together didn’t think it through. When flipping to the second disc in Season One, for example, there was a picture that showed a character who hadn’t yet been introduced. A few discs later, I spotted a key character in a new setting. I quickly learned to grab the discs without looking at the images, but even that didn’t solve my “problems.” Once the disc loaded, some of the episode titles were obvious giveaways as to what would happen.

Dana Foundation on Storify

During last Saturday's Staying Sharp session, we covered the event live using Storify, a program that allows users to pull information from all over the internet—Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.—and assemble it in one place. You can find Dana's Storify post from Staying Sharp here: http://storify.com/dana_fdn/staying-sharp-mount-vernon.

As you can see, the Storify post includes many tweets and photos, listed chronologically, and allows readers to follow the event as if they were there. Towards the end, you can find the panelists' "one important nugget" they shared with the audience.

We will be using Storify again at the next Staying Sharp event in Las Vegas in a few weeks. Stay tuned!

--Andrew Kahn

Free Webcast on Youth Addiction Tonight

Tune in tonight to the free webcast, “Raising Drug-Free Kids: How Can the Science of Addiction Help Us?” to hear Dana Alliance member and Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse Nora Volkow, M.D., discuss how drug addiction impacts our youth and the importance of prevention.

This webcast is part of the Child Mind Institute’s Speak Up for Kids series, and will run from 8-9pm EST. Register here.

For more information on youth addiction, visit NIDA for Teens.

--Ann L. Whitman