Students at the University of Pittsburgh are trying to discover a cure for common acne using a not-so-common tool: facial bacteria. An eight-member team of undergraduate student researchers is studying a common bacterium that lives deep in the skin and survives on oil produced in the face but also is a component of healthy skin. Their goal is to produce a probiotic with the bacterium that will help combat acne. We felt like there was a really big need for it, said Stephen Kita, a recent bioengineering graduate and team founder. Who hasnt experienced acne at some point or another? This has the potential to impact or help a lot of people. The team is preparing to compete with thousands of students from around the world, including a team from Carnegie Mellon, at this years International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition in October. The team raised its own funds for the synthetic biology competition costs and lab materials through a crowd funding website, many of the donations coming from friends, family members and supportive faculty and staff at the university and totaling about $1,900. Everyone who knows about it is really excited about it, Mr. Kita said. The nice thing … Continue reading →

Relaxnews Sep 29, 2014 , Last Updated: 2:55 PM ET Photos of the faces of Angelina Jolie and Halle Berry were morphed together in a bioengineering experiment to determine how neurons react to ambiguous faces when individuals try to decipher identity. "We are constantly bombarded with noisy and ambiguous sensory information and our brain is constantly making decisions based on such limited data," says Professor Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, director of the Centre for Systems Neuroscience and Head of Bioengineering at the University of Leicester in the U.K. Using the morphed image, Dr. Quiroga and his team concluded that the neurons activate upon recognition of the faces rather than the visual stimulus of the features. Looking at a face, he says, one recognizes consciously that it's the face of a friend, for example, but the process of identifying the individual features is sub-conscious. The neurons the researchers observed in the study illustrated this point to perfection, according to Dr. Quiroga, who says they fired upon perception, not upon contemplation of the features. Furthermore, he says, the experiment proves Aristotle was correct in saying that humans create images of the external world and seal them into memory more than they gather information … Continue reading →

September 29, 2014 Image Caption: Angelina Jolie + Halle Berry were morphed for the study. Credit: University of Leicester Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, University of Leicester Study reveals individual neurons in the human brain are triggered by the subjects conscious perception, rather than by the visual stimulus An international team of scientists, involving Professor Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, director of the Centre for Systems Neuroscience and Head of Bioengineering at the University of Leicester, has shown how individual neurons in the human brain react to ambiguous morphed faces. For this, the researchers used images of celebrities, such as Angelina Jolie and Halle Berry, morphed together to create an ambiguous face which test subjects were asked to identify. The study found that for the same ambiguous images, the neurons fired according to the subjective perception by the subjects rather than the visual stimulus. For example, a neuron originally firing to Whoopi Goldberg fired to a morph image between Goldberg and Bob Marley only when the subject identified the morphed image as Goldberg and remained silent when the subject said the very same image was Marley. They concluded that neurons fire in line with conscious recognition of images rather than the actual images seen. … Continue reading →