From UCSD

The brain of famous amnesiac patient H.M. is currently being sliced into 3,000 giant histological sections to be mounted and stained on glass plates. The entire process is being broadcast live at "The Brain Observatory", a site hosted by UC San Diego.

Doctors at UCSD are performing a massive 30-hour microtome session in order to section the entire brain. The brain has been frozen into a gelatin medium for the process as opposed to embedded in paraffin.

H.M. was an amnesiac patient who developed severe anterograde amnesia at the age of 16, after a surgery intended to cure his lifelong epilepsy. This meant he was incapable of forming new long-term memories, though he retained the ability to learn certain types of new information and skills. The study of his condition helped develop a number of theories in the field of cognitive neuropsychology,  a branch of psychology that aims to correlate physical structures of the brain to psychological functions.

microscopy | news | medical

TED talks are an annual conference for sharing revolutionary ideas and inventions with the scientific community at large. This year saw the addition of TEDMED, dedicated to innovations in the medical field, and Wired.com provided a great overview.

This year's talks were heavily centered around gadgets, digitization and how they might impact the future of medicine. Wireless monitoring technologies were shown off, a project to collect over 100,000 human genomes is off to a solid start, and living cultures of artificially grown tissue were passed around to attendees.

All in all, a great article on some phenomenal innovations. Read more for an excerpt from the article, or Click here to view it on Wired.com.

news | technology | medical | innovation