Why you get goosebumps when you're scared--or inspired The primal reflex still sparks at chills, thrills, and eerie delights. Even the earliest humans got goosebumps. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. As the nights draw in, temperatures drop, and horror movies slink onto our screens, you'll feel the familiar prickle of raised hairs down your arms more often. But why do our bodies get goosebumps in the first place? Goosebumps are valuable tools for many animals.

A ground-breaking study shows the most detailed map of a mammal's brain to date. The 3D blueprints display more than two miles of neural wiring, close to 100,000 nerve cells, and about 500 million synapses -- all contained in a piece of mouse brain no bigger than a grain of sand. Dr Clay Reid of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle said: 'Inside this tiny speck is an exquisite forest of connections, filled with rules we're only beginning to understand.' The sample comes from an outer part of the brain - known as the cortex - a region which is involved in sight, the Times reports. Dr Forrest Collman, of the same Institute, said: 'By studying how the cortex functions in the mouse brain, we can generate better ideas and hypotheses about how our own brains work.'

It's no hidden health secret that sleep is really good for us. It helps our immune systems and supports almost every organ system in the body. We've also known for almost two decades that the slow, synchronous electrical waves in the brain during deep sleep supports memory formation. However, we did not know exactly how the brain does this until now. These slow waves make the neocortex–where long-term memory is stored in the brain–particularly receptive to new information.

Long-distance friendships and relationships can be hard at the best of times. But new technology might soon let you hold hands with a loved one from thousands of miles away. Experts have designed a soft fingertip device that enables the realistic feeling of touch - one of the most complex sensations in the human body. The bioinspired haptic (BAMH) system works by simulating all four touch receptors in the human finger using vibrations at different speeds and strengths across multiple areas. The team behind the device said they believe they have the technology to create a glove, which could eventually enable remote social interaction and the feeling of holding a hand.

Balls of human brain cells linked to a computer have been used to perform a very basic form of speech recognition. The hope is that such systems will use far less energy for AI tasks than silicon chips. "This is just proof-of-concept to show we can do the job," says Feng Guo at Indiana University Bloomington. "We do have a long way to go." Brain organoids are lumps of nerve cells that form when stem cells are grown in certain conditions. "They are like mini-brains," says Guo.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Jellyfish could be much smarter than scientists previously thought, asserts a new study published in the journal Current Biology. Poisonous Caribbean box jellyfish can learn at a far more complex level than ever imagined, despite only having 1,000 nerve cells and no centralized brain, according to new research from the University of Copenhagen. Scientists say their findings change the fundamental understanding of the brain -- and could reveal more about human cognitive functions and the process of dementia.

Information from the senses must be compressed into the limited range of firing rates generated by spiking nerve cells. Optimal compression uses all firing rates equally often, implying that the nerve cell's response matches the statistics of naturally occurring stimuli. Since changing the voltage-dependent ionic conductances in the cell membrane alters the flow of information, an unsupervised, non-Hebbian, developmental learning rule is derived to adapt the conductances in Hodgkin-Huxley model neurons. By maximizing the rate of information transmission, each firing rate within the model neuron's limited dynamic range is used equally often . An efficient neuronal representation of incoming sensory information should take advan(cid:173) tage of the regularity and scale invariance of stimulus features in the natural world.

Medical Imaging Informatics and Artificial Intelligence at UCSF is headed by Dr. Dugyu Tosun-Torgut and brings together world-class researchers from multiple disciplines in order to find new, innovative ways to use artificial intelligence and imaging for medical diagnosis. By uniting neurologists, engineers, and data scientists Medical Imaging Informatics and Artificial Intelligence will be extremely impactful in increasing the scope of our current imaging systems when it comes to the brain. The Medical Imaging Informatics and Artificial Intelligence Lab at UCSF aims to foster a truly collaborative environment. All team members are expected to contribute and participate in meaningful ways as we seek to discover novel new ways to utilize technology to better diagnose and treat patients. We value long term partnerships and create a trusting environment for all to succeed.

Around 2005, BCI research has once again become the focus of biomedical engineering. In the summer of that year, an international conference on BCI was held in a valley in Albany, New York, with more than 100 attendants. The conference gathered the world's earliest BCI researchers who had innovative ideas on inducing brain electrical activities, processing brain electrical signals, etc. The chairman of the conference is Professor Jonathan Wolpaw of Wadsworth Center in New York State. He believes that non-invasive scalp EEG is the future of BCI technology.

Can we use machine learning methods to predict the sensing data of odor mixtures and design new smells? A new study by researchers from Tokyo Tech does just that. The novel method is bound to have applications in the food, health, beauty, and wellness industries, where odors and fragrances are of keen interest. The sense of smell is one of the basic senses of animal species. It is critical to finding food, realizing attraction, and sensing danger. Humans detect smells, or odorants, with olfactory receptors expressed in olfactory nerve cells.