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Events on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

Chaos & Complex Systems Seminar
Long-term cortical and subcortical neuromodulation induced by electrical tongue stimulation
Time: 12:05 pm
Place: 4274 Chamberlin (Refreshments will be served)
Speaker: Joe Wildenberg, UW Department of Neuroscience
Abstract: The use of electrical neurostimulation to treat neurological disorders is expanding from initial applications in epilepsy and Parkinson's disease to conditions such as depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, balance disorders, and as an adjuvant to behavioral therapy during neurorehabilitation for stroke. Our group has developed a non-invasive technique that stimulates the central nervous system through the tongue. Previous work has shown this technique efficacious as therapy for balance disorders with beneficial effects lasting weeks to months after the stimulation therapy has ended. Here I will present a functional magnetic resonance imaging study indicating that stimulation of the cranial nerves via afferents in the tongue can influence neural structures within the balance-processing network to produce positive behavioral effects. Furthermore, the results of this study indicate that this stimulation can modify neural processing of tasks not encountered during the stimulation sessions. This seems to be the first evidence of long-term network-wide processing plasticity induced by electrical neurostimulation in humans.
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Astronomy Colloquium
"Using Numerical Simulations to Study the Formation and Evolution of Galaxies
Time: 3:30 pm
Place: 3425 Sterling Hall
Speaker: Dr. T.J. Cox, Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Abstract: The past decade has produced an amazingly robust picture for the universe we live in. This picture predicts that structure forms hierarchically, i.e., small objects collapse at early times and grow via mergers and gravity. The prevailing idea for the formation of galaxies is that the morphology and structure that we observe is a direct byproduct of this hierarchical merger history; however, a detailed mapping between specific merger histories, and the wide variety of galaxy types, is still uncertain. By using a comprehensive set of state-of-the-art numerical simulations, we show how this process is being studied, and what some of the common scenarios might be. For example, we show that a single disk-disk merger, such as that which will occur in 5 Gyr between our own Milky Way and our nearest neighbor Andromeda, is a plausible mechanism to form many elliptical galaxies provided that dissipation is involved. We also show were this picture fails, and outline how current and future work will address these shortcomings and yield testable predictions of the model.
Host: Prof Christi Tremonti
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