Potential Antioxidant Activity of Terpenes

Terpenes play a key part in the metabolic processes of a wide variety of animals, plants and microorganisms in which they are produced. In nature, terpenoids serve a variety of purposes including defense, signaling and as key agents in metabolic processes. Terpenes have been used in perfumery, cosmetics and medicine for thousands of years and are still extracted from natural sources for these uses. Terpenes antioxidant activities may sometimes explain their capacity to adjust inflammation, immunological effects and neural signal transmission. They offer pertinent protection under oxidative stress situations including renal, liver, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, neurodegenerative and diabetes as well as in ageing mechanisms.

Open multimodal iEEG-fMRI dataset from naturalistic stimulation with a short audiovisual film

Intracranial human recordings are a valuable and rare resource that the whole neuroscience community can benefit from. Making such data available to the neuroscience community not only helps tackle the reproducibility issues in science, it also helps make more use of this valuable data. The latter is especially true for data collected using naturalistic tasks. Here, we describe a dataset collected from a large group of human subjects while they watched a short audiovisual film. The dataset is characterized by several unique features. First, it combines a large amount of intracranial data from 51 intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) participants, who all did the same task. Second, the intracranial data are accompanied by fMRI recordings acquired for the same task in 30 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) participants. Third, the data were acquired using a rich audiovisual stimulus, for which we provide detailed speech and video annotations. This multimodal dataset can be used to address questions about neural mechanisms of multimodal perception and language comprehension as well as the nature of the neural signal acquired during the same task across brain recording modalities.

Feeling the beat: an investigation into the neural correlates of vibrotactile beat perception

The current study investigates our ability to perceive and synchronize movements to the beat of rhythms presented through vibrations to the skin. I compared EEG recordings and tapping accuracy to rhythms that varied in modality: auditory-only, vibrotactile, multimodal (vibrotactile and auditory) and complexity: metronome and simple rhythms. The neural data showed that signals localized to the primary auditory cortex showed a larger spike in power at beat frequencies presentation of auditory compared to vibrotactile rhythms. Tapping ability was found to be lowest in vibrotactile compared to auditory and multimodal rhythms. Auditory only and multimodal rhythms did not show a statistical difference in the neural or tapping data. Tapping variability predicted neural entrainment, such that more variable tapping elicited a more entrained neural signal in primary auditory cortex, and less in pre-motor regions. In conclusion, these results show how the temporal processing of rhythm is superior in auditory modalities.