In a discovery that carries significant implications for changing brain function through dietary interventions, UCLA researchers say they now have the first evidence that bacteria ingested in food can affect how the human brain works. The study, which focused on women who consumed yogurt containing the bacteria known as probiotics, appears in the journalGastroenterology. Researchers […]
Adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine – the A,T,G and C that make up the DNA code. But these 4 letters are not the whole story. The rise of epigenetics in the past decade has drawn attention to a fifth nucleotide, 5-methylcytosine (5-mC), that sometimes replaces cytosine in the famous DNA double helix to regulate which […]
The infamous middle finger salute is recognized by nearly everyone in our society, but to someone from a foreign country, it may be incomprehensible – or even worse, interpreted as some kind of precopulatory come-on. Likewise, Americans are likely to be clueless about the common gestures of a different culture. Which raises an intriguing question […]
The human brain’s chain-of-command relies on not one, but two quite different – although complementary – command-and-control areas, according to neuroscientists at the Washington University School of Medicine. These two “commanders” are brain regions that do not consult each other but still work toward a common purpose – the control of voluntary, goal-oriented behavior. This […]
A fast and efficient image enhancement technique that was originally applied to improving monochrome microscope images has proved itself equally effective at the other end of the scale – sharpening details on color images of distant galaxies produced by the Hubble Space Telescope. Its effectiveness at cleaning up images from outer space (before and after […]
New findings published in the American Journal of Epidemiology not only reveal that we don’t get enough sleep, but that we don’t get as many Z’s as we think we do. Other findings in the University of Chicago study show that blacks, men, and the poor, sleep less than whites, women and the affluent; and […]
Researchers working in a relatively new area of neuroscience have made progress in understanding why some people are more prone to risk taking than others. “Neuroeconomics” is a relatively new area of neuroscience that incorporates the expertise of neuroscientists, economists, psychologists and psychiatrists. Researchers in these fields are collectively trying to understand how the brain […]
Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) have made an intriguing discovery to do with the properties of human bone. The scientists describe their results, published in Nature Materials, as like finding a sort of “glue” in human bone. It describes how young healthy bone resists fracture and how getting older increases the […]
New research appearing in Neuropsychology details the anatomy of sarcasm and explains how the mind puts sharp-tongued words into context. The psychologists behind the research explain that for sarcasm to work, listeners must grasp the speaker’s intentions in the context of the situation, which calls for sophisticated social thinking and whether we understand that everyone […]
Johns Hopkins researchers, writing in Cell, report that four critical components of cells’ protein-building machine don’t do what scientists had long assumed. The machine, called the ribosome, is a ball of RNA (DNA’s cousin) surrounded by proteins. In the RNA center, genetic instructions are read, the right protein building block is added onto a growing […]
