When we type or perform other precise tasks, our brains and muscles usually work together effortlessly. But when a neurological disease or spinal cord injury severs the connection between the brain and limbs, once-easy motions become difficult or impossible. In recent years researchers have sought to give people suffering from injury or disease some restored […]
Scientists at the University of California, Irvine have been investigating what might happen to an astronaut’s brain during the long journey to Mars and found that constant exposure to highly energetic charged particles – much like those found in the galactic cosmic rays that bombard astronauts during extended spaceflights – cause significant damage to the […]
Babies whose mothers were exposed during pregnancy to stressors such as trauma, illness, alcohol, or drug abuse become susceptible to various psychiatric disorders later in life. Now, researchers think that it may be the stressor’s effect on single gene that gives rise to conditions such as schizophrenia, PTSD, autism, and bipolar disorders. The Yale University […]
A study presented at the 2014 American Society for Microbiology meeting adds to the growing body of evidence that multiple sclerosis may be triggered by Clostridium perfringens, a spore-forming bacterium that is one of the most common causes of foodborne illness. Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an inflammatory disease of the central nervous system characterized by […]
Researchers have discovered that zinc plays a critical role in regulating how the neurons in our brain communicate with one another as well as affecting how our memories form. The new findings, published in the journal Neuron, are the result of research by Xiao-an Zhang, at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and co-researchers at MIT […]
California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researchers have made an artificial neural network out of DNA, creating a circuit of interacting molecules that can recall memories based on incomplete patterns, just as the human brain can. Detailing the work in Nature, lead author Lulu Qian explained that the neural net consisted of four artificial neurons made […]
The brain’s mirror neuron system enables us to better understand and anticipate the actions of others, leading researchers to posit that autism may come about because of a crippled mirror neuron architecture. But new research published in Biological Psychiatry shows that individuals with autism eventually develop a very robust mirror neuron network. “While most of […]
In the real world, smells don’t happen one odor at a time. Animal movements distort plumes of odor molecules that constantly drift, changing direction as the wind disperses them. Now, by exploring how animals smell odors under natural conditions, Rockefeller University scientist Maria Neimark Geffen reveals that the brain encodes these swirling and complex patterns […]
The idea that the electrical signal patterns generated by neurons represent the encoding of different types of cognitive information appears to be wrong, according to scientists at the Weizmann Institute. Their research, appearing in the journal Neuron, showed that the communication signals between neurons, as measured by the experimenters, were indistinguishable from random neuronal firings. […]
Many neuroscientists and AI researchers believe that truly understanding how the brain works will be impossible until we can fathom how the billions of neurons are connected. Now, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies believe they have overcome a major hurdle to preparing such a map: identifying all of the connections to a […]
