In a striking new finding, researchers at the UC Davis MIND Institute found that typically-developing children gain more neurons in a region of the brain that governs social and emotional behavior, the amygdala, as they become adults. This phenomenon...
FOXP2, a gene implicated in affecting speech and language, is held up as a textbook example of positive selection on a human-specific trait. But in a paper published August 2 in the journal Cell, researchers challenge this finding. Their...
Scientists in Japan have designed new molecules that modify the circadian rhythm, opening the way to the possibility of managing jet lag and improving treatments for sleep disorders.
The negative impacts of jet lag and shift work could be significantly...
Image is a Z-statistic map threshold at voxel-height probability of P<.001and cluster probability of P<.05 displayed over axial MNIT1 anatomic template. Significant clusters are located in the anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral inferior frontal, inferior parietal and medial temporal gyrl,...
Loss of the sense of smell can indicate a neural disease like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. However, contrary to previous belief, degenerations in the nervous system do not play a leading role in the loss of the sense of...
What are some ways you cope with stresses in your life? Do you do yoga? Meditate? Exercise? Perhaps you should add taking prebiotics to that list.
Probiotics are well known to benefit digestive health, but prebiotics are less well understood....
Picture a little boy imitating his father shaving in the mirror or a little girl wobbling proudly in her mother's high heels.
From infancy, we learn by watching other people, then use those memories to help us predict outcomes and...
An illustration showing the portions of the brain involved in perception of a visual boundary, like a curb or a wall.Credit: Soojin Park/JHU
Humans rely on boundaries like walls and curbs for navigation, and Johns Hopkins University researchers have pinpointed...
Salk scientists show how visual neurons encode temporal dynamic information. It was previously thought that visual neurons encode information by summing the number of action potentials within a static temporal window. This representation is fixed, like a photo of...
Low levels of the stress hormone cortisol are linked to obesity, high levels of fat in the blood and metabolic syndrome among patients with recurrent depressions or bipolar disorder. This according to a study at Umeå University in Sweden...
A team of scientists has uncovered the neural processes mice use to ignore their own footsteps, a discovery that offers new insights into how we learn to speak and play music.
The research is reported in the journal Nature.
"The ability...
