Brain

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—A University of Michigan cell biologist and his colleagues have identified a potential drug that speeds up trash removal from the cell's recycling center, the lysosome.

The finding suggests a new way to treat rare inherited metabolic disorders such as Niemann-Pick disease and mucolipidosis Type IV, as well as more common neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, said Haoxing Xu, who led a U-M team that reported its findings March 13 in the online, multidisciplinary journal Nature Communications.

People often wonder if computers make children smarter. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are asking the reverse question: Can children make computers smarter? And the answer appears to be 'yes.'

UC Berkeley researchers are tapping the cognitive smarts of babies, toddlers and preschoolers to program computers to think more like humans.

If replicated in machines, the computational models based on baby brainpower could give a major boost to artificial intelligence, which historically has had difficulty handling nuances and uncertainty, researchers said.

Philadelphia, PA, March 13, 2012 – A new study suggests that administering FTY720, an oral drug that has shown promise in trials for human multiple sclerosis, significantly improves locomotor recovery in mice with spinal cord injury (SCI). The research suggests a possible new avenue to counteract the degeneration of the spinal cord in human SCI. The study will be published in the April 2012 issue of The American Journal of Pathology.

LA JOLLA, Calif., March 12, 2012 – Children with multiple hereditary exostoses (MHE), an inherited genetic disease, suffer from multiple growths on their bones that cause pain and disfigurement. But beyond the physical symptoms of this condition, some parents have long observed that their children with MHE also experience autism-like social problems. Buoyed by the support of these parents, researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) used a mouse model of MHE to investigate cognitive function.

KINGSTON, R.I. – March 12, 2012 – University of Rhode Island marine biologist Jacqueline Webb gets an occasional strange look when she brings fish to the Orthopedics Research Lab at Rhode Island Hospital. While the facility's microCT scanner is typically used to study bone density and diseases like osteoporosis, it is also providing new insights into the skull structure and sensory systems of fish.

Chicago, IL – March 10, 2012 -- More than two-thirds of human genes have counterparts in the well-studied fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, so although it may seem that humans don't have much in common with flies, the correspondence of our genetic instructions is astonishing. In fact, there are hundreds of inherited diseases in humans that have Drosophila counterparts.

How do we recognize a face? To date, most research has answered "holistically": We look at all the features—eyes, nose, mouth—simultaneously and, perceiving the relationships among them, gain an advantage over taking in each feature individually. Now a new study overturns this theory. The researchers—Jason M. Gold and Patrick J. Mundy of the Indiana University and Bosco S. Tjan of the University of California Los Angeles—found that people's performance in recognizing a whole face is no better than their performance with each individual feature shown alone.