Brain

Contrary to the TV sitcom where the wife experiencing strong labor pains screams at her husband to stay away from her, women rarely give birth alone. There are typically doctors, nurses and husbands in hospital delivery rooms, and sometimes even other relatives and friends. Midwives often are called on to help with births at home.

Assisted birth has likely been around for millennia, possibly dating as far back as 5 million years ago when our ancestors first began walking upright, according to University of Delaware paleoanthropologist Karen Rosenberg.

Past behavior is generally considered to be a good predictor of future behavior, but new research indicates that may not be the case in the development of depression, particularly among adolescent girls.

University of Washington social scientists tracked first- and second-graders for seven years and found that anti-social behavior among girls and anxiety among both sexes predicted depression in early adolescence. Surprisingly, early signs of depression were not predictive of adolescent depression.

CHICAGO --- The kids who pass through juvenile detention facilities are among the most troubled youths in the community. How do they fare a few years after this significant brush with the legal system?

The day that robot playmates help children with autism learn the social skills that they naturally lack has come a step closer with the development of a system that allows a robot to monitor a child's emotional state.

RICHMOND, Va. (Feb. 17, 2009) – Virginia Commonwealth University researchers have identified a gene that plays a key role in regulating liver cancer progression, a discovery that could one day lead to new targeted therapeutic strategies to fight the highly aggressive disease.

When ABC journalist Bob Woodruff was injured while reporting in Iraq in 2006, he suffered severe head injuries that caused him to lose his ability to recall and produce common words — a condition called aphasia. Today, Woodruff has recovered most of his language skills thanks to intensive behavioral therapy — reading and repeating words and sounds.

In comparison to many other living creatures, flies tend to be small and their brains, despite their complexity, are quite manageable. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried have now ascertained that these insects can make up for their low number of nerve cells by means of sophisticated network interactions. The neurobiologists examined nerve cells that receive motion information in their input region from only a narrow area of the fly's field of vision.

HOUSTON – (Feb. 17, 2009) – A research project at Rice University has brought scientists to the brink of comprehending a long-standing medical mystery that may link cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis and perhaps even Alzheimer's disease.

And for that, we can thank the rat.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- After a collective trauma, such as Thursday's crashof Continental Flight 3407 near Buffalo, an entire community (or even the nation) can be exposed to the tragedy through media coverage and second-hand accounts, according to Mark Seery, Ph.D., University at Buffalo assistant professor of psychology.

"Individuals potentially suffer negative effects on their mental andphysical health, even if they have not 'directly' experienced the lossof someone they know or have not witnessed the event or its aftermathin person," Seery says.

WASHINGTON – While science tries to understand the stuff dreams are made of, humans, from cultures all over the world, continue to believe that dreams contain important hidden truths, according to newly published research.

Which modules of the tau protein, in neurons of Alzheimer disease patients, may act in a destructive manner were investigated by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (Göttingen) and the Max Planck Unit for Structural Molecular Biology (Hamburg) with the help of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (PLoS Biology, February 17, 2009).

Scientists have long known that interrupting the 24-hour circadian rhythm plays havoc with the lives and health of medical, military and airline personnel, factory employees and travelers.

A new paper by University of Notre Dame biologist Giles Duffield and a team of researchers that appears in this month's edition of the journal Cell Biology sheds new light on circadian timing systems and focuses on a key gene that seems to regulate the response of the circadian clock to light signals.

CINCINNATI—University of Cincinnati (UC) researchers have discovered that estrogen receptors are present in medulloblastoma—the most common type of pediatric brain tumor—leading them to believe that anti-estrogen drug treatments may be beneficial in limiting tumor progression and improving patients' overall outcome.

This research is being published in the March 2009 edition of Endocrinology.

Worldwide almost 30 million suffer from Alzheimer's disease, an irreversible, neurodegenerative condition that is eventually fatal. The brains of people with Alzheimer's contain two types of misfolded proteins - amyloid plaques and tangles of the protein Tau. Whether these protein abnormalities are a cause of Alzheimer's or a consequence of the disease are unclear. A new paper in this week's PLoS Biology investigates the structure of Tau to better understand its role in healthy cells and in the pathology of Alzheimers.

GALVESTON, Texas —Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have discovered a key tactic that the Rift Valley fever virus uses to disarm the defenses of infected cells.