Brain

PITTSBURGH—Spontaneous thoughts, intuitions, dreams and quick impressions. We all have these seemingly random thoughts popping into our minds on a daily basis. The question is what do we make of these unplanned, spur-of-the-moment thoughts? Do we view them as coincidental wanderings of a restless mind, or as revealing meaningful insight into ourselves?

This news release is available in French.

This news release is available in French.

Imaging scientists at Western University's Robarts Research Institute (London, Canada) have developed a better way to track the progression of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) from its earliest stages. Led by Ravi Menon, PhD, the researchers used what's called "Quantitative Susceptibility (QS) Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)," to measure damage in specific areas of the brain which the study showed to be common to all patients. The findings are published in advance online, in Radiology.

A new treatment for drug-resistant epilepsy with the potential to suppress seizures 'on demand' with a pill, similar to how you might take painkillers when you feel a headache coming on, has been developed by UCL (University College London) researchers funded by the Wellcome Trust.

The treatment, described in Nature Communications, combines genetic and chemical approaches to suppress seizures without disrupting normal brain function. The technique was demonstrated in rodents but in future we could see people controlling seizures on-demand with a simple pill.

Removing a malignant tumor from the head of the pancreas is a risky and demanding operation. The surgeon must carefully navigate around the stomach, the gallbladder, the bile duct, lymph nodes, and several high-pressure blood vessels.

Heat shock protein (HSP90) has been suggested to be involved in neuronal protein misfolding and accumulation in Parkinson's disease (PD) brains leading to dopaminergic neuronal death and the eventual dopamine depletion. Therefore, HSP90 has been suggested as a therapeutic target in PD. Dr. Muhammed Al-Jarrah and co-workers from Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST) point out exercise training significantly inhibited HSP90 overexpression in the soleus and gastrocnemius in PDe rats, which is a potential therapeutic target for ameliorating skeletal muscle abnormalities in PD.

The pilot is wearing a white cap with myriad attached cables. His gaze is concentrated on the runway ahead of him. All of a sudden the control stick starts to move, as if by magic. The airplane banks and then approaches straight on towards the runway. The position of the plane is corrected time and again until the landing gear gently touches down. During the entire maneuver the pilot touches neither pedals nor controls.

This news release is available in German.

Because the majority of patients with diffuse brain injury are not suitable candidates for surgery, neuroprotective agents are of great importance. Apolipoprotein E exerts a neuroprotective effect against brain injury, but synthetic apolipoprotein E cannot cross the blood-brain barrier, thus limiting its application.It has been reported that apolipoprotein E (138) mimetic peptide can cross the blood-brain barrier in both normal and injured brain. However, its impact on neurological function following diffuse brain injury is still unclear. Prof.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Across the board, even if they believed in the concept of a soul, people in a new study ascribed free will based on down-to-Earth criteria: Did the actor in question have the capacity to make an intentional and independent choice? The study suggests that while grand metaphysical views of the universe remain common, they have little to do with how people assess each other's behavior.

For the study, 24 kindergarten students were placed in laboratory classrooms for six introductory science lessons on topics they were unfamiliar with. Three lessons were taught in a heavily decorated classroom, and three lessons were given in a sparse classroom.

The results showed that while children learned in both classroom types, they learned more when the room was not heavily decorated. Specifically, children's accuracy on the test questions was higher in the sparse classroom(55 percent correct) than in the decorated classroom(42 percent correct).

Two years ago, a new type of stem cell was discovered in the brain that has the capacity to form new cells. The same research group at Lund University in Sweden has now revealed that these stem cells, which are located in the outer blood vessel wall, appear to be involved in the brain reaction following a stroke.

The findings show that the cells, known as pericytes, drop out from the blood vessel, proliferate and migrate to the damaged brain area where they are converted into microglia cells, the brain's inflammatory cells.

Ants are capable of complex problem-solving strategies that could be widely applied as optimization techniques. An individual ant searching for food walks in random ways, biologists found. Yet the collective foraging behaviour of ants goes well beyond that, as a mathematical study to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals: The animal movements at a certain point change from chaos to order. This happens in a surprisingly efficient self-organized way.

PHILADELPHIA – Puberty is the defining process of adolescent development, beginning a cascade of changes throughout the body, including the brain. Penn Medicine researchers have discovered that cerebral blood flow (CBF) levels decreased similarly in males and females before puberty, but saw them diverge sharply in puberty, with levels increasing in females while decreasing further in males, which could give hints as to developing differences in behavior in men and women and sex-specific pre-dispositions to certain psychiatric disorders.