Brain

Obtaining consent for genetic studies can be an opportunity for researchers to foster respectful engagement with participants, not merely to mitigate legal risk. This shift is proposed in a policy forum appearing tomorrow, Jan. 21, in Science, the journal of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science.

The difficult task of sorting and counting prized stem cells and their cancer-causing cousins has long frustrated scientists looking for new ways to help people who have progressive diseases.

But in a development likely to delight math teachers, University of Florida researchers have devised a series of mathematical steps that accomplishes what the most powerful microscopes, high-throughput screening systems and protein assays have failed to do — assess how rapidly stem cells and their malignant, stemlike alter egos increase their numbers.

The anti-diuretic hormone "vasopressin" is released from the brain, and known to work in the kidney, suppressing the diuresis. Here, the Japanese research team led by Professor Yasunobu OKADA, Director-General of National Institute for Physiological Sciences (NIPS), and Ms. Kaori SATO, a graduate student of The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, clarified the novel function of "vasopressin" that works in the brain, as well as in the kidney via the same type of the vasopressin receptor, to maintain the size of the vasopressin neurons.

A prototype computer game has been developed to help improve decision making skills in all aspects of our lives.

Supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), a team at Queen's University Belfast has developed a prototype that could be built on by commercial games manufacturers and turned into an e-learning or training tool for professionals in all walks of life – and for the general public too.

Alternatively, some of its features could be incorporated into existing computer games that have a strategy element.

Married people may think they communicate well with their partners, but psychologists have found that they don't always convey messages to their loved ones as well as they think — and in some cases, the spouses communicate no better than strangers.

The same communication problem also is true with close friends, a recent study has found.

What makes music beautiful? The best compositions transcend culture and time – but what is the commonality which underscores their appeal? New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Research Notes suggests that the brain simplifies complex patterns, much in the same way that 'lossless' music compression formats reduce audio files, by removing redundant data and identifying patterns.

It is possible to construct a three-dimensional, 3D, face from flat 2D images, according to research published in the International Journal of Biometrics this month. The discovery could be used for biometrics in security applications or in forensic investigations.

An Inserm research team in Toulouse, led by Dr Stein Silva (Inserm Unit 825 "Brain imaging and neurological handicaps"), working with the "Modelling tissue and nociceptive stress" Host Team (MATN IFR 150), were interested in studying the illusions described by many patients under regional anaesthetic. In their work, to be published in the journal Anesthesiology, the researchers demonstrated that anaesthetising an arm affects brain activity and rapidly impairs body perception.

Associate professor Anne Mangen at the University of Stavanger's Reading Centre asks if something is lost in switching from book to computer screen, and from pen to keyboard.

The process of reading and writing involves a number of senses, she explains. When writing by hand, our brain receives feedback from our motor actions, together with the sensation of touching a pencil and paper. These kinds of feedback is significantly different from those we receive when touching and typing on a keyboard.

Learning by doing

Malignant gliomas are fast-growing brain tumours with poor prospects of recovery depending on disease stage. Experts hope that the examination of patients by means of positron emission tomography (PET) is more helpful in the choice of the right treatment than other procedures. In a final report the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) has now investigated the benefit of PET in the detection of recurrences. According to this report, no robust conclusions are possible on the advantages or disadvantages of PET.

Recent work, in particular the CAMERA study, has used MRI to study the brains of migraine sufferers and has shown that a higher proportion of these patients exhibit lesions of the brain microvessels than the rest of the population.

Lesions of the brain microvessels

Lesions of the brain microvessels, visible on cerebral MRI images, can be of various kinds: white-matter hyperintensities and, more rarely, silent infarcts leading to loss of white-matter tissue.

DETROIT— The combined results of a genetic blood test and a five-minute functional MRI successfully classified more than three-quarters of healthy older adults, many of whom were destined to develop cognitive decline within 18 months of testing.

John Woodard, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Institute of Gerontology at Wayne State University, is lead author of "Predicting Cognitive Decline in Healthy Older Adults Using fMRI" published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease (vol. 21, no. 3).

Montreal, January 19, 2011 – Toddlers who learn a second language from infancy have an edge over their unilingual peers, according to a new study from Concordia University and York University in Canada and the Université de Provence in France. As reported in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, the research team tested the understanding of English and French words among 24-month-olds to see if bilingual toddlers had acquired comparable vocabulary in each language.