Brain

Alexandria, VA - We're most accustomed to flooding causing levees to fail, like they did in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. So although the El Nino-induced floods are making the most news in California right now, it's not actually the floods that are threatening some California levees the most. Instead it's the severe drought over the last four years that has taken its toll on thousands of kilometers of century-old earthen levees.

Maria Barraza has been a Community Health Worker (CHW) for 25 years, providing health services and facilitating research studies in underserved areas where disparities are most prevalent. In her role, Barraza contributes to the development and implementation of community and clinic-based research studies.

An electrical and systems engineer at Washington University in St. Louis has designed a method that, figuratively, forces a leopard to change its spots.

Jr-Shin Li, the Das Family Distinguished Career Development Associate Professor in Electrical & Systems Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, has devised a unified mathematical framework to design a single, global input, or waveform, that is able to inspire a population of nonlinear, rhythmic units ubiquitous in nature and manmade systems.

Researchers report on targeting stem cells, trials and translation, emerging drug targets in development and discovery, cutting edge research in stem cell and immune modulation, and adipose-derived stem cell plasticity for regenerative medicine

Putnam Valley, NY. (March 18, 2016) - Studies scheduled to be published in the May 2016 issue of Cell Transplantation (25(5)) were presented in 2015 at the 8th Annual Meeting of the Pan Pacific Symposium on Stem Cells and Cancer Research (PPSSC) held in in Hsinchu, Taiwan from April 11-13 of 2015.

A research group led by Ryota Hashimoto, an associate professor at Osaka University, Naohiro Okada, a graduate student at the University of Tokyo, and Kiyoto Kasai, a professor at the University of Tokyo, replicated prior findings that the volume of globus pallidus (one of the basal ganglia in the brain) in schizophrenia was larger than that in healthy subjects. Also, the group found that patients with schizophrenia demonstrated a specific leftward volumetric asymmetry for the globus pallidus.

Before women even become pregnant, their biological profile may predict a lower-birthweight baby, a UCLA-led research team reports.

It's an age-old quandary: Are we born "noble savages" whose best intentions are corrupted by civilization, as the 18th century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau contended? Or are we fundamentally selfish brutes who need civilization to rein in our base impulses, as the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued?

After exploring the areas of the brain that fuel our empathetic impulses -- and temporarily disabling other regions that oppose those impulses -- two UCLA neuroscientists are coming down on the optimistic side of human nature.

They say that once you've learned to ride a bicycle, you never forget how to do it. But new research suggests that while learning, the brain is actively trying to forget. The study, by scientists at EMBL and University Pablo Olavide in Sevilla, Spain, is published today in Nature Communications.

"This is the first time that a pathway in the brain has been linked to forgetting, to actively erasing memories," says Cornelius Gross, who led the work at EMBL.

Innovative entrepreneurial intentions -- or the aim to create new products and bring them to market, rather than replicating existing products -- are boosted by college experiences, according to research by NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

The multi-country study, published in The Journal of Higher Education, suggests that beyond personality, family history of entrepreneurship, and other characteristics, educational practices may actually spur innovation.

New research has provided more evidence that an innovative treatment strategy may help prevent brain swelling and death in stroke patients. J. Marc Simard, professor of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, along with colleagues at Yale University and Massachusetts General Hospital, found that Cirara, an investigational drug, powerfully reduced brain swelling and death in patients who had suffered a type of large stroke called malignant infarction, which normally carries a high mortality rate.

According to the World Health Organization, depression is a major cause of disease burden worldwide, affecting an estimated 350 million people. According to the National Institutes of Mental Health, in 2014, an estimated 15.7 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States had at least one major depressive episode in the past year.

Researchers from King's College London and the University of Oxford have identified a molecular signal, known as 'neuregulin-1', which drives and enables the spinal cord's natural capacity for repair after injury.

The findings, published today in Brain, could one day lead to new treatments which enhance this spontaneous repair mechanism by manipulating the neuregulin-1 signal.

An ongoing culture of secrecy, poor access to specialist mental health services and a lack of high quality independent investigations has contributed to hundreds of non-natural deaths in detention, according to a new report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Since 2014, over 225 people detained in prisons, psychiatric hospitals and police cells - many of whom had mental health conditions - have died of non-natural causes in England and Wales. When 2015 figures for psychiatric hospitals are also published, the final number could be far higher.

• First comprehensive study of substance abuse and dependence in delinquent youth after detention through young adulthood
• More than 90 percent of males, nearly 80 percent of females diagnosed with substance abuse or dependence by late 20s
• Non-Hispanic whites 30 times more likely to abuse cocaine than African Americans
• Contradicts stereotype that African Americans abuse "hard drugs" more than non-Hispanic whites

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MADISON, Wis. -- In one of the first studies to 'read' the genetic activity inside individual brain cells, University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientist Xinyu Zhao has identified the genetic machinery that causes maturation in a young nerve cell. The cells under study came from the hippocampus, a memory-related structure that is the only place in a mammal's brain where new neurons can form throughout life.