Brain

The U.S. Forest Service recently published its first urban forest assessment -- providing details on the composition and health of the Austin, Texas urban forest, and documenting the contributions trees make to the environment, economy and the well-being of the community's residents.

According to the report, Austin's trees provide almost $34 million in services and benefits to the community in air pollution removal, carbon sequestration and energy savings.

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Physical and relational bullying can happen among children as young as 3- to 5-years-old, but the results of a new study suggest that a relatively short intervention program recently developed by researchers at the University at Buffalo can lead to significant reductions in some of these behaviors.

The study, published in a special edition of the journal School Psychology Review, is one of the first to examine and identify multiple types of bullying behavior in early childhood.

The research thoroughly reviews the importance of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and the blood-tumor barrier (BTB) along with the current status and future perspectives of interesting physical and surgical strategies to circumvent these central nervous system (CNS) barriers in the treatment of malignant brain tumors.

How much time and effort do you spend chewing?

Although you probably enjoy a few leisurely meals every day, chances are that you spend very little time and muscular effort chewing your food. That kind of easy eating is very unusual. For perspective, our closest relatives, chimpanzees, spend almost half their day chewing, and with much greater force.

When and how did eating become so easy? And what were its consequences?

JUPITER, FL - March 9, 2016 - Bipolar disorder, which affects nearly eight million Americans, takes a toll not only on patients, but also on their families and communities.

A new study by scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has identified specific genetic variations closely associated with increased susceptibility to bipolar disorder and other conditions. The discovery may provide a target for new therapies.

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists have discovered how pieces of bacterial cell wall cross the placenta and enter developing neurons, altering fetal brain anatomy and cognitive functioning after birth. The study appears today in the scientific journal Cell Host & Microbe.

It has long been known that the foundations of morality are present in children from a very young age, and that morality matures during childhood. But how is brain activity related to moral judgments in young children?

Developmental neuroscientists Dr Jason Cowell and Dr Jean Decety from the Child Neurosuite at the University of Chicago sought to answer this question as part of a recent study, which is now the subject of this video produced by Research Square.

Montreal, March 9, 2016 --Taking the stairs is normally associated with keeping your body strong and healthy. But new research shows that it improves your brain's health too -- and that education also has a positive effect.

In a study recently published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, researchers led by Jason Steffener, a scientist at Concordia University's Montreal-based PERFORM Centre, show that the more flights of stairs a person climbs, and the more years of school a person completes, the "younger" their brain physically appears.

PHILADELPHIA--Community mental health clinics, where most specialty mental health treatment is delivered, have been relying more on independent contractors to treat patients, largely for budgetary reasons. Many of these clinics have simultaneously been moving towards the greater use of evidence-based psychosocial practices (EBPs), broadly defined as talk therapies that are informed by rigorous research as well as clinician expertise and patient preferences.

Amsterdam, March 9, 2016 - A portable biosensor that could show how disease is progressing in patients with Alzheimer's could greatly improve people's quality of life in the future, according to a new review published in Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

New Orleans, LA - Research conducted at LSU Health New Orleans School of Public Health has found that exposure to poverty does not produce metabolic and inflammatory biomarkers in young, healthy children. It identifies early childhood as an opportunity to prevent a known association in adults between poverty and the metabolic syndrome. The study is one of the first to characterize the timing of exposure to such stress and the emergence of the physiologic changes leading to cardio-metabolic disease and to document these relationships during this critical developmental period.

Young people who self-harm only seek emergency hospital care as a last resort due to a deep sense of shame and unworthiness, a study at the University of Exeter has found.

Doctors have long characterized epilepsy as a brain disorder, but researchers at Case Western Reserve University have found that part of the autonomic nervous system functions differently in epilepsy during the absence of seizures.

This connection to the involuntary division of the nervous system may have implications for diagnosing and treating the disease and understanding sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP).

The research is published online in the Journal of Neurophysiology.

Educational neuroscience has little to offer schools or children's education, according to new research from the University of Bristol, UK.

A child who soothes themselves back to sleep from an early age adjusts to school more easily than those who don't, new QUT research has found.

The Australian study revealed one in three children have escalating problems sleeping across birth to five years which increased their risk of emotional and behavioural issues at school and put them at risk of attention deficit disorders.