Brain

URBANA, Ill. - A new University of Illinois study reveals that the transition from home to child care is an important time for creating a partnership between parent and provider that benefits the child's development.

In this mixed-methods study, researchers at the U of I report that several factors--including the child's age, child temperament, and maternal depressive symptoms--may play a role in the ease or difficulty that mothers and their young children experience during the transition into child care.

Over two thirds or the home health care population consists of adults over the age of 65, approximately 36% have some form of cognitive impairment, including dementia. According to the Institute of Medicine, the number of home health care (HHC) providers qualified to properly care for the older adults, including those with dementia, is inadequate.

Small numbers are processed in the right side of the brain, while large numbers are processed in the left side of the brain, new research suggests.

The study, from scientists at Imperial College London, offers new insights into the mystery of how our brains handle numbers. The findings of the research, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, could in the future help to tailor rehabilitation techniques for patients who have suffered brain damage, such as stroke patients, and inform treatments for conditions such as dyscalculia, which causes difficulty in processing numbers.

Inside our brains nerve cells signal each other using neurotransmitters including carbon monoxide (CO) and nitric oxide (NO) gases. Besides sharing a number of biological and chemical characteristics, CO and NO work together in regulating many physiological processes including vasodilatation, and immune reaction. Accurate and quantitative measurements of their physiological levels have been seen to result in meaningful findings and the focus of many previous studies. However their similarities have prevented such effort from cracking the entangled bond between CO and NO.

Antidepressants are frequently initiated in persons with Alzheimer's disease already before the diagnosis, shows a recent study from the University of Eastern Finland. Among persons with Alzheimer's disease, the initiation of antidepressant use was most common during the six months after the Alzheimer's diagnosis, and more frequent than among comparison persons without Alzheimer's disease even 4 years after the diagnosis. The results were published in International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Depression can strike anyone, taking a toll on mental and physical health, friendships, work and studies. But figuring out who's at risk for it is still a murky task.

A new University of Michigan study suggests that standard ways of looking for depression risk may not work as well among blacks as they do among whites. But listening to how blacks describe their own mental health could help, the study suggests.

LA JOLLA, CA - March 3, 2016 - In a new study published today in the journal Neuron, scientists from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) are the first to sequence the complete genomes of individual neurons and to produce live mice carrying neuronal genomes in all of their cells.

Use of the technique revealed surprising insights into these cells' genomes--including the findings that each neuron contained an average of more than 100 mutations and that these neurons accumulated more mutations in genes they used frequently.

ORLANDO, Fla.--High school football players with ill-fitting helmets are at greater risk for more severe concussions, according to a study presented today at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS).

"This study suggests that incorrect helmet fit may be one variable that predisposes a football player to sustain a more severe concussion," said senior study author Joseph Torg, MD, an orthopaedic surgeon specializing in sports medicine at Temple University Health System, who has identified acceptable tackle techniques for the NFL.

MINNEAPOLIS - Keeping the brain active with social activities and using a computer may help older adults reduce their risk of developing memory and thinking problems, according to a study released today that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 68th Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada, April 15 to 21, 2016.

In a study aiming to replicate laboratory experiments published in high-impact economics journals, researchers reproduced original results in 61% of cases. The work contributes to increasing efforts to demonstrate that scientific findings are reproducible amid continued concern on this matter across disciplines. In recent decades, the reproducibility of results has been questioned in sciences such as medicine, neuroscience and genetics. In economics, concerns have been raised about inflated findings in both empirical and experimental analysis.

A new study suggests that the specific alignment of neural networks in the brain dictates whether a person's altruism was motivated by selfish or altruistic behavior. In psychology, motives are considered to be drivers of human behavior but can be difficult to discern; simply observing a person's actions is not sufficient to do so. A person may behave altruistically, for example, because they are moved by someone's sufferings (empathy), or they may behave altruistically because they feel obliged to return a favor (reciprocity).

According to two Harvard professors and their collaborators, a 2015 landmark study showing that more than half of all psychology studies cannot be replicated is actually wrong.

In an attempt to determine the replicability of psychological science, a consortium of 270 scientists known as The Open Science Collaboration (OSC) tried to replicate the results of 100 published studies. More than half of them failed, creating sensational headlines worldwide about the "replication crisis" in psychology.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- An analysis of more than 14 million reviews on RateMyProfessors.com, where students write anonymous reviews of their professors, found that students most often use the words "brilliant" and "genius" to describe male professors and in academic disciplines in which women and African-Americans are underrepresented.

The findings, reported in the journal PLOS ONE, included academic disciplines in the sciences, humanities, social sciences and math.

To understand human behaviors, it is crucial to understand the motives behind them. So far, there was no direct way to identify motives. Simply observing behavior or eliciting explanations from individuals for their actions will not give reliable results as motives are considered to be private and people can be unwilling to unveil - or even be unaware of - their own motives.

Our brain is home to different types of neurons, each with their own genetic signature that defines their function. These neurons are derived from progenitor cells, which are specialized stem cells that have the ability to divide to give rise to neurons. Today, neuroscientists from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) shed light on the mechanisms that allow progenitors to generate neurons.