Brain

A decade or so ago, a spate of high profile legal cases arose in which people were accused, and often convicted, on the basis of “recovered memories.” These memories, usually recollections of childhood abuse, arose years after the incident occurred and often during intensive psychotherapy.

So how accurate are recovered memories? The answer is not so clear. In fact, this question has lead to one of the most contentious issues in the fields of psychology and psychiatry.

It's no secret that humans can recognize siblings on a biological level. Now it turns out plants can also, according to biologists at McMaster University. Even more, they get downright competitive with strangers of the same species.

Women who enjoy good childhood relationships with their fathers are more likely to select partners who resemble their dads research suggests.

In contrast, the team of psychologists from Durham University and two Polish institutions revealed that women who have negative or less positive relationships were not attracted to men who looked like their male parents.

Primates with severe Parkinson’s disease were able to walk, move, and eat better, and had diminished tremors after being injected with human neural stem cells, a research team from Yale, Harvard, the University of Colorado, and the Burnham Institute report today.

Scientists at the University of Portsmouth are using the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence to develop the world's first thinking car wheel.

The 'smart' wheel is being developed under a £200K Department of Trade and Industry-funded Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project with Hampshire-based company PML Flightlink Ltd.A University of Portsmouth Scientist works on the wheel. Credit: Russell Sach

Primates with severe Parkinson’s disease were able to walk, move, and eat better, and had diminished tremors after being injected with human neural stem cells, a research team from Yale, Harvard, the University of Colorado, and the Burnham Institute report today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

These results are promising, but it will be years before it is known whether a similar procedure would have therapeutic value for humans, said the lead author, D. Eugene Redmond Jr., professor of psychiatry and neurosurgery at Yale.

The vocal learning process in the zebra finch offers a model system to study the neural and behavioral mechanisms by which humans learn to produce sounds. Songbirds such as zebra finches have specialized areas of their brains devoted to communication. That is why they have been used as animal models to study speech disorders, such as stuttering. It is estimated that more than 3 million Americans stutter.

An international research team has discovered a gene that, when mutated, causes one of the most common forms of inherited blindness in babies. Scientists at the University of Leeds, working in collaboration with experts from other centres around the world, identified the gene, which is essential to photoreceptors in the eye, the cells that "see" light.

The unique cooperation model used in the political field by the countries around the Baltic Sea needs to be extended to the public-private sector in order to increase the competitiveness and attractiveness of the Baltic Sea Region. This was one of the main conclusions reached by the leading representatives from business, government and research within the ICT and Life-Science at the seminar "Talents on Top of Europe" at the Nordic Embassies in Berlin today.

Experts present an analysis of long term data on the success of stem cell transplantation for osteopetrosis patients which suggests second transplants should be considered a key option.

Osteopetrosis is a rare disease and devastating for those it afflicts. Children born with this genetic disorder may suffer blindness as early as a few months after birth. Hearing loss is also associated with osteopetrosis, as is a tendency to suffer bone fractures.

Logic or feeling. Left-brained or right-brained. The terms have become part of the lexicon for categorizing intellectual and artistic people. It turns out there may be more than just wishful thinking in labelling people. New research has furthered our understanding of the different roles of the left and right sides of our brains.

Northwestern University researchers have discovered a drug that slows – and may even halt – the progression of Parkinson’s disease. The drug rejuvenates aging dopamine cells, whose death in the brain causes the symptoms of this devastating and widespread disease.

D. James Surmeier and his team of researchers have found that isradipine, a drug widely used for hypertension and stroke, restores stressed-out dopamine neurons to their vigorous younger selves.

An international study by researchers at Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute, the University of Washington School of Medicine, and Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands has identified a new genetic cause for Joubert syndrome (JS).

We've all had the feeling we've been somewhere before or had a feeling we've previously had a conversation. It isn't magic or mysticism, the answer is in a set of neurons called your 'place cells.'

Much cooler than a flaming Optimus Prime, more practical than Big Guy and Rusty The Boy Robot - they're rescue robots, and they're here to help.