Brain

Jami Fisher, a lecturer in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Linguistics, has a long history with American Sign Language. Both of her parents and her brother are deaf, she's Penn's ASL Program coordinator and now, with Meredith Tamminga, an assistant professor in Linguistics and director of the University's Language Variation and Cognition Lab, she's working on a project to document what they're calling the Philadelphia accent of this language.

Researchers at the University of Basel took a close look at a signaling pathway present in most organisms and found that it suppresses the formation of specific types of brain tumor. Their results have been published by the journal Cancer Cell.

Gliomas are the most common brain tumors in adults and the prognosis for patients is, in many cases, very bad. Therefore, novel and effective therapies for glioma treatment are needed. In order to develop these, it is crucial to understand the biology of this type of tumor.

Stem cells as potential source of tumors

Workplace incivility should be treated with the utmost seriousness. This is the finding of three psychologists at Lund University in Sweden who surveyed nearly 6 000 people on the social climate in the workplace. Their studies show that being subjected to rudeness is a major reason for dissatisfaction at work and that unpleasant behaviour spreads if nothing is done about it.

Northwestern University neuroscientists now can read the mind of a fly. They have developed a clever new tool that lights up active conversations between neurons during a behavior or sensory experience, such as smelling a banana. Mapping the pattern of individual neural connections could provide insights into the computational processes that underlie the workings of the human brain.

DURHAM, N.C. -- New research from Duke University helps explain the paradox of why we are quick to blame people for their actions, but slower to give them credit.

We constantly read others' intentions in what they do -- from seeing someone help an elderly person cross the street or cutting in line or committing a heinous crime. Judgments about intentionality are threaded deeply within our legal system and pervasive in our support of political candidates, and have been the focus of discussion for the past decade in the philosophical literature.

Targeted magnetic pulses to the brain were shown to reduce craving and substance use in cocaine-addicted patients. The results of this pilot study, published in the peer-reviewed journal European Neuropsychopharmacology, suggest that this may become an effective medical treatment for patients with cocaine addiction, although a larger trial is needed to confirm the initial findings.

People with dementia exposed to low quality of life through lack of activity.

Quality of life for people with dementia living in long-term care is often negatively impacted due to low levels of activity participation.

Furthermore, staff and families remain pessimistic about the abilities of the person with dementia to be engaged.

These are among the findings of a large-scale national study on the quality of life of people with dementia in residential aged care undertaken by the Dementia Collaborative Research Centre and Griffith University.

The winner of a decades-old debate about what scientists call the fadeout effect -- one of the most persistent research mysteries in intelligence and psychological development -- may finally have been decided.

A new study identifies numerous genetic mutations that help explain why newborns with congenital heart disease (CHD) have a high risk of neurodevelopmental disorders. Neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), which result in cognitive, motor, social, and language impairments, occur in 10% of all children with CHD, and in 50% with severe CHD. Pinpointing genes that play a role in both disorders may help identify those at greatest risk of neurodevelopmental disabilities, allowing for improved monitoring and early intervention. To better understand this overlap, Jason Homsy et al.

A team of scientists has determined why some children who are born with heart defects also often have developmental disabilities such as problems with speech and muscle coordination. The research, led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators Richard Lifton of Yale University and Christine Seidman of Harvard Medical School and their colleagues in the Pediatric Cardiovascular Genetics Consortium, suggests that these children accrue mutations very early in development that damage genes crucial for heart and brain formation.

MONTREAL---A new detailed map of the hippocampal region of the brain, compiled by researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital-The Neuro at McGill University, is helping the scientific community accelerate research and develop better treatments for patients suffering from epilepsy and other neurological and psychiatric disorders.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - When it comes to emotional health, young couples -- especially women -- do just as well moving in together as they do getting married, according to a new national study.

Using data collected in the 2000s, researchers found that single young women experienced a similar decline in emotional distress when they moved in with a romantic partner or when they went straight to marriage for the first time.

Men experienced a drop in emotional distress only when they went directly to marriage, not when they moved in with a romantic partner for the first time.

In the first study of its kind, researchers have shown that inadequate maternal iron intake during pregnancy exerts subtle effects on infant brain development. Their findings have been published online by the journal Pediatric Research.

Nudging people toward particular decisions by presenting one option as the default can influence important life choices. However, many policymakers and some critics of behavioral interventions have raised serious ethical concerns, arguing that nudging people toward an option without their awareness is unethical, and that defaults only work because people are not aware that they are being manipulated by them. If people knew they were being nudged, the argument goes, they would resist the influence of the default or even, possibly, react by deliberately rejecting the default.

ATLANTA--Activating receptors in the brain for the body's hunger hormone increases food-related behaviors, such as gathering, storing and consuming food, a finding that has implications for the treatment of obesity, according to researchers at Georgia State University.