Brain

If pigeons went to medical school and specialized in pathology or radiology, they'd be pretty good at distinguishing digitized microscope slides and mammograms of normal from cancerous breast tissue, according to a new study from the University of Iowa and the University of California, Davis.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - If a baseball player waits until he sees the ball arrive in front of him to swing his bat, he will miss miserably. By the time the batter sees the ball's position, plans his swing and moves the bat, the ball will be firmly in the catcher's mitt.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Nov. 18, 2015) -- Two women, seated at a table, told their stories in quiet tones. A group of chefs, some standing, others seated, leaned forward eagerly, clearly interested in what these two women had to say. They peppered the women with questions: did food taste better cold or hot? Was texture an issue? Did a glass of wine before dinner help or hurt the flavor experience?

Infants are starved of oxygen during difficult births. Children's cognitive function is permanently damaged due to malnutrition or exposure to infections or toxins. Adults suffer from crippling depression or dementia. The breadth and complexity of these and other brain and nervous system disorders make them some of the most difficult conditions to diagnose and treat, especially in the developing world, where there are few resources.

NEW YORK NY (November 18, 2015)--Most people probably think that we perceive the five basic tastes--sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami (savory)--with our tongue, which then sends signals to our brain "telling" us what we've tasted. However, scientists have turned this idea on its head, demonstrating in mice the ability to change the way something tastes by manipulating groups of cells in the brain.

The findings were published today in the online edition of Nature.

LA JOLLA--Diabetes is often the result of obesity and poor diet choices, but for some older adults the disease might simply be a consequence of aging. New research has discovered that diabetes--or insulin resistance--in aged, lean mice has a different cellular cause than the diabetes that results from weight gain (type 2). And the findings point toward a possible cure for what the co-leading scientists, Ronald Evans and Ye Zheng, are now calling a new kind of diabetes (type 4).

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. (11/18/2015) - Children around the globe recognize and respond to scenarios that put them at an unfair disadvantage to their peers, while children in only a few societies correct conditions that place them at an unfair advantage over others, according to the results of a pioneering experiment, reported today in the journal Nature, about how fairness develops in societies around the world.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- When the brain forms memories or learns a new task, it encodes the new information by tuning connections between neurons. MIT neuroscientists have discovered a novel mechanism that contributes to the strengthening of these connections, also called synapses.

ANN ARBOR -- If diabetes in Mexico continues unchecked, at least one in three people, and as many as one in two, could be diagnosed with the disease in their lifetimes.

In the first comprehensive effort to document incidence of the disease in Mexico, research led by Rafael Meza, assistant professor of epidemiology at the U-M School of Public Health, found that from 1960 to 2012 diabetes incidence in the country doubled every 10 years. The researchers predict that up to 23 percent of the country's population could have the disease by 2050.

While some things may be 'as simple as black and white,' this has not been the case for the circuits in the brain that make it possible for you to distinguish black from white. The patterns of light and dark that fall on the retina provide a wealth of information about the world around us, yet scientists still don't understand how this information is encoded by neural circuits in the visual cortex--a part of the brain that plays a critical role in building the neural representations that are responsible for sight.

Human infants are capable of deductive problem solving as early as 10 months of age, a new study by psychologists at Emory University and Bucknell finds. The journal Developmental Science is publishing the research, showing that babies can make transitive inferences about a social hierarchy of dominance.

WASHINGTON (Nov. 17, 2015) -- Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have found in a small study that although a group of HIV+ older individuals scored "cognitively normal" in standard neuropsychology testing, a scan of their brains tells a different story.

Published Nov. 17 in the journal AIDS Care, functional MRI (fMRI) scans, taken while participants were performing an alternating face-gender/word-semantic task, revealed that HIV+ individuals in the study showed deficits in cognitive functioning, compared to an age matched healthy controls.

A large national survey of U.S. adults in 2012-2013 suggests that nearly 10 percent of Americans, or more than 23.3 million people, have lifetime drug use disorder diagnoses arising from drug use in the past year or prior to that and many of these individuals were untreated, according to an article published online by JAMA Psychiatry.

Bright light treatment either alone or combined with an antidepressant was an effective and well tolerated treatment for adults with nonseasonal major depressive disorder (MDD) in a randomized clinical trial, according to an article published online by JAMA Psychiatry.

New research finds that light therapy can treat non-seasonal depression and improve the overall wellbeing of people suffering from the disease.

"These results are very exciting because light therapy is inexpensive, easy to access and use, and comes with few side effects," said Dr. Raymond Lam, a UBC professor and psychiatrist at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health, a partnership between UBC and Vancouver Coastal Health. "Patients can easily use light therapy along with other treatments such as antidepressants and psychotherapy."