Brain

• Research shows that prior to infants speaking, they can identify new sounds as communicative signals
• Once identified, this new signal (like language) then boosts infants' learning
• Study reveals intricate links among infants' social, language and cognitive abilities in the first year of life

Research published earlier this year claiming chimpanzees can learn each others' language is not supported, a team of scientists concludes after reviewing the study.

Multiple sclerosis, a debilitating neurological disease, is triggered by self-reactive T cells that successfully infiltrate the brain and spinal cord where they launch an aggressive autoimmune attack against myelin, the fatty substance that surrounds and insulates nerve fibers. Over time, the resulting bouts of inflammation permanently damage the myelin sheath and the nerve fibers it protects, disrupting nerve signals traveling to and from the brain.

Reflecting recommendations from the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) and 65 other partner organizations, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that voluntary Advance Care Planning (ACP)--a comprehensive, ongoing, person-centered approach to communication about future healthcare choices--will for the first time become a recognized, reimbursable benefit for Medicare recipients.

Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) make use of their sense of smell to distinguish between members of their own and other social groups, according to new research, led by Stefanie Henkel (University of Leipzig, Germany), published in Springer's journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 2 - We all love belting our lungs out at sporting event, hurling insults and encouragements in turn, but does it actually have an effect on either team's performance? A study conducted by a student at the University of Nebraska seeks to answer this question.

Researchers at Gothenburg University have developed a reference method for standardized measurements that diagnose Alzheimer's disease decades before symptoms appear. The method has now formally been classified as the international reference method, which means that it will be used as the standard in Alzheimer's diagnostics worldwide.

A study led by Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers suggests that awakening several times throughout the night is more detrimental to people's positive moods than getting the same shortened amount of sleep without interruption.

As they report in the November 1 issue of the journal Sleep, researchers studied 62 healthy men and women randomly subjected to three sleep experimental conditions in an inpatient clinical research suite: three consecutive nights of either forced awakenings, delayed bedtimes or uninterrupted sleep.

Research conducted at the University of Warwick indicates that chronic pain sufferers could benefit from therapy to help them sleep better.

The University of Warwick academics found that cognitive behavioural therapies (CBT) were either moderately or strongly effective in tackling insomnia in patients with long-term pain. They also discovered that chronic pain sufferers didn't just benefit from improved sleep but also experienced a wider positive impact on pain, fatigue and depression. However they also concluded that therapies only worked when delivered in person.

When it comes to stem cells, too much of a good thing isn't wonderful: producing too many new stem cells may lead to cancer; producing too few inhibits the repair and maintenance of the body.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- What people believe they want and what they might actually prefer are not always the same thing. And in the case of being outperformed as an element of romantic attraction, the difference between genuine affinity and apparent desirability becomes clearer as the distance between two people gets smaller.

Patients with glioblastoma, a type of malignant brain tumor, usually survive fewer than 15 months following diagnosis. Since there are no effective treatments for the deadly disease, University of California, San Diego researchers developed a new computational strategy to search for molecules that could be developed into glioblastoma drugs. In mouse models of human glioblastoma, one molecule they found shrank the average tumor size by half. The study is published October 30 by Oncotarget.

UNIVERSITY of Huddersfield investigative psychology lecturer Dr Chris Street is making breakthroughs that are leading towards a clearer understanding of how humans tell lies and how their deceptions can be detected. For more than 30 years it has been said that we should trust our hunches and unconscious knowledge of body language. Yet his work, described in a new journal article, shows that we would be better off consciously relying on a single "cue", such as whether or not a person is plainly thinking hard.

In order to retain a piece of information for a short time, working memory is required. The underlying processes are considerably more complex than hitherto assumed, as researchers from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Bonn University report in the journal "Cell Reports". Two brain states must alternate rhythmically in order for a piece of information to be successfully maintained.

Working memory: maintaining new information for a short time

Neurons communicate by passing electrical messages, known as action potentials, between each other. Each neuron has a highly specialized structural region, the axon initial segment (AIS), whose primary role is in the generation and sending of these messages. The AIS can undergo changes in size and location in response to alterations of a neuron's ongoing electrical activity. However, until now, all such 'AIS plasticity' has been exceptionally slow, occurring over a timescale of days.