Brain

Exercise helps people with Parkinson's disease improve their balance, ability to move around and quality of life. It is a net positive, even if it does not reduce their risk of falling, according to a new study in the journal Neurology.

Dogs and other pets play an important role in individuals' social lives, and they can act as catalysts for social interaction, previous research has shown. Although much media attention has focused on how dogs can improve the social skills of children with autism, a University of Missouri researcher recently found that children with autism have stronger social skills when any kind of pet lived in the home.

People discriminate between quantities - armies are less likely to want to attack when the defense outnumbers them, whereas lions, chimpanzees and hyenas will not attack at all if they don't have superior numbers. These animals use numerical information to make decisions about their social life.

Testing numerical competence

People who occupy the extreme ends of the political spectrum, whether liberal or conservative, may be less influenced by outside information on a simple estimation task than political moderates, according to psychologists.

The research, conducted by psychological scientists Mark J. Brandt and Anthony Evans of Tilburg University and Jarret T. Crawford of The College of New Jersey, suggests that because political extremists hold their own beliefs to be superior to the beliefs of others, they may be more resistant to the so-called anchor bias, even for non-political information.

Whether an odor is pleasant or disgusting to an organism is not just a matter of taste. Often, an organism's survival depends on its ability to make just such a discrimination, because odors can provide important information about food sources, oviposition sites or suitable mates. However, odor sources can also be signs of lethal hazards. Scientists from the BMBF Research Group Olfactory Coding at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, have now found that in fruit flies, the quality and intensity of odors can be mapped in the so-called lateral horn.

Temnothorax albipennis ants explore nest cavities and negotiate through branching mazes and show bias when doing it, finds a new study.

They found that ants were significantly more likely to turn left than right when exploring new nests. Such left bias was also present when the ants were put in branching mazes, though this bias was initially obscured by wall-following behavior.

So why do the majority of rock ants turn left when entering unknown spaces?

When people spend time interacting with their smartphones via touchscreen, it actually changes the way their thumbs and brains work together, according to a report in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on December 23. More touchscreen use in the recent past translates directly into greater brain activity when the thumbs and other fingertips are touched, the study shows.

Children who play the violin or study piano could be learning more than just Mozart, finds a child psychiatry team. They say that musical training might also help kids focus their attention, control their emotions and diminish their anxiety.

Forgetfulness, it turns out, is all in the head. Scientists have shown fading memory and clouding judgment, the type that comes with advancing age, show up as lost and altered connections between neurons in the brain. But new experiments suggest an existing drug, known as riluzole and already on the market as a treatment for ALS, may help prevent these changes.

Older adults who have greater heart and lung health also have better memory recall and cognitive capabilities. The study, which appears online in the Journal of Gerontology, examines the relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF), memory and cognition in young and older adults.

Aging is associated with decline in executive function (problem solving, planning and organizing) and long-term memory for events. CRF has been associated with enhanced executive function in older adults, but the relationship with long-term memory remains unclear.

You may think your e-reader is helping you get to sleep at night, but it might actually be harming your quality of sleep, according to researchers. Exposure to light during evening and early nighttime hours suppresses release of the sleep-facilitating hormone melatonin and shifts the circadian clock, making it harder to fall asleep at bedtime.

Use of a light-emitting electronic device (LE-eBook) in the hours before bedtime can adversely impact overall health, alertness, and the circadian clock which synchronizes the daily rhythm of sleep to external environmental time cues, according to researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) who compared the biological effects of reading an LE-eBook compared to a printed book. These findings of the study are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on December 22, 2014.

UCL researchers have developed an innovative way to understand how the brain works by using flashes of light, allowing them to both 'read' and 'write' brain signals.

Before Charlotte the spider spelled the word "humble" in her web to describe Wilbur the pig, she told Templeton the rat that the word meant "not proud."

That's probably what most people say if you put them on the spot. But if you give them time to think about it deeply, like a new study just did, other themes emerge that have a lot to do with learning.

And these intellectual dimensions of humility describe the spider as well or better than the pig.

New UCLA research indicates that lost memories can be restored. The findings offer some hope for patients in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.

For decades, most neuroscientists have believed that memories are stored at the synapses -- the connections between brain cells, or neurons -- which are destroyed by Alzheimer's disease. The new study provides evidence contradicting the idea that long-term memory is stored at synapses.