Brain

Hummingbirds rely on their ability to hover in order to feed off the nectar of flowers.

It's an incredible feat of flying requiring mind boggling visual processing power, but two University of British Columbia researchers found a glitch in the system, something the tiny birds are powerless to control.

The researchers put hovering hummingbirds through a virtual reality experiment that showed the birds can't control their inflight response to some visual stimuli.

Whether we're paying attention to something we see can be discerned by monitoring the firings of specific groups of brain cells. Now, new work from Johns Hopkins shows that the same holds true for the sense of touch. The study brings researchers closer to understanding how animals' thoughts and feelings affect their perception of external stimuli.

The results were published Nov. 25 in the journal PLoS Biology.

Neuro-rehabilitation (physical therapy, occupational therapy, etc.) helps hemaparetic stroke patients confronted with loss of motor skills on one side of their body, to recover some of their motor functions after a cerebrovascular accident. One of the most promising tracks in neuro-rehabilitation consists in amplifying the motor learning ability after a stroke, in other words how to learn (again) how to make movements with the parts of the human body impacted after a stroke.

Montreal, Canada, November x, 2014 - Angiochem, a clinical stage biotechnology company creating and developing drugs that cross the blood-brain barrier, today announced the publication in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics demonstrating that ANG4043, a peptide-monoclonal antibody (mAb) conjugate, entered the brain at therapeutic concentrations, resulting in significantly prolonged survival in mice. The antibody is directed against HER2, which is the protein targeted by Herceptin®.

Phoenix, AZ (December 9th, 2014) - Healthy, elderly research participants who report being more sleepy and less rested have higher levels of amyloid deposition in regions of the brain that are affected in Alzheimer's disease, according to a report presented today at the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology annual meeting in Phoenix (Arizona). If sleep disturbance is a cause of amyloid accumulation, it may be an early target for intervention to prevent the progression of cognitive deficits in late life.

Phoenix, AZ (December 9th, 2014) - Abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex and related brain areas are observed in adolescents who have attempted suicide, according to a report today at the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology annual meeting in Phoenix Arizona. The study suggests that deficits in frontal systems may be associated with risk for suicide attempts in youths with mood disorders.

Donald Trump's ego may be the size of his financial empire, but that doesn't mean he's the picture of mental health. The same can be said about the self-esteem of people who are living from paycheck to paycheck, or unemployed. New research from the University of California, Berkeley, underscores this mind-wallet connection.

The mass die-off of nerve cells in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease may largely occur because an entirely different class of brain cells, called microglia, begin to fall down on the job, according to a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The researchers found that, in mice, blocking the action of a single molecule on the surface of microglia restored the cells' ability to get the job done -- and reversed memory loss and myriad other Alzheimer's-like features in the animals.

Glucose is a component of carbohydrates, and the main energy source used by brain cells.

By studying rats, a team at Imperial College London identified a mechanism that appears to sense how much glucose is reaching the brain, and prompts animals to seek more if it detects a shortfall.

The researchers believe it may play a role in driving our preference for sweet and starchy foods.

The study, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, is published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Glucose is the primary fuel for the brain. Therefore, it has been proposed that the brain must sense glucose and promote eating behaviors when levels are low. A new study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation reveals that activation of an enzyme, glucokinase, in a region of the hypothalamus called the arcuate nucleus specifically increases glucose uptake. Steve Bloom and colleagues at Imperial College London determined that glucokinase levels in the arcuate nucleus are dramatically increased in fasted rats.

Everyday events are easy to forget, but unpleasant ones can remain engraved in the brain. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences identifies a neural mechanism through which unpleasant experiences are translated into signals that trigger fear memories by changing neural connections in a part of the brain called the amygdala. The findings show that a long-standing theory on how the brain forms memories, called Hebbian plasticity, is partially correct, but not as simple as was originally proposed.

Hummingbirds' remarkable ability to hover in place is highly contingent on the tiny bird having a completely stationary visual field, according to University of British Columbia research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

UBC zoologists Benjamin Goller and Douglas Altshuler projected moving spiral and striped patterns in front of free-flying hummingbirds attempting to feed from a stationary feeder.

You don't have to be a jerk to come up with fresh and original ideas, but sometimes being disagreeable is just what's needed to sell your brainchild successfully to others. However, difficult or irritating people should be aware of the social context in which they are presenting their ideas. A pushy strategy will not always be equally successful, warn Samuel Hunter of Pennsylvania State University and Lily Cushenbery of Stony Brook University in the US, in an article in Springer's Journal of Business and Psychology.

Researchers have long wondered if there is an upper limit to our capacity to store memories and how we manage to remember so many events without mixing up events that are very similar.

If you want your child to tell the truth, it's best not to threaten to punish them if they lie. That's what researchers discovered through a simple experiment involving 372 children between the ages of 4 and 8.

How the Experiment was Done

The researchers, led by Prof. Victoria Talwar of McGill's Dept. of Educational and Counselling Psychology, left each child alone in a room for 1 minute with a toy behind them on a table, having told the child not to peek during their absence.

While they were out of the room, a hidden video camera filmed what went on.