Brain

New research from North Carolina State University finds that having a positive attitude about aging makes older adults more resilient when faced with stressful situations.

University of California, Berkeley engineers have built the first dust-sized, wireless sensors that can be implanted in the body, bringing closer the day when a Fitbit-like device could monitor internal nerves, muscles or organs in real time.

Because these batteryless sensors could also be used to stimulate nerves and muscles, the technology also opens the door to "electroceuticals" to treat disorders such as epilepsy or to stimulate the immune system or tamp down inflammation.

Oxford University researchers have discovered what causes a switch to flip in our brains and wake us up. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, brings us closer to understanding the mystery of sleep.

Sleep is governed by two systems--the circadian clock and the sleep homeostat. While the circadian clock is quite well understood, very little is known about the sleep homeostat.

Parents are vital in encouraging their children to obey the road rules and young drivers are keen to show their parents they can be trusted, which means they may hold greater power in enforcing driver restrictions compared with traditional policing, according to QUT research.

Dr Alexia Lennon, from QUT's Centre for Accident Research & Road Safety - Queensland (CARRS-Q), will present her findings at the 2016 International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology being held in Brisbane from August 2-5.

For the first time, researchers have discovered that birds can sleep in flight. Together with an international team of colleagues, Niels Rattenborg from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen measured the brain activity of frigatebirds and found that they sleep in flight with either one cerebral hemisphere at a time or both hemispheres simultaneously. Despite being able to engage in all types of sleep in flight, the birds slept less than an hour a day, a mere fraction of the time spent sleeping on land.

When slim men suffer bouts of low blood sugar, chances are that they will make unfair decisions involving the more rotund people they engage with in the workplace. This is according to Achim Peters of the University of Lübeck in Germany, corresponding author of a study in Springer Nature's International Journal of Obesity that investigates economic decision-making in lean and corpulent men. The findings add fuel to the growing consensus that men of normal weight struggle to make fair and objective decisions about people who tip the scales.

Brain tissue can die as the result of stroke, traumatic brain injury, or neurodegenerative disease. When the affected area includes the motor cortex, impairment of the fine motor control of the hand can result. In a new study published in Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, researchers found that inosine, a naturally occurring purine nucleoside that is released by cells in response to metabolic stress, can help to restore motor control after brain injury.

Research has found that exercise causes more new neurons to be formed in a critical brain region, and contrary to an earlier study, these new neurons do not cause the individual to forget old memories, according to research by Texas A&M College of Medicine scientists, in the Journal of Neuroscience.

AMES, Iowa - Iowa State University researchers have identified a protein essential for building memories that appears to predict the progression of memory loss and brain atrophy in Alzheimer's patients.

In Canada and the U.S., doctors are increasingly being encouraged to try to identify depression in children and adolescents - even if they do not have obvious indications of the disease. In order to do so, the physicians often use short questionnaires that ask about symptoms of depression. But, according to new research, there is insufficient evidence to show that any of these questionnaires accurately screen 6- to 18-year-olds for the disease.

Ronan the sea lion can keep the beat better than any other animal, a study published in Frontiers in Neuroscience found out more.

Whether it is Mozart, Hendrix, Miles Davis, or tribal drumming, few activities feel as uniquely human as music. And, indeed, for a long time, most scientists believed that Homo sapiens was the only species capable of creating and responding to rhythm and melody.

PORTLAND, Ore. - Hospital readmissions, a $17 billion annual problem, are higher in rural, remote or smaller communities that sometimes have significantly less access to pharmacies, according to a study published today that was one of the first to examine this issue.

Researchers at Oregon State University and Oregon Health & Science University found that the average number of readmissions from rural areas was 15.3 percent, compared to 14.7 percent for their urban counterparts where the days and hours a person could find an open pharmacy were much higher.

Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have found an association between lower weight and more extensive deposits of the Alzheimer's-associated protein beta-amyloid in the brains of cognitively normal older individuals. The association -- reported in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease -- was seen in particular among individuals carrying the APOE4 gene variant, which is known to increase the risk of Alzheimer's.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- In early 2014, months before the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and shortly after the Black Lives Matter movement got its start, Michael Schlosser, the director of the Police Training Institute at the University of Illinois, began offering police recruits classes that challenged their views about race and racism, introduced them to critical race theory and instructed them in methods to de-escalate potentially volatile encounters with members of minority groups.

Researchers from New Zealand's University of Otago have discovered the molecular mechanism by which queen honeybees carefully control worker bees' fertility.

It has long been known that worker bees have a very limited ability to reproduce in a hive with a queen and brood present, but in their absence, a third of them will activate their ovaries and lay eggs that hatch into fertile male drones.

It is queen pheromone that represses worker bee fertility, but how it achieves this has remained unclear.