Brain

A major international research project led by a University of Sussex academic provides new evidence that the common belief in a cultural divide between the West and the rest of the world is little more than a myth.

After thousands of hours of work, MIT researchers have released the first major database of fully annotated English sentences written by non-native speakers.

The researchers who led the project had already shown that the grammatical quirks of non-native speakers writing in English could be a source of linguistic insight. But they hope that their dataset could also lead to applications that would improve computers' handling of spoken or written language of non-native English speakers.

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - Aug. 1, 2016 - Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center are one step closer to understanding what causes cocaine to be so addictive. The research findings are published in the current issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

Epilepsy is an extremely common disorder affecting people of all ages, from infants through teenagers to older adults. One of the most mysterious things about this disorder is that about 6 percent of the people with epilepsy have an unusually high incidence of sudden unexpected death.

As the world moves closer to autonomous and self-driving vehicles, road safety experts are turning from technology to psychology to better understand the road to safer mobility, according Professor Narelle Haworth, director of QUT's Centre for Accident Research & Road Safety - Queensland (CARRS-Q).

Experience in trading changes how the human brain evaluates the sale of goods, muting a well-established economic bias known as the endowment effect, according to researchers at the University of Chicago.

The findings, to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, come from a set of experiments on why traders are less susceptible to the effect -- a phenomenon in which people demand a higher price to sell a good than they're willing to pay for it. Such behavior contradicts standard economic theory, distorting prices and reducing market activity.

CATONSVILLE, MD, AUGUST 1, 2016 - How well does the emotional and instantaneous content in tweets perform relative to the more deliberate searches recorded in Google Trends in forecasting future TV ratings? In a massive big data analysis using data from Twitter, Google Trends and other widely used websites for entertainment information, a forthcoming article in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science finds that mining Twitter content is significantly more effective than Google Trends in its ability to predict future TV ratings.

FINDINGS

Using the landmark Framingham Heart Study to assess how physical activity affects the size of the brain and one's risk for developing dementia, UCLA researchers found an association between low physical activity and a higher risk for dementia in older individuals. This suggests that regular physical activity for older adults could lead to higher brain volumes and a reduced risk for developing dementia.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- A team of Brown University researchers has been able to watch in real time what happens to neurons after they experience the kinds of forces involved in a blow to the head. Their findings, published in the journal Scientific Reports, could help scientists to understand how traumatic brain injury unfolds at the cellular level.

The study was done using a custom-built laboratory device that can compress neurons inside 3-D cell cultures while using a powerful microscope to continuously monitor changes in cell structure.

Young American adults aren't doing it as often as you'd think. Although Americans are now strikingly more accepting of premarital sex, a new study reveals that more Millennials, born in the 1990s in particular, are nevertheless forgoing sex during young adulthood. The new sexual revolution has apparently left behind a larger segment of this generation than first thought.

Since time immemorial, older generations have fretted over the sexual habits of young people. In today's world, however, elders might just be wondering why young people are having so little sex, according to a new study by San Diego State University psychology professor Jean M. Twenge.

A study published in eLife provides new insights on how bats recognise their surroundings to help them build mental maps.

Bats have excellent spatial memory, and navigate with ease to important locations including roosts and foraging grounds. But exactly how these animals recognise such places through echolocation - perception based on soundwaves and their echoes - is largely unknown. New research from the Universities of Bristol and Antwerp suggests the animals observe and remember templates to help form a cognitive map of their environment.

When a targeted program to reduce relational aggression among at-risk girls is shared with the entire classroom, the entire class benefits--not just the aggressive girls for whom the program was developed. Researchers from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) recently reported these findings from Friend to Friend (F2F), a program they developed to prevent relational aggression among urban girls.

A new report details how physicians and patients used social media to help diagnose cutaneous leishmaniasis in a group of teens who traveled on a youth adventure trip to Israel. Their posts quickly brought the cluster to the attention of the teens and their parents, leading to prompt recognition of the cause of their skin lesions and appropriate treatment.

People with cutaneous leishmaniasis develop skin sores after being infecting with Leishmania parasites, which are spread by the bite of sand flies.

When reaching into a pocket or purse, it is easy to use the sense of touch to distinguish keys from loose change. Our brains seamlessly integrate the tactile, sensory cues from our fingers with hand movements to perceive the different objects.

This process of "sensorimotor integration" is often severely disrupted in disorders such as stroke and neuropathy. Understanding these disorders ultimately depends on understanding the neural coding that underlies touch, a challenging problem to study in humans.