Brain

Close to half a million people survive strokes every year in the United States, and many are left with long-term disabilities. The options for treatment, after the damage is done, are limited, and predicting who will recover and how much is an elusive goal.

Whether at school, in car accidents, on the sports field or the battlefield, mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is a common part of our lives. It is especially frequent among children, athletes, and the elderly. Now, scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have shown that a single dose of a new molecule they developed can effectively protect the brain from inflammation, cell death, and cognitive impairments that often follow a mild traumatic brain injury.

Experiments conducted under the leadership of a Stanford University School of Medicine investigator have succeeded, for the first time, in restoring multiple key aspects of vision in mammals.

Loss or impairment of the ability to speak is one of the most feared complications of stroke--one faced by about 20% of stroke patients. Language, as one of the most complex functions of the brain, is not seated in a single brain region but involves connections between many regions.

Rockville, Md. Scientists may have overcome a major roadblock in the development of Alzheimer's therapies by creating a new technology to observe -- in the back of the eye -- progression of the disease before the onset of symptoms. Clinical trials are to start in July to test the technology in humans according to a paper recently published in Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science (IOVS).

Two Northwestern University neuroscientists have identified the neurochemical signal likely missing in Parkinson's disease by being the first to discover two distinctly different kinds of neurons that deliver dopamine to an important brain region responsible for both movement and learning/reward behavior.

Outdoor learning can have a significant and positive impact on children's quality of life but needs to be introduced more formally into global school curricula in order for its potential benefits to be fully realised, a new report suggests.

Student Outcomes and Natural Schooling has been produced by Plymouth University and Western Sydney University, following a conference organised in collaboration with the University of East London and Natural England, and with funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Smells are a vital part of daily life: bad odors warn us off rotten food, and the aroma of a tasty meal stimulates salivation and digestion. Our sense of smell is closely linked to our autonomic nervous system, which controls the unconscious functions in our bodies as well as affecting our emotions.

Prosocial behaviors, such as willingness to help others, may be linked to specific personalities. Based on new research published by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, agreeableness is one of the better predictors of prosocial behavior.

A deadly bacteria that can be picked up by a simple sniff can travel to the brain and spinal cord in just 24 hours, a new Griffith University and Bond University study has found.

The pathogenic bacteria Burkholderia pseudomallei, which causes the potentially fatal disease melioidosis, kills 89,000 people around the world each year and is prevalent in northern Australia and southeast Asia.

Previously, researchers did not understand how the bacteria travelled to the brain and spinal cord, or just how quickly.

How do you build rapport with a new employer or someone on a first date? It turns out that there may be a simple strategy that's often overlooked: eat the same food as your companion.

Researchers from the University of Chicago launched a series of experiments to determine whether similar food consumption facilitates a sense of closeness and trust between adults, and their results were recently published online in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

The color red is usually associated with inducing compliant behavior with stop signs, warning lights and corrections on a graded assignment.

What if this color did just the opposite in certain situations? Results from a new study published online in the Journal of Consumer Psychology suggest that certain personality types are more likely to rebel against the norm--rather than comply--when seeing the color red.

We have all bumped our heads at some point, and such incidents are usually harmless. This is thanks to fluid-filled chambers in our brain that offset minor knocks and jolts and provide padding for sensitive components of our nervous system. Cerebral fluid, however, has more than just a protective function: It removes cellular waste, supplies our nervous tissue with nutrients, and transports important messenger substances. How these messenger substances are actually being delivered to their destination in the brain, however, was unclear until now.

When talking about troubling sexual encounters some women mention faking sexual pleasure to speed up their male partner's orgasm and ultimately end sex.

This is one of the findings of a qualitative study by Emily Thomas (Ryerson University, Canada) Monika Stelzl, Michelle Lafrance (St. Thomas University, Canada) that will be presented today, Friday 8 July 2016, at the British Psychological Society's Psychology of Women annual conference in Windsor.

EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Living around people with opposing political viewpoints affects your ability to form close relationships and accept other perspectives - and may even change your personality, finds a national study led by a Michigan State University scholar.

The findings also could help explain why so many Americans are moving to areas that suit them politically, further segregating the nation into "red" and "blue" states, said William Chopik, MSU assistant professor of psychology.