Brain

Scientists at Newcastle University, UK, have made a pioneering breakthrough in the understanding of how a fatal brain tumour grows -- which could lead to improved treatments for patients.

Experts have found cells within the malignant brain tumour, glioma, rely on fats to fuel growth. This contradicts previous scientific belief that tumour cells require mainly sugars to make energy.

Glioma is the most common form of primary malignant brain tumour in adults, with approximately four cases per 100,000 people each year. Gliomas remain one of the hardest to treat cancers.

KINGSTON - Queen's University biology professor Lonnie Aarssen has published a study that, for the first time, provides strong empirical support for a correlation between a motivation to seek accomplishment and an attraction to leisure.

"I've been interested for quite a while in two motivations that people seem to display -- one I call legacy drive and one I call leisure drive," says Dr. Aarssen.

Engineers and neuroscientists at the University of Sheffield have demonstrated for the first time that the cells in the retina carry out key processing tasks. This could pave the way for improving retinal implants and therefore the sight of thousands of people suffering from retinal disorders.

Up to now, it was thought that the function of these retinal cells, or photoreceptors, was mainly to convert light into electrical signals, from which the brain can interpret images.

Learning a new language is a difficult task. It requires skills for memorizing new words, learning how to put those words together in a grammatical way, and integrating them with existing linguistic knowledge. In a new study from researchers at the Donders Institute and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, these skills were observed through brain imaging as native speakers of Dutch learned an artificial miniature language 'Alienese'.

Reuse grammatical characteristics

COLUMBIA, Mo. - According to recent studies, in colleges and universities up to 60 percent of students drop out or transfer from science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, and more than 50 percent of students pursuing STEM in community colleges never graduate. Researchers from the University of Missouri and partner institutions are exploring how ethnic and gender variables affect retention rates, goal setting and satisfaction among engineering students.

Deep, dark and sometimes overwhelming, the human compulsion to seek revenge is a complex emotion that science has found incredibly hard to explain.

Despite popular consensus that "revenge is sweet," years of experimental research have suggested otherwise, finding that revenge is seldom as satisfying as we anticipate and often leaves the avenger less happy in the long run.

LA JOLLA -- Salk Institute scientists have found preliminary evidence that tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and other compounds found in marijuana can promote the cellular removal of amyloid beta, a toxic protein associated with Alzheimer's disease.

While these exploratory studies were conducted in neurons grown in the laboratory, they may offer insight into the role of inflammation in Alzheimer's disease and could provide clues to developing novel therapeutics for the disorder.

Nerves in the central nervous system of adult mammals do not usually regenerate when injured. The granule cell, a nerve cell located in the cerebellum, is different. When its fibres, called parallel fibres, are cut, rapid regeneration ensues and junctions with other neurons called "synapses" are rebuilt. The precise mechanism for this was unclear.

A European study led by Umeå University Professor Lars Nyberg, has shown that the dopamine D2 receptor is linked to the long-term episodic memory, which function often reduces with age and due to dementia. This new insight can contribute to the understanding of why some but not others are affected by memory impairment. The results have been published in the journal PNAS.

A consensus statement which includes a University of Exeter researcher says exercise boosts kids' and young people's brain power and academic prowess.

Time taken away from lessons for physical activity is time well spent and does not come at the cost of getting good grades, say the 24 signatories to the statement on physical activity in schools and during leisure time, published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

La Jolla, Calif., June XX, 2016 (embargoed until 11:00 A.M. EST) -- A new study led by scientists at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP) describes a technology that could lead to new therapeutics for traumatic brain injuries. The discovery, published today in Nature Communications, provides a means of homing drugs or nanoparticles to injured areas of the brain.

Mucolipidosis IV (MLIV) is a devastating early childhood neurological disease characterized by progressive neurodegeneration, leading to severe impairments in muscle coordination, cognitive deficits and retinal degeneration that causes blindness.

There is no effective treatment for the condition, symptoms of which usually appear within a year of birth -- and whose rarity makes it a low priority for pharmaceutical companies.

BINGHAMTON, NY - Government agencies are having difficulty tracking potential terrorist attacks, since terrorists have developed new ways to communicate besides social media. A new framework developed by researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York is able to predict future terrorist attacks by recognizing patterns in past attacks.

Our visual system is constantly bombarded with complex optical information. The input information is often insufficient or ambiguous, leading to potentially conflicting interpretations about the structure of the physical world. The human brain has amazing computational powers to resolve these ambiguities and generate a coherent perception almost instantly. As a way to understand how our brain works, scientists have been fascinated about how the human brain achieves this goal.

Washington, DC, June 28, 2016 - A study to be published in the July 2016 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP) reports that adolescents in urban communities may have less aggressive behaviors if they live in neighborhoods with more greenery, such as parks, golf courses, or fields.