Brain

When motors break down, getting where you want to go becomes a struggle. Problems arise in much the same way for critical brain receptors when the molecular motors they depend on fail to operate. Now, researchers reporting in Cell Reports, a Cell Press publication, on February 7, have shown these broken motors induce stress and anxiety in mice. The discovery may point the way to new kinds of drugs to treat anxiety and other disorders.

A study out today in the journal Cell Stem Cell shows that human brain cells created by reprogramming skin cells are highly effective in treating myelin disorders, a family of diseases that includes multiple sclerosis and rare childhood disorders called pediatric leukodystrophies.

PITTSBURGH—Crowdsourcing is an effective way to mobilize people to accomplish tasks on a global scale, but some researchers fear that crowd work for pay could easily become the high-tech equivalent of a sweat shop. Trivial work for rock bottom pay isn't inevitable, however, and they've outlined a research agenda to make crowd work both intellectually and monetarily rewarding.

Mild traumatic brain injury (TBI), including concussion, is one of the most common types of neurological disorder, affecting approximately 1.3 million Americans annually. It has received more attention recently because of its frequency and impact among two groups of patients: professional athletes, especially football players; and soldiers returning from mid-east conflicts with blast-related TBI. An estimated 10 to 20 percent of the more than 2 million U.S. soldiers deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan have experienced TBI.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — The stark contrast between America's "me-first" culture and the "collective-good" mentality in China is reflected in the two countries' use of social networking sites, according to a new study led by a Michigan State University scholar.

U.S. citizens spend more time on the networking sites, consider them to be more important and have more "friends" on the sites, the research found. The most popular social networking site in the United States is Facebook; in China it's Ozone.

In time for Valentine's Day, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin is featuring several new studies all about relationships – including the link between income in marriage and health, the role of jealousy in becoming a parent, and how humor affects romantic couples in conflict.

Being the breadwinner has health costs

ARGONNE, Ill. (Feb. 6, 2013) -- The Art Institute of Chicago teamed up with Argonne National Laboratory to unravel a decades-long debate among art scholars about what kind of paint Picasso used to create his masterpieces.

Women who are more aware of their bodies from within are less likely to think of their bodies principally as objects, according to research published February 6 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Vivien Ainley and Manos Tsakiris from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Reading text on digital devices like tablet computers requires less effort from older adults than reading on paper, according to research published February 6 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Matthias Schlesewsky and colleagues from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, in collaboration with colleagues from Georg August University Göttingen and the University of Marburg, Germany.

Researchers from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway university asked healthy female student volunteers aged between 19 – 26, to concentrate hard and count their own heartbeats, simply by "listening" to their bodies. Their accuracy in this heartbeat perception test was compared with their perception of their bodies as objects, measured by scores on the Self-Objectification Questionnaire.

WOODS HOLE, MASS. -- Among the animals that are appealing "cover models" for scientific journals, lancelets don't spring readily to mind. Slender, limbless, primitive blobs that look pretty much the same end to end, lancelets "are extremely boring. I wouldn't recommend them for a home aquarium," says Enrico Nasi, adjunct senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL). Yet Nasi and his collaborators managed to land a lancelet on the cover of the Journal of Neuroscience last December. These simple chordates, they discovered, offer insight into our own biological clocks.

ANN ARBOR—Hunger, thirst, stress and drugs can create a change in the brain that transforms a repulsive feeling into a strong positive "wanting," a new University of Michigan study indicates.

The research used salt appetite to show how powerful natural mechanisms of brain desires can instantly transform a cue that always predicted a repulsive Dead Sea Salt solution into an eagerly wanted beacon or motivational magnet.

People who grew up in states where it was legal to drink alcohol before age 21 are more likely to be binge drinkers later in life, according to a study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The findings are available online in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

The researchers tracked the long-term drinking behavior of more than 39,000 people who began consuming alcohol in the 1970s, when some states had legal drinking ages as low as 18.

U.S. soldiers in combat often suffer constricted blood vessels and increased pressure in the brain — significant complications of traumatic brain injuries, according to research presented at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2013.

"Research shows that traumatic brain injury is a hallmark of recent military conflicts, affecting nearly a third of all wounded soldiers," said Alexander Razumovsky, Ph.D., lead researcher and director of Sentient NeuroCare Services in Hunt Valley, Md.

Constricted blood vessels in the brain are cerebral vasospasm.

Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders have more bleeding strokes at an earlier age than other people independent of methamphetamine abuse, according to research presented at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2013.