Brain

A new study shows that repeated radiation therapy used to target tumors in the brain may not be as safe to healthy brain cells as previously assumed. The findings, which appear in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, Physics, show that the treatment also kills important support cells in the brain and may cause as much, if not more damage, than single dose radiation therapy.

TORONTO, May 18, 2016 - More than half of children are scared of needles; York University researchers have found a strong connection between this fear in anticipation of a jab and their parents' behaviour during infant vaccinations.

Psychology Professor Rebecca Pillai Riddell's lab investigated factors contributing to the anxiety that preschoolers experience in anticipation of pain when getting their vaccines. The pain study found that past and continuing behaviour of the parent was the biggest reason for this suffering.

Montreal, May 18, 2016 -- Anxiety disorders and related problems such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are among the most common mental health conditions. At least one in four Canadians will have an anxiety disorder in their lifetime.

While effective therapies for these often-debilitating disorders exist, many sufferers find them very difficult to engage with or complete. This prompted researchers at Concordia University in Montreal to look for ways to make treatment easier to handle for those who need it most.

AMES, Iowa - There are many paths to success, but the significance of grit in helping you reach that goal has been greatly overstated, says an Iowa State University psychologist.

PHILADELPHIA - A 24-hour rhythm of cellular detoxification in flies and mammals is coordinated by a neuropeptide that also drives feeding in both organisms, found a team led by Amita Sehgal, PhD, a professor of Neuroscience and director of the Chronobiology Program, in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Their findings were published this month in eLife. Sehgal is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator.

New research demonstrates the effectiveness of ketamine to treat depression in a mouse model of the disease and brings together two hypotheses for the cause of depression. The research, led by Bernhard Lüscher, professor of biology and of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State University, is in press and will be published in the September 15, 2016, print edition of the journal Biological Psychiatry (Vol. 80, Issue 6).

Why people on immunosuppressant drugs for autoimmune conditions have a higher incidence of an often-fatal brain disease may be linked to a mutation in a common virus, according to researchers at Penn State College of Medicine.

Progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) is a rare disease of the brain's white matter caused by the John Cunningham polyomavirus (JCV), a usually harmless virus that infects up to 80 percent of healthy adults.

In a study appearing in the May 17 issue of JAMA, Giancarlo Natalucci, M.D., of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and colleagues randomly assigned 448 preterm infants born between 26 weeks 0 days' and 31 weeks 6 days' gestation to receive either high-dose recombinant human erythropoietin (rhEPO) or placebo (saline) intravenously within 3 hours, at 12 to 18 hours, and at 36 to 42 hours after birth.

A team of scientists has identified the existence of a back-up plan for memory storage, which comes into play when the molecular mechanism of primary long-term memory storage fails.

Previous work had shown that mice engineered without an enzyme crucial to long-term memory storage could still form such memories, creating a controversy that a team of scientists has now resolved with the new research, which appears in the journal eLife.

Can machines think? That's what renowned mathematician Alan Turing sought to understand back in the 1950s when he created an imitation game to find out if a human interrogator could tell a human from a machine based solely on conversation deprived of physical cues. The Turing test was introduced to determine a machine's ability to show intelligent behavior that is equivalent to or even indistinguishable from that of a human. Turing mainly cared about whether machines could match up to humans' intellectual capacities.

A new study from Uppsala University shows that compared to non-shift workers, shift workers needed more time to complete a test that is frequently used by physicians to screen for cognitive impairment. However, those who had quit shift work more than five years ago completed the test just as quick as the non-shift workers. The findings are published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging.

Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at the University of California San Diego have developed a technique for imaging brain activity in a freely walking fruit fly. Working with one of the most common model organisms in science, Drosophila melanogaster, the team shows for the first time what goes on in the brain of the fly during courtship -- when it's unrestrained.

Dubbed "Flyception" by the researchers, the novel imaging system is described in Nature Methods.

Brooklyn, NY - New research led by SUNY Downstate Medical Center shows that mice devoid of PKMzeta, a molecule previously identified by SUNY Downstate scientists as essential to memory formation and storage, recruit a closely related molecule, PKCiota/lambda, to make up for the missing PKMzeta.

Researchers at MIT and Oxford University have shown that the location stamps on just a handful of Twitter posts -- as few as eight over the course of a single day -- can be enough to disclose the addresses of the poster's home and workplace to a relatively low-tech snooper.

The tweets themselves might be otherwise innocuous -- links to funny videos, say, or comments on the news. The location information comes from geographic coordinates automatically associated with the tweets.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Relationship satisfaction and the energy devoted to keeping a partner are dependent on how the partner compares with other potential mates, a finding that relates to evolution's stronghold on modern relationship psychology, according to a study at The University of Texas at Austin.

When it comes to mating, people choose partners whose collective qualities most closely reflect what they would prefer in an ideal mate. They prioritize from an array of traits such as intelligence, health, kindness, attractiveness, dependability and financial prospects.