Brain

PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 22, 2012 — With nearly 55 million students, teachers and school staff about to return to elementary and secondary school classrooms, scientists today described a new hand-held sensor ― practical enough for wide use ― that could keep classroom air fresher and kids more alert for learning.

Ancient Greek philosophers considered the ability to "know thyself" as the pinnacle of humanity. Now, thousands of years later, neuroscientists are trying to decipher precisely how the human brain constructs our sense of self.

Managers and non-managers show distinctly different brain activation patterns when making decisions, according to research published Aug. 22 in the open access journal PLOS ONE.

New born human infants have the largest brains among primates, but also the highest proportion of body fat. Before birth, if the supply of nutrients from the mother through the placenta is limited or unbalanced, the developing baby faces a dilemma: should resources be allocated to brain growth, or to fat deposition for use as an energy reserve during the early months after birth?

Scientists at the University of Southampton have shown that this decision could have an effect on how fat we are as children.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – A collaborative research effort by scientists at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Duke University, and University College of London in the UK, sheds new light on alcohol-related birth defects.

Scientists at UCLA and the Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology, have unraveled how our brain cells encode the pronunciation of individual vowels in speech.

Published in the Aug. 21 edition of the journal Nature Communications, the discovery could lead to new technology that verbalizes the unspoken words of people paralyzed by injury or disease.

Every high school kid has done it: putting off studying for that exam until the last minute, then pulling a caffeine-fueled all-nighter in an attempt to cram as much information into their heads as they can.

Now, new research at UCLA says don't bother.

The problem is the trade-off between study and sleep. Studying, of course, is a key contributor to academic achievement, but what students may fail to appreciate is that adequate sleep is also important for academics, researchers say.

Early fruits of the collaboration between the Genome 10K project and Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) to sequence 100 vertebrate species have resulted in the sequencing and release of the genome of one of naturalist Charles Darwin's Galápagos finches, the medium ground finch Geospiza fortis.

NEW YORK, August 22, 2012 – Researchers at NYU School of Medicine have made a novel discovery that could have widespread clinical implications, potentially affecting everything from nutrient metabolism to obesity in children.

Since the 1950's, low dose antibiotics have been widely used as growth promoters in the agricultural industry. For decades, livestock growers have employed subtherapeutic antibiotic therapy (STAT), not to fight infection or disease, but to increase weight gain in cattle, swine, sheep, chickens and turkey, among other farm animals.

A low dose of the sedative clonazepam alleviated autistic-like behavior in mice with a mutation that causes Dravet syndrome in humans, University of Washington researchers have shown.

Dravet syndrome is an infant seizure disorder accompanied by developmental delays and behavioral symptoms that include autistic features. It usually originates spontaneously from a gene mutation in an affected child not found in either parent.

ATLANTA – Scientists at Georgia State University have found that the ability to hear is lessened when, as a result of injury, a region of the brain responsible for processing sounds receives both visual and auditory inputs.

Yu-Ting Mao, a former graduate student under Sarah L. Pallas, professor of neuroscience, explored how the brain's ability to change, or neuroplasticity, affected the brain's ability to process sounds when both visual and auditory information is sent to the auditory thalamus.

The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Intensive preparation for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) actually changes the microscopic structure of the brain, physically bolstering the connections between areas of the brain important for reasoning, according to neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley.

The results suggest that training people in reasoning skills – the main focus of LSAT prep courses – can reinforce the brain's circuits involved in thinking and reasoning and could even up people's IQ scores.

Preemptive cognitive training—an early intervention to address neuropsychiatric deficiencies—can help the brain function normally later in life, a team of researchers has found through a series of experiments on laboratory rats. Their findings, which appear in the latest issue of the journal Neuron, hold promise for addressing a range of brain impairments in humans, including schizophrenia.

Animals that literally have holes in their brains can go on to behave as normal adults if they've had the benefit of a little cognitive training in adolescence. That's according to new work in the August 23 Neuron, a Cell Press publication, featuring an animal model of schizophrenia, where rats with particular neonatal brain injuries develop schizophrenia-like symptoms.

"The brain can be loaded with all sorts of problems," said André Fenton of New York University. "What this work shows is that experience can overcome those disabilities."

Human and chimp brains look anatomically similar because both evolved from the same ancestor millions of years ago. But where does the chimp brain end and the human brain begin?

A new UCLA study pinpoints uniquely human patterns of gene activity in the brain that could shed light on how we evolved differently than our closest relative. Published Aug. 22 in the advance online edition of Neuron, these genes' identification could improve understanding of human brain diseases like autism and schizophrenia, as well as learning disorders and addictions.