Brain

New research by a team including Plymouth University indicates how influential a person's political affinity is to their opinion about hydraulic fracking.

Yaniv Hanoch, Professor of Decision Science in Plymouth University's School of Psychology, co-authored the study alongside Dr Becky Choma and Shannon Currie from Ryerson University. The researchers examined the role of people's political ideology in people's attitude, knowledge, and perceptions about hydraulic fracking.

A recent study suggests that who we are might be more integrated with where we are than previously thought. Demonstrating how architects and urban planners might take guidance from disciplines like neuroscience, philosophy and psychology, a paper published in Frontiers in Psychology, reveals that a good built environment might promote well-being and effect our decisions.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- Athletes who wait to report a concussion may experience longer recovery times, say University of Florida researchers who found that college players who delayed treatment or removal from play missed an average of five more days of play than athletes who immediately reported concussion symptoms.

The study appears in the May issue of the Journal of Athletic Training.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., May 9, 2016--Researchers recently demonstrated how an informatics-based adaptive design strategy, tightly coupled to experiments, can accelerate the discovery of new materials with targeted properties, according to a recent paper published in Nature Communications.

May 9, 2016 - Neuroimaging studies of interconnected brain networks may provide the "missing links" between behavioral and biological models of cognitive vulnerability to depression, according to a research review in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry. The journal is published by Wolters Kluwer.

Tablet and laptop users beware. Using digital platforms such as tablets and laptops for reading may make you more inclined to focus on concrete details rather than interpreting information more abstractly, according to a new study published in the proceedings of ACM CHI '16, the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, to be held May 7-12, 2016. The findings serve as another wake-up call to how digital media may be affecting our likelihood of using abstract thought.

Humidity can make us feel miserable -- think of sultry summer days in Chicago, for example -- but humans do not have dedicated sensory systems in the skin to detect water vapor in the air. Most insects, for whom humidity levels can mean life or death, do have such systems, but little has been known about how they work.

Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have discovered how the major genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease causes memory impairment. A specific type of brain activity important for memory replay is disrupted in mice with the E4 version of the apolipoprotein E (apoE4) gene, which may interfere with memory formation.

A new addition in the growing number of studies using brain organoids to understand how the Zika virus leads to microcephaly reveals that human neural stem cells infected by the virus subsequently trigger an innate immune response that leads to cell death. On May 6 in Cell Stem Cell, University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers report that if this immune response is blocked, it helps neural stem cells survive Zika infection.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently concluded that Zika virus infection in pregnant women can stunt neonatal brain development, leading to babies born with abnormally small heads, a condition known as microcephaly. Now, for the first time, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have determined one way Zika infection can damage developing brain cells.

A software tool developed collaboratively by Disney Research and ETH Zurich makes it possible for non-experts to design and build flexible objects that can sense when they are being deformed and thus be used to control games, provide feedback for toys or otherwise provide input to a computer.

Creating a bendable object with customized appearance and shape already is possible with today's 3-D printers. The new tool, called DefSense, enables designers to give those objects deformation-sensing functionality, even if the designers lack expertise in this complex task.

Enantiornithes are the most successful clade of Mesozoic birds, representing the sister group of the Ornithuromorpha, which gave rise to living birds. Nevertheless, the feeding habits of enantiornithines have remained unknown because of a lack of fossil evidence. In contrast, exceptionally preserved fossils reveal that derived avian features were present in the digestive systems of some non-enantiornithine birds with ages exceeding 125 million years.

Future Science Group (FSG) today announced the publication of a new article in Future Science OA, reviewing national and international guidelines for folic acid supplementation, and analyzing its potential risks and benefits in terms of maternal and fetal outcomes.

A physician has to make many quick decisions when confronted with a stroke patient.

Should treatment be intensive or comfort-based, or somewhere in between?

A physician will recommend a more intensive approach for a patient who may be able to rehabilitate, but it's all about comfort if the chances for recovery are low.

EAST LANSING, Mich. - Michigan State University researchers used an old-fashioned neurobiology technique to explore new avenues for treatments to reverse a late-onset neurodegenerative disease that robs men of the capacity to walk, run, chew and swallow.

The results were recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience.