Brain

April 12, 2012 - The color of our skin or where we come does matter when it comes to how we react to a racist insult. A new study has found that African American women are more likely than Asian American women to directly rebuff racist comments, a difference that may reflect deeply rooted cultural differences.

If you have seen a child just eat an entire ice-cream, and she begs you to buy her one, what will your reaction be?

A new University of British Columbia study finds that the way individuals experience the universal emotion of pride directly impacts how racist and homophobic their attitudes toward other people are.

The study, published in the April issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, offers new inroads in the fight against harmful prejudices such as racism and homophobia, and sheds important new light on human psychology.

High levels of vitamin D do not seem to boost teens' academic performance, indicates research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Some previous research has linked higher levels of the vitamin to enhanced brainpower (cognitive function) in adults.

The authors wanted to find out if the same was true of children, and what impact different types of the vitamin - sourced mainly from sunlight (vitamin D3) or from plants (vitamin D2) - might have.

Holding a weapon makes men look taller and more muscular, according to a report published Apr. 11 in the open access journal PLoS ONE.

The researchers, led by Daniel Fessler at University of California Los Angeles, conducted a number of online surveys to determine that men holding a gun or a large kitchen knife were viewed as larger and more muscular than men holding non-threatening objects. This pattern cannot be explained by any actual correlation between gun ownership and physical size.

The discovery, using state-of-the-art informatics tools, increases the likelihood that it will be possible to predict much of the fundamental structure and function of the brain without having to measure every aspect of it. That in turn makes the Holy Grail of modelling the brain in silico—the goal of the proposed Human Brain Project—a more realistic, less Herculean, prospect. "It is the door that opens to a world of predictive biology," says Henry Markram, the senior author on the study, which is published this week in PLoS ONE.

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Certain antidepressants appear to decrease depression in people with Parkinson's disease without worsening motor problems, according to a study published in the April 11, 2012, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — No matter what novel objects we come to behold, our brains effortlessly take us from an initial "What's that?" to "Oh, that old thing" after a few casual encounters. In research that helps shed light on the malleability of this recognition process, Brown University neuroscientists have teased apart the potentially different roles that two distinct cell types may play.

HOUSTON – (April 11, 2012) – A vast majority of cells in the brain are glial, yet our understanding of how they are generated, a process called gliogenesis, has remained enigmatic. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have identified a novel transcripitonal cascade that controls these formative stages of gliogenesis and answered the longstanding question of how glial cells are generated from neural stem cells.

The findings appear in the current edition of Neuron.

A recent study finds that a new compound reverses many of the major symptoms associated with Fragile X syndrome (FXS), the most common form of inherited intellectual disability and a leading cause of autism. The paper, published by Cell Press in the April 12 issue of the journal Neuron, describes the exciting observation that the FXS correction can occur in adult mice, after the symptoms of the condition have already been established.

Scientists have discovered a mutation limited to brain tissue that causes hemimegalencephaly (HMG), a condition where one half of the brain is enlarged and dysfunctional, leading to intellectual disability and severe epilepsy. The research, published by Cell Press in the April 12 issue of Neuron, has broad significance as a potential model for other complex neuropsychiatric diseases that may also be caused by "brain-only" mutations.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Women undergoing treatment for breast cancer can experience cognitive declines, such as decreased verbal fluency or loss of memory and attention. Often experienced by patients undergoing chemotherapy, the declines have become known as "chemo brain." However, a health psychologist at the University of Missouri says "chemo brain" isn't always to blame.

LONDON, ON – 75% of mental illnesses emerge by age 25. Mood and anxiety disorders are among the most common conditions, yet there is little support for youth in this age group. A new study from Lawson Health Research Institute shows that may no longer be the case.

A high-tech, precision, water jet milling control system which could transform the manufacture of complex aerospace, optical and biomedical structures and devices is being developed by an international team of engineers led by The University of Nottingham.

Until recently, the production of pluripotent "multipurpose" stem cells from skin cells was considered to be the ultimate new development. In the meantime, it has become possible to directly convert cells of the body into one another – without the time-consuming detour via a pluripotent intermediate stage. However, this method has so far been rather inefficient. Scientists from the Bonn Institute of Reconstructive Neurobiology (director: Prof. Dr. Oliver Brüstle) have now developed the method to the point that it can be used for biomedical applications.