Brain

Traumatic events have lasting influence on what products people desire and purchase. When rebuilding and restocking an area that has been affected by conflict or natural disaster, what traumatized individuals value most is what is most practical and quick--even 50 years after the traumatic incident. A new study published in Frontiers in Psychology found strong consumer trends among those who experienced traumatic events that offer insights into what store owners and aid providers can stock to meet the needs of trauma-altered shoppers.

People with the most common type of lung cancer whose disease has spread to the brain could be spared potentially harmful whole brain radiotherapy, according to new research published in The Lancet. The phase 3 randomised trial found that whole brain radiotherapy had no beneficial effect on length or quality of survival over treatment with steroids and other supportive care [1].

PATIENTS with non-small cell lung cancer which has spread to the brain could be spared whole brain radiotherapy as it makes little or no difference to how long they survive and their quality of life, according to a Cancer Research UK-funded clinical trial published today (Sunday) in The Lancet*.

Around 45,500 people are diagnosed with lung cancer in the UK every year and an estimated 85 per cent of cases are non-small cell lung cancer. Up to 30 per cent of patients with non-small cell lung cancer have the disease spread to the brain.

For children with autism and a class of genetic disorders, exposure to diagnostic ultrasound in the first trimester of pregnancy is linked to increased autism severity, according to a study by researchers at UW Medicine, UW Bothell and Seattle Children's Research Institute.

Researchers at the Institute for the Developing Mind at Children's Hospital Los Angeles have analyzed current gene-disease findings to understand why people with neurodevelopmental and mental illness often have physical disorders.

Their study, published online in Frontiers in Psychiatry, may reframe how clinicians and scientists approach the treatment and study of neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) beyond a single diagnosis.

Last March, the artificial intelligence (AI) program AlphaGo beat Korean Go champion LEE Se-Dol at the Asian board game. "The game was quite tight, but AlphaGo used 1200 CPUs and 56,000 watts per hour, while Lee used only 20 watts. If a hardware that mimics the human brain structure is developed, we can operate artificial intelligence with less power," points out Professor YU Woo Jong.

Scientists from the Higher School of Economics (HSE) together with colleagues from the University of Helsinki have discovered that learning foreign languages enhances the our brain's elasticity and its ability to code information. The more foreign languages we learn, the more effectively our brain reacts and processes the data accumulated in the course of learning.

ITHACA, N.Y. - At the dinner table, babies do a lot more than play with their sippy cups, new research suggests.

Babies pay close attention to what food is being eaten around them - and especially who is eating it - according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study adds evidence to a growing body of research suggesting even very young children think in sophisticated ways about subtle social cues.

PITTSBURGH (September 2, 2016) ... The potential to develop "materials that compute" has taken another leap at the University of Pittsburgh's Swanson School of Engineering, where researchers for the first time have demonstrated that the material can be designed to recognize simple patterns. This responsive, hybrid material, powered by its own chemical reactions, could one day be integrated into clothing and used to monitor the human body, or developed as a skin for "squishy" robots.

In a new research collaboration between the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Adelaide, previously held views on the evolutionary development of the human brain are being challenged. The findings of their studies, published today inthe Royal Society Open Science*, unseats previous theories thatthe progression of human intelligence is simply related to the increase in size of the brain.

The regulation and function of sleep is one of the biggest black boxes of today's brain science. A new paper published online on August 2 in the journal Brain Structure & Function finds that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is suppressed by adenosine acting on a specific subtype of adenosine receptors, the A2A receptors, in the olfactory bulb. The study was conducted by researchers at Fudan University's School of Basic Medical Sciences in the Department of Pharmacology and the University of Tsukuba's International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine (WPI-IIIS).

When it comes to the billions of neurons in your brain, what you see at birth is what get -- except in the hippocampus. Buried deep underneath the folds of the cerebral cortex, neural stem cells in the hippocampus continue to generate new neurons, inciting a struggle between new and old as the new attempts to gain a foothold in memory-forming center of the brain.

A gas that was formerly known for its noxious qualities could help people with diabetes recover from common heart and blood vessel complications, concludes research led by the University of Exeter Medical School.

In the first study to consider these two adverse outcomes in the same cohort, researchers have shown a strong correlation between parental psychiatric disorder and the increased risk of suicide attempts and violent behaviour in their children.

With a clever approach, researchers point to the first gene that could be protective of tinnitus -- that disturbing ringing in the ear many of us hear, when no sound is present.