Brain

Developers of massive open online courses -- or MOOCs -- may want to take a page from Facebook to keep more students engaged and enrolled, according to researchers.

In a study that compared MOOC student use of the course's Facebook groups to use of the built-in course message boards and forums, researchers said students were more engaged on the Facebook groups and also admitted to the researchers that they preferred interacting more on the social media site than through the course tools.

When you think of a neuron, imagine a tree.

A healthy brain cell indeed looks like a tree with a full canopy. There's a trunk, which is the cell's nucleus; there's a root system, embodied in a single axon; and there are the branches, called dendrites.

The largest meta-analysis so far of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for recurrent depression has found that MBCT is an effective treatment option that can help prevent the recurrence of major depression. The study used anonymised individual patient data from nine randomized trials of MBCT. It suggests that for the millions of people who suffer recurrent depression it provides a treatment choice and an alternative or addition to other approaches such as maintenance anti-depressants.

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy was associated with a reduced risk of depressive relapse over a 60-week follow-up period compared with usual care and outcomes were comparable to those who received other active treatments, according to an article published online by JAMA Psychiatry.

Recurrent depression causes significant disability. Interventions that prevent depressive relapse could help reduce the burden of this disease. A growing body of research suggests mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is efficacious.

In recent years there has been an explosion in the number of smartphone apps aimed at 'brain training'. These games often make confident statements about improving our mental performance, but there is little scientific evidence to show that they do.

A new study in the open-access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience has investigated why consumers decide to download these apps, how they use them and what they think their benefits may be.

A computer algorithm that can tell whether you are happy or sad, angry or expressing almost any other emotion would be a boon to the games industry. New research published in the International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics describes such a system that is almost 99 percent accurate.

WASHINGTON, DC, April 25, 2016 -- Neighborhoods are becoming less diverse and more segregated by income -- but only among families with children, a new study has found.

Study author Ann Owens, an assistant professor of sociology at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, examined census data from 100 major U.S. metropolitan areas, from Los Angeles to Boston. She found that, among families with children, neighborhood income segregation is driven by increased income inequality in combination with a previously overlooked factor: school district options.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Why does one person who tries cocaine get addicted, while another might use it and then leave it alone? Why do some people who kick a drug habit manage to stay clean, while others relapse? And why do some families seem more prone to addiction than others?

The road to answering these questions may have a lot to do with specific genetic factors that vary from individual to individual, a new study in rats suggests.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have identified a circuit between two brain regions that controls alcohol binge drinking, offering a more complete picture on what drives a behavior that costs the United States more than $170 billion annually and how it can be treated.

Scientists have discovered Sarmientosaurus musacchioi, a new species of titanosaurian dinosaur, based on an complete skull and partial neck fossil unearthed in Patagonia, Argentina, according to a study published April 26, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Rubén Martínez from the Laboratorio de Paleovertebrados of the Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia San Juan Bosco (UNPSJB), Argentina, and colleagues.

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) -- "There's an app for that."

The phrase is so ubiquitous it's a meme, and trademarked by Apple Inc.

In fact there are more than 165,000 mobile applications available for health care, with the largest category for people with mental-health disorders, managing everything from addiction to depression and schizophrenia.

A new study shows the death of newborn brain cells may be linked to a genetic risk factor for five major psychiatric diseases, and at the same time shows a compound currently being developed for use in humans may have therapeutic value for these diseases by preventing the cells from dying.

For the past four years, researchers at MIT, Tufts University, and Georgia State University have been conducting a study to determine whether tablet computers loaded with literacy applications could improve the reading preparedness of young children living in economically disadvantaged communities.

Alexandria, VA - Between Utah and Colorado, there is a geographical diamond in which lies a rich collection of fossils and dinosaur footprints recording the history of when dinosaurs inhabited this region. All major ages of dinosaur life are recorded here, and for more than a hundred years, paleontologists have busily been debating which dinosaurs existed based on bones and abundant dinosaur tracks, the latter of which provide clues that allow geoscientists to interpret dinosaur daily life.

PHILADELPHIA - Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is the most common genetically inherited cause of intellectual disability in humans. New research shows how the hormone insulin -- usually associated with diabetes -- is involved in the daily activity patterns and cognitive deficits in the fruitfly model of FXS, according to a new study from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania published online this month in Molecular Psychiatry in advance of the print issue.