Brain

In the largest study of brain development in preschoolers with autism to date, a study by UC Davis MIND Institute researchers has found that 3-year-old boys with regressive autism, but not early onset autism, have larger brains than their healthy counterparts.

Babies as young as eight months old want people who commit or condone antisocial acts to be punished, according to a new study led by a University of British Columbia researcher.

While previous research shows that babies uniformly prefer kind acts, the new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that eight month-old infants support negative behavior if it is directed at those with antisocial behavior – and dislike those who are nice to bad guys.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Men may think about sex more often than women do, but a new study suggests that men also think about other biological needs, such as eating and sleep, more frequently than women do, as well.

And the research discredits the persistent stereotype that men think about sex every seven seconds, which would amount to more than 8,000 thoughts about sex in 16 waking hours. In the study, the median number of young men's thought about sex stood at almost 19 times per day. Young women in the study reported a median of nearly 10 thoughts about sex per day.

New Orleans, LA – Research led by Dr. Paul Harch, Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans, has found that treatment with hyperbaric oxygen nearly three years after injury significantly improved function and quality of life for veterans with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. The findings are available online now in the Journal of Neurotrauma.

A more flexible approach to teaching methods and better community support could reduce school drop-out in high HIV-prevalence areas in sub-Saharan Africa. Findings from a project led by London's Institute of Education and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Department for International Development (DFID) show that using new ways of encouraging young children to stay in regular schooling cut drop-out rates by 42 per cent in just a year.

During estimation processes we unconsciously make use of recent experiences. Scientists from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich and the Bernstein Center Munich asked test subjects to estimate distances in a virtual reality environment. The results revealed that estimates tended to approach the mean of all previously experienced distances. For the first time, scientists were able to accurately predict the experimental findings using a mathematical model. The model combines two well-known laws of psychophysics with a theorem from probability theory.

A team of neuroscientists and anaesthetists, who have been using pioneering techniques to study how the brain regulates the heart, has identified a crucial part of the nervous system whose malfunction may account for an increased risk of death from heart failure. The findings, published online (ahead of print) in the Journal of Physiology, could lead to more targeted therapies to help reduce serious illness and death in cardiovascular disease.

The so-called Machado-Joseph disease is at the center of the current Bonn study. This is a disorder of movement coordination which was originally described in inhabitants of the Azores of Portuguese descent and which represents the most frequent dominantly inherited cerebellar ataxia in Germany today. The majority of patients develop gait abnormalities and a series of other neurological symptoms between the ages of 20 and 40.

Stressed people fall into habits and their behaviour is not goal-directed. That the neurotransmitter norepinephrine plays a decisive role here is now reported in the Journal of Neuroscience by scientists from Bochum led by Dr. Lars Schwabe (RUB Faculty of Psychology). If the effect of norepinephrine is stopped by beta blockers, the stress effect does not occur. "The results may be important for addictive behaviours, where stress is a key risk factor" said Schwabe. "They are characterised by ingrained routines and habits."

By placing real and virtual objects in the flight paths of bats, scientists at the Universities of Bristol and Munich have shed new light on how echolocation works. Their research is published today in Behavioural Processes.

The researchers found that it is not the intensity of the echoes that tells the bats the size of an object but the 'sonar aperture', that is the spread of angles from which echoes impinge on their ears.

CHICAGO – Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers have identified abnormalities in the brains of children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) that may serve as a biomarker for the disorder, according to a study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

Thoughts about killing oneself and engaging in suicidal behavior may begin much younger than previously thought. While about one of nine youths attempt suicide by the time they graduate from high school, new findings reveal that a significant proportion make their first suicide attempt in elementary or middle school.

In a study published in the November issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, nearly 40 percent of young adults who said they had tried suicide said that they made their first attempt before entering high school.

STANFORD, Calif. — Neuroscientists at Stanford University School of Medicine have homed in on potential differences in autistic people's brain cells by studying brainlike spheres grown in an elaborate process from skin cells.

The scientists studied cells from patients with Timothy syndrome, a rare genetic condition that is associated with one of the most penetrant forms of autism: In other words, most people with the Timothy syndrome mutation have autism as a symptom, among other problems.

Potential clues to how autism miswires the brain are emerging from a study of a rare, purely genetic form of the disorders that affects fewer than 20 people worldwide. Using cutting-edge "disease-in a-dish" technology, researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have grown patients' skin cells into neurons to discover what goes wrong in the brain in Timothy Syndrome. Affected children often show symptoms of autism spectrum disorders along with a constellation of physical problems.