Brain

BINGHAMTON, NY – Helping at-risk high schoolers succeed in the classroom has always been difficult. Binghamton University Professor David Sloan Wilson thinks that he has a solution: design a school program that draws upon general theories of social behavior.

NEW YORK, November 20, 2011 – In a new study scientists at NYU Langone Medical Center have shown that the sense of smell can be improved. The new findings, published online November 20, 2011, in Nature Neuroscience, suggest possible ways to reverse the loss of smell due to aging or disease.

Treatment with dexpramipexole – a novel drug believed to prevent dysfunction of mitochondria, the subcellular structures that provide most of a cell's energy – appears to slow symptom progression in the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Promising results of a phase 2 trial of dexpramipexole are receiving advance online publication in Nature Medicine. Some preliminary results of the study were presented at the 2009 International Symposium on ALS/MND and the 2010 American Academy of Neurology annual meeting.

Click on the video above to see how the dots create a sense of moving forward straight ahead, to the right, and to the left.

(Photo Credit: University of Rochester)

We've all experienced it: The frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do. Or get. Or find.

New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses. "Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an 'event boundary' in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away," Radvansky explains.

"Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized."

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y., Nov. 17, 2011 – The nation's preterm birth rate slipped under 12 percent for the first time in nearly a decade, the fourth consecutive year it declined, potentially sparing tens of thousands of babies the serious health consequences of an early birth.

WASHINGTON, November 17, 2011 -- Factors such as low hemoglobin levels, increased systolic blood pressure, and male gender are linked to a higher risk of silent cerebral infarcts (SCIs), or silent strokes, in children with sickle cell anemia (SCA), according to results from a large, first-of-its-kind study published online today in Blood, the Journal of

There is no doubt that eating a balanced diet is essential for maintaining a healthy body weight as well as appropriate arousal and energy balance, but the details about how the nutrients we consume are detected and processed in the brain remain elusive. Now, a research study discovers intriguing new information about how dietary nutrients influence brain cells that are key regulators of energy balance in the body.

Someone with the condition known as grapheme-color synesthesia might experience the number 2 in turquoise or the letter S in magenta. Now, researchers reporting their findings online in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on November 17 have shown that those individuals also show heightened activity in a brain region responsible for vision.

The findings provide a novel way of looking at synesthesia as the product of regional hyperexcitability in the brain, the researchers say. They also provide a window into our understanding of individual differences in perception.

Everybody knows how to zoom in and out on an online map, to get the level of resolution you need to get you where you want to go. Now researchers have discovered a key mechanism that can act like a zoom button in the brain, by controlling the resolution of the brain's internal maps.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – More than 20 years ago, Charles Borduin, a University of Missouri researcher, developed a treatment for juvenile offenders that has become one of the most widely used evidence-based treatments in the world. Now, he has found that the treatment continues to have positive effects on former participants more than 20 years after treatment.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Ever wondered why flies are attracted to beer? Entomologists at the University of California, Riverside have, and offer an explanation. They report that flies sense glycerol, a sweet-tasting compound that yeasts make during fermentation.

Human relationships are intense and long lasting, and differ in a number of ways from those of our fellow mammals. However, we still have little idea of what motivates us to continue to invest a considerable proportion of our energy and time in such relationships.

Researchers at the University of Tampere and the Aalto University, Finland, have shown that the perception of nude bodies is boosted at an early stage of visual processing. The research was funded by the Academy of Finland.

PITTSBURGH, Nov. 17 – Poor perceptions about workplace safety culture among emergency medical services (EMS) workers is associated with negative patient and provider safety outcomes -- the first time such a link has been shown in the pre-hospital setting, according to a study by University of Pittsburgh researchers that now appears online in Prehospital Emergency Care and is scheduled to be published in the January-March print edition.