Brain

EUGENE, Ore. -- Using new optical equipment, a team of 11 researchers put roundworms into a world of virtual reality, monitored both their behavior and brain activity and gained unexpected information on how the organism's brain operates as it moves.

CHICAGO -- Healthier dietary choices by pregnant women are associated with reduced risks of birth defects, including neural tube defects and orofacial clefts, according to a study published Online First by the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.-- Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have discovered that one of the most common genetic alterations in autism -- deletion of a 27-gene cluster on chromosome 16 -- causes autism-like features. By generating mouse models of autism using a technique known as chromosome engineering, CSHL Professor Alea Mills and colleagues provide the first functional evidence that inheriting fewer copies of these genes leads to features resembling those used to diagnose children with autism.

Boston, MA -- Huntington's disease, a devastating genetic disorder that causes degeneration of nerve cells in the brain, affects more than 15,000 Americans, and at least 150,000 are at risk of developing the disease. There is no known cure or treatment for the disease -- which starts with changes in mood, judgment, memory, and other cognitive functions and inevitably leads to increasing physical disability, dementia and death.

Neuroscientists investigating the 'brain code' claim to have made a significant step forwards in understanding how the brain deals with stress- and mitigates its impact.

Examining what they term 'thin' and 'mushroom-like' parts of nerve cells in the brain, which are responsible for learning and remembering, they discovered that it is possible to alter what is remembered – thereby mitigating the stress of painful memories.

The brain learns through changes in the strength of its synapses -- the connections between neurons -- in response to stimuli.

Now, in a discovery that challenges conventional wisdom on the brain mechanisms of learning, UCLA neuro-physicists have found there is an optimal brain "rhythm," or frequency, for changing synaptic strength. And further, like stations on a radio dial, each synapse is tuned to a different optimal frequency for learning.

STANFORD, Calif. — A study, in mice, by investigators at the Stanford University School of Medicine points toward potential new therapies for stroke, the nation's third-leading cause of death and foremost single cause of severe neurological disability. The study, which will be published online Oct. 3 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, also may reveal why a much-heralded class of blockbuster drugs failed to live up to their promise.

A team of researchers led by Clifford Woolf and Chi Ma, at Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, Boston, has identified a way to accelerate the regeneration of injured peripheral nerves in mice such that muscle function is restored. In an accompanying commentary, Ahmet Höke, at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, discusses the importance of this work to the clinical problem.

New research, led by psychologists at the University of Bristol, has found that children who are familiar with a snack food will expect it to be more filling. This finding, published (online ahead of print) in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, is important because it reveals one way in which children over-consume snack foods and increase their risk of becoming overweight.

About 5 to 10 percent of American children are diagnosed as dyslexic. Historically, the label has been assigned to kids who are bright, even verbally articulate, but who struggle with reading—in short, whose high IQs mismatch their low reading scores. When children are not as bright, however, their reading troubles have been chalked up to their general intellectual limitations.

Researchers at Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center have identified a new pathway of stem cell activity in the brain that represents potential targets of brain injuries affecting newborns. The recent study, which raises new questions of how the brain evolves, is published in the current issue of Nature.

Fruit fly aggression is correlated with smaller brain parts, involves complex interactions between networks of important genes, and often cannot be controlled with mood-altering drugs like lithium., according to the results of a painstaking study conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University and colleagues in Belgium who are trying to discover what happens in the genes and brains of hyper-aggressive flies and how that differs from what takes place in more passive fly cousins.

Researchers working with adult mice have discovered that learning and memory were profoundly affected when they altered the amounts of a certain protein in specific parts of the mammals' brains.

The protein, called kibra, was linked in previous studies in humans to memory and protection against late-onset Alzheimer's disease. The new work in mice, reported in the Sept. 22 issue of Neuron, shows that kibra is an essential part of a complex of proteins that control the sculpting of brain circuitry, a process that encodes memory.

Johns Hopkins scientists investigating chemical modifications across the genomes of adult mice have discovered that DNA modifications in non-dividing brain cells, thought to be inherently stable, instead underwent large-scale dynamic changes as a result of stimulated brain activity. Their report, in the October issue of Nature Neuroscience, has major implications for treating psychiatric diseases, neurodegenerative disorders, and for better understanding learning, memory and mood regulation.

"Whether you think you can or think you can't -- you're right," said Henry Ford. A new study, to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people who think they can learn from their mistakes have a different brain reaction to mistakes than people who think intelligence is fixed.