Brain

Studying a new type of pinhead-size, lab-grown brain made with technology first suggested by three high school students, Johns Hopkins researchers have confirmed a key way in which Zika virus causes microcephaly and other damage in fetal brains: by infecting specialized stem cells that build its outer layer, the cortex.

(BOSTON) - Researchers from the Schepens Eye Research Institute of Massachusetts Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School have developed a smartphone application that projects a magnified smartphone screen to Google Glass, which users can navigate using head movements to view a corresponding portion of the magnified screen. They have shown that the technology can potentially benefit low-vision users, many of whom find the smartphone's built-in zoom feature to be difficult to use due to the loss of context.

Scientists from Duke-NUS Medical School (Duke-NUS) have derived a structural model of a transporter at the blood-brain barrier called Mfsd2a (1). This is the first molecular model of this critical transporter, and could prove important for the development of therapeutic agents that need to be delivered to the brain --- across the blood-brain barrier. In future, this could help treat neurological disorders such as glioblastoma.

A range of diseases -- from diabetes to cardiovascular disease, and from Alzheimer's disease to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder -- are linked to changes to genes in the brain. A new study by UCLA life scientists has found that hundreds of those genes can be damaged by fructose, a sugar that's common in the Western diet, in a way that could lead to those diseases.

However, the researchers discovered good news as well: An omega-3 fatty acid known as docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, seems to reverse the harmful changes produced by fructose.

Gender stereotyping may start as young as three months, according to a study of babies' cries from the University of Sussex.

Adults attribute degrees of femininity and masculinity to babies based on the pitch of their cries, as shown by a new study by researchers from the University of Sussex, the University of Lyon/Saint-Etienne and Hunter College City University of New York. The research is published in the journal BMC Psychology.

The study found:

Long before Alzheimer's disease can be diagnosed clinically, increasing difficulties building cognitive maps of new surroundings may herald the eventual clinical onset of the disorder, finds new research from Washington University in St. Louis.

"These findings suggest that navigational tasks designed to assess a cognitive mapping strategy could represent a powerful new tool for detecting the very earliest Alzheimer's disease-related changes in cognition," said senior author Denise Head, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- University of Florida Health researchers have developed a unique mouse model that will allow researchers around the world to better study the genetic origins and potential treatments for a neurodegenerative brain disease that causes amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, often referred to as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, and frontotemporal dementia.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- People who go to bed wary of potential danger sometimes pledge to sleep "with one eye open." A new Brown University study finds that isn't too far off. On the first night in a new place, the research suggests, one brain hemisphere remains more awake than the other during deep sleep, apparently in a state of readiness for trouble.

When people sleep in an unfamiliar place for the first time--a hotel room, for example--they often feel as though they haven't slept as well. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on April 21 have discovered the reason why: under those conditions, one hemisphere of the brain stays more awake to keep watch.

Any organism with a brain needs to make decisions about how it's going to navigate through three-dimensional spaces. That's why animals have evolved sensory organs in the ears to detect if they're rotating or moving in a straight line. But how does an animal perceive curved motion, as in turning a corner? One explanation, published April 21 in Cell Reports, from researchers looking at macaques, is that curved motion is detected when sensory neurons in the brain receiving converging information about linear and rotational movement are activated.

By turning skin cells into brain neurons, researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have identified that certain tiny molecules aiding in gene expression, known as microRNAs (miRNAs), are under-expressed in the brains of the 14 schizophrenia patients they studied. Their findings, published online today in the journal Cell Reports, show that one of these molecules, a miRNA known as miR-9, is a risk factor that controls the activity of hundreds of genes.

INDIANAPOLIS -- Machine learning has come of age in public health reporting according to researchers from the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. They have found that existing algorithms and open source machine learning tools were as good as, or better than, human reviewers in detecting cancer cases using data from free-text pathology reports. The computerized approach was also faster and less resource intensive in comparison to human counterparts.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have found that drawing pictures of information that needs to be remembered is a strong and reliable strategy to enhance memory.

"We pitted drawing against a number of other known encoding strategies, but drawing always came out on top," said the study's lead author, Jeffrey Wammes, PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology. "We believe that the benefit arises because drawing helps to create a more cohesive memory trace that better integrates visual, motor and semantic information."

A recent review that examined all published studies on anatomical abnormalities in the brains of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder found substantial discrepancy throughout the literature regarding the reported presence and significance of neuroanatomical findings.

An ideal study would include hundreds of well-characterized individuals of both sexes, with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder, who would undergo brain imaging at birth and be followed at least until late childhood or late adolescence

Humans aren't the only farmers out there. Five years ago, the Queller-Strassmann lab at Rice University, now at Washington University in St. Louis, demonstrated that the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum -- affectionately nicknamed "Dicty" -- can maintain a crop of food bacteria from generation to generation, giving these farmers an advantage when food is scarce.