Brain

Researchers from the University of Liverpool and Florida State University College of Medicine have conducted a study on the effect the misperception of a child's weight by their parents can have on a child's actual weight.

Parents of children who are overweight often fail to accurately identify their child's weight status. Although these misperceptions are presumed to be a major public health concern, little research has examined whether parental perceptions of child weight status are protective against weight gain during childhood.

AVONDALE, Pa. -- While macroinvertebrates are a tasty food source for crayfish, a new study reveals a surprising finding: When crayfish were present in in-stream experimental enclosures, macroinvertebrate density was higher, not lower.

Stroud Water Research Center's lead fluvial geomorphologist Melinda Daniels, Ph.D., and Lindsey Albertson, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher and ecology professor from Montana State University, conducted the study in Valley Creek. The creek is an urbanized and degraded tributary of the Schuylkill River in King of Prussia -- a Philadelphia suburb.

The school a girl attends can affect her chance of being diagnosed with an eating disorder. That's the conclusion of research carried out by a joint UK-Swedish team. The results were published today in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. - Studies performed by a Sanford Research scientist using an innovative stem-cell model for a fatal developmental disorder is the focus of a recent study published in Nature Medicine. Kevin Francis, Ph.D. uncovered unique cellular defects associated with Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome (SLOS) by modeling this disease using induced pluripotent stem cells.

Because billions of neurons are packed into our brain, the neuronal circuits that are responsible for controlling our behaviors are by necessity highly intermingled. This tangled web makes it complicated for scientists to determine exactly which circuits do what. Now, using two laboratory techniques pioneered in part at Caltech, Caltech researchers have mapped out the pathways of a set of neurons responsible for the kinds of motor impairments--such as difficulty walking--found in patients with Parkinson's disease.

Brain waves that spread through the hippocampus are initiated by a method not seen before--a possible step toward understanding and treating epilepsy, according to researchers at Case Western Reserve University.

The researchers discovered a traveling spike generator that appears to move across the hippocampus--a part of the brain mainly associated with memory--and change direction, while generating brain waves. The generator itself, however, produces no electrical signal.

The ability to adapt to changes in the environment is key to survival, but this type of behavioral flexibility is often impaired in older individuals. A study in mice published April 20, 2016 in Neuron shows that the age-related decline in forming new behaviors is partly due to the deterioration of a brain circuit that plays a key role in goal-directed learning.

Federal cooperative extension programs have helped more than 137,000 farmers stay in business since 1985, according to economists.

In a study, the researchers said that 137,700 farmers would have left the industry without the federal program, which uses research from the country's land grant universities to provide education and learning opportunities to farmers and other citizens. Without cooperative extension, and the underlying research, the researchers estimated that the country would have lost 28 percent more farmers than actually left agriculture.

For years, neuroscientists have puzzled over how two abnormal proteins, called amyloid and tau, accumulate in the brain and damage it to cause Alzheimer's disease (AD). Which one is the driving force behind dementia? The answer: both of them, according to a new study by researchers at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute.

Athens, Ga. - Exposure to chemicals found in everyday products could affect the amount of fat stored in the body, according to a study by University of Georgia researchers.

Phthalates are chemicals found in everything from plastic products to soap to nail polish--they give plastic its bendy stretch. But growing research shows that these chemicals could be harming people's health, said the study's lead author Lei Yin, an assistant research scientist in the UGA College of Public Health's department of environmental health science.

WASHINGTON (April 20, 2016)--Researchers have developed a new method to map and track the function of brain circuits affected by autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in boys using brain imaging. The technique will provide clinicians and therapists with a physical measure of the progress patients are making with behavioral and/or drug treatments - a tool that has been elusive in autism treatment until this point.

U.S. veterans who screened positive for sexual trauma in the military had a higher risk of postdeployment homelessness, with male veterans at greater risk than female veterans, according to an article published online by JAMA Psychiatry.

(SALT LAKE CITY)-The devastating consequences of sexual trauma in the military reported by 25 percent of female and 1 percent of male veterans who served in the U.S. armed forces don't end with psychological and physical trauma, but are associated with a much higher risk for homelessness, a study led by Utah researchers has found.

Computers have helped revolutionize the commercial world and transformed the lives of the general public through the development of the Internet and mobile technologies like the iPhone. But, practically speaking, they have done little for the good of our planet.

This troubled Carla Gomes, a computer science professor at Cornell University, and led her to embark on an effort to develop computational methods that can help cultivate a more sustainable world.

Latest research on social networks in wild baboon troops has revealed how the animals get information from each other on the whereabouts of food. However, once information reaches a high status baboon, subordinates often end up in a queue for scraps.

A new study, by researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Zoological Society of London, shows how baboons monitor each other for changes in behaviour that indicate food has been found, such as hunching over to scoop it up.