Brain

Previous research says on average, children living in poverty are less well prepared to start school than children from middle-income homes. Now, new research says home learning experiences may help low-income children's school readiness.

"Our findings indicate that enriched learning experiences as early as the first year of life are important to children's vocabulary growth, which in turn provides a foundation for children's later school success," said Eileen T. Rodriguez, survey researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.

AUGUSTA, Ga. – Scientists have shown a molecular chaperone is working like a waste management company to collect and detoxify high levels of toxic amyloid beta peptide found in Alzheimer's disease.

It was known that the molecular chaperone, HspB1, was present in the hallmark plaque of Alzheimer's patients but its role remained a mystery.

New research from the University of Leicester demonstrates that general practitioners (GPs) are struggling to correctly identify people in the early stages of dementia resulting in both missed cases (false negatives) and misidentifications (false positives).

Researchers from the University of Leicester in the UK and National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health, London, UK and the Department of General Practice, Dusseldorf, Germany examined 30 previous studies involving 15,277 people seen in primary care for cognitive disorders, including 7109 assessed for dementia.

Picture a menacing drill sergeant, a gory slaughterhouse, a devastating scene of a natural disaster.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have found that viewing such emotion-laden images immediately after taking a test actually enhances people's retention of the tested material.

The data the researchers gathered in recent studies are the first to show that negative arousal following successful retrieval of information enhances later recall of that information.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 20, 2011 -- After more than 100 years following its pathologic description, the cause of Alzheimer's disease (AD) remains unknown. To test the validity of present and future proposals related to the probable cause of AD, three postulates, or necessary conditions, are recommended by Jack de la Torre, MD, PhD, Adjunct Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, in an article published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

Scientists at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have discovered that a gene linked to dyslexia has a surprising biological function: it controls cilia, the antenna-like projections that cells use to communicate.

Dyslexia is largely hereditary and linked to a number of genes, the functions of which are, however, largely unknown. This present study from Karolinska Institutet and Helsinki University now shows that one of these genes, DCDC2, is involved in regulating the signalling of cilia in brain neurons.

Coming out as lesbian, gay, or bisexual increases emotional well-being even more than earlier research has indicated. But the psychological benefits of revealing one's sexual identity -- less anger, less depression, and higher self-esteem – are limited to supportive settings, shows a study published June 20 in Social Psychology and Personality Science.

Economists recognize that companies that export are more productive. However, a more complex relationship between exporting and investing in research and development may better explain the high productivity of companies in "economic miracle" countries such as China and Taiwan, according to a team of economists.

"The old story is that there's some type of magic that makes your company more productive if it exports," said Bee-Yan Aw, professor of economics, Penn State. "Actually what we found is that really productive firms tend to export in the first place."

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — An international research team, co-led by scientists at Mayo Clinic's campus in Florida, have discovered three potential susceptibility genes for development of progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), a rare neurodegenerative disease that causes symptoms similar to those of Parkinson's disease but is resistant to Parkinson's medications. Their report is being published online June 19 in Nature Genetics.

Scientists have developed a way to turn memories on and off—literally with the flip of a switch.

Using an electronic system that duplicates the neural signals associated with memory, they managed to replicate the brain function in rats associated with long-term learned behavior, even when the rats had been drugged to forget.

"Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Flip it off, and the rats forget," said Theodore Berger of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Department of Biomedical Engineering.

A new study published today in the journal Child Development finds that having a poor sense of numbers can lead to a mathematical learning disability and difficulty in achieving basic math proficiency. This inaccurate number sense is just one cause of math learning disabilities, according to the research led by Dr. Michele Mazzocco of the Kennedy Krieger Institute.

Scientists and educators alike have long known that cramming is not an effective way to remember things. With their latest findings, researchers at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan, studying eye movement response in trained mice, have elucidated the neurological mechanism explaining why this is so. Published in the Journal of Neuroscience, their results suggest that protein synthesis in the cerebellum plays a key role in memory consolidation, shedding light on the fundamental neurological processes governing how we remember.

Although most teens have the knowledge and reasoning ability to make decisions as rationally as adults, their tendency to make much riskier choices suggests that they still lack some key component of wise decision making. Why is this so? Because adolescents may not bother to use those thinking skills before they act. That's the finding of a new study by researchers at Temple University that appears in the journal Child Development.

Home learning experiences that are consistently supportive in the early years may boost low-income children's readiness for school. That's the finding of a new longitudinal study that appears in the journal Child Development.

The study was done by researchers at New York University based on research conducted as part of the national Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project, which is funded by the Administration for Children and Families. The study was also supported by the National Science Foundation.

DALLAS – June 16, 2011 – UT Southwestern Medical Center scientists are shedding new light on why the anesthetic drug ketamine produces a fast-acting antidepressant response in patients with treatment-resistant depression.

The drug's robust effect at low doses as a fast-acting antidepressant potentially has use in emergency rooms with high-risk patients.