Brain

The swirling skies of Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night illustrate a mystery that has eluded biologists for more than a century--why do we perceive the color blue in the dimly lit night sky? A newly discovered mechanism of color vision in mice might help answer this question, Caltech researchers say.

The work, which was done in the laboratory of Markus Meister, Anne P. and Benjamin F. Biaggini Professor of Biological Sciences, will be published on April 14 in the print edition of the journal Nature.

Researchers have developed a behavioral model that explains the complexity and diversity of social hierarchies in ants, and which scientists believe may help us understand the nature of other animal societies - from primates to dolphins. The work was done by researchers at North Carolina State University, the University of Oxford and Arizona State University.

AMHERST, Mass. - In a study exploring the relationship between memory for specific past experiences and recovery from strong negative emotions, University of Massachusetts Amherst research psychologists report that episodic memory may be more important in helping midlife and older adults recover from a negative event than it is for younger adults.

In the fall, eastern North American monarch butterflies take the biggest trip of their lives to their wintering grounds in Mexico. The butterflies are genetically hardwired to fly southwest mainly using a time-compensated sun compass, which combines the time of day and the position of the sun to navigate. To understand how this information connects in the butterfly brain, researchers reporting April 14 in Cell Reports created a mathematical model that can reproduce the animals' internal calculations.

Each fall, monarch butterflies across Canada and the United States turn their orange, black and white-mottled wings toward the Rio Grande and migrate over 2,000 miles to the relative warmth of central Mexico.

Mice that vocalize in a repetitive, halting pattern similar to human stuttering may provide insight into a condition that has perplexed scientists for centuries, according to a new study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the National Institutes of Health.

JUPITER, FL - April 14, 2016 - While research has identified hundreds of genes required for normal memory formation, genes that suppress memory are of special interest because they offer insights into how the brain prioritizes and manages all of the information, including memories, that it takes in every day. These genes also provide clues for how scientists might develop new treatments for cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.

LA JOLLA -- Salk Institute scientists have developed a new reagent to map the brain's complex network of connections that is 20 times more efficient than their previous version. This tool improves upon a technique called rabies virus tracing, which was originally developed in the Callaway lab at Salk and is commonly used to map neural connections.

The removal of the enzyme Dnmt1 during oligodendrocyte progenitor cell (OPC) differentiation in the central nervous system resulted in inefficient myelin formation and neurological deterioration, including loss of control of bodily movements, in mice, according to a study conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published today in the medical journal Cell Reports. The results could lead to a new understanding of multiple sclerosis and other myelin disorders in humans.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] --Many doctors and scientists think they could improve the diagnosis and understanding of autism spectrum disorders if they had reliable means to identify specific abnormalities in the brain. Such "biomarkers" have proven elusive, often because methods that show promise with one group of patients fail when applied to another. In a new study in Nature Communications, however, scientists report a new degree of success. Their proposed biomarker worked with a comparably high degree of accuracy in assessing two diverse sets of adults.

The results from this study may have important implications in better understanding violence against women, as well as the variables related to recidivism in batterers.

A pioneering study led by a research group at the University of Granada (Spain) compares, for the first time in the world, the brain functioning of aggressors against their partners or ex-partners to that of other criminals when they are exposed to images related to different types of violence.

WASHINGTON (April 14, 2016) - Safe levels of electrical stimulation can enhance your capacity to think more creatively, according to a new study by Georgetown researchers.

Georgetown psychology professor Adam Green and Dr. Peter Turkeltaub of Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) and MedStar National Rehabilitation Network, and a team of colleagues published the study yesterday online in Cerebral Cortex.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Commitment to family is both a driving force and source of hardship for Latino immigrants, according to a Florida State University researcher.

Threats to familismo -- deeply held cultural beliefs about the centrality of family in daily life -- are often a major source of stress for immigrants and can have a negative impact on their overall health and well-being as they move forward in a new country.

It's difficult to look at pictures of cars shown on a computer and then keep yourself from saying "car" inside your head the next time one shows up on the screen -- even when someone tells you to avoid saying it. Now, a new study led by San Francisco State University researcher Ezequiel Morsella concludes that this same automatic effect can occur with much more complicated mental manipulations -- for instance, transforming "car" to the pig latin "ar-cay" in your head after you've been told to avoid that transformation.

Overweight people make unhealthier food choices than lean people when presented with real food, even though both make similar selections when presented with hypothetical choices, according to research led by the University of Cambridge and published today in the journal eNeuro.