Brain

More that 70 NYU scholars convened in Washington, DC, for the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association (AERA), the largest gathering of academics in the field of education research.

NYU researchers present their findings - spanning work from early childhood education through higher education - April 8 through 12, looking at diverse topics such as race, inequality, and the use of technology in education.

Tuition Variation Trends at Public and Private Universities

Friday, April 8, 2016 at noon ET

Researchers from Imperial College London, working with the Beckley Foundation, have for the first time visualised the effects of LSD on the human brain.

In a series of experiments, scientists have gained a glimpse into how the psychedelic compound affects brain activity. The team administered LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide) to 20 healthy volunteers in a specialist research centre and used various leading-edge and complementary brain scanning techniques to visualise how LSD alters the way the brain works.

(Boston)--A newly discovered pathway leading to the regeneration of central nervous system (CNS) brain cells (neurons) in a type of roundworm (C. elegans) sheds light on the adult human nervous system's ability to regenerate.

The findings, which appear online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, soon may lead to treatments that enhance nerve cell regeneration in humans with spinal cord injury and paralysis.

Okazaki, Japan - When we are in pain, we reach for painkillers as we try to "turn off" the pain. Unfortunately, this does not always work, and this problem has prompted researchers around the world to seek the "main switch" that can promptly and effectively conduct this switching off.

Stress is a major burden in many people's lives affecting their health and wellbeing. New research led by the University of Bristol has found that genes in the brain that play a crucial role in behavioural adaptation to stressful challenges are controlled by epigenetic mechanisms.

Adaptation to stress is known to require changes in the expression of so-called immediate-early genes in the brain, particularly in the hippocampus, a brain region that plays a crucial role in learning and memory.

ATLANTA--Using imagery is an effective way to improve memory and decrease certain types of false memories, according to researchers at Georgia State University.

Zika virus preferentially kills developing brain cells, a new study reports. The results offer evidence for how Zika virus may cause brain defects in babies - and specifically microcephaly, a rare birth defect in which the brain fails to grow properly. Brazil is in the midst of an unprecedented epidemic of Zika virus (ZIKV), which was first detected in the country in May 2015. Since then, reports of microcephaly in the country have increased significantly, but a link between the virus and the birth defect has not been proven.

An innovative collaboration between neuroscientists and developmental psychologists that investigated how infants' brains process other people's action provides the first evidence that directly links neural responses from the motor system to overt social behavior in infants.

The research will be published April 12 in Psychological Science, the peer-reviewed journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Middle-class African American mothers must parent differently than their white counterparts. African American middle-class mothers bear the added weight of preparing their children -- particularly their sons -- to navigate "gendered racism," or discrimination based on both race and gender, from a very young age. This is according to a new research study published in the April 2016 issue of Gender & Society, a top-ranked journal in Gender Studies and Sociology.

More than half of our brains are made up of glial cells, which wrap around nerve fibers and insulate them--similarly to how the plastic casing of an electric cable insulates the copper wire within--allowing electrical and chemical impulses to travel faster. In the past, neuroscientists considered the glial cell an essential yet passive helper of nerve cells.

Neurobiologists at UC San Diego have discovered how signals that orchestrate the construction of the nervous system also influence recovery after traumatic injury. They also found that manipulating these signals can enhance the return of function.

Most people who suffer traumatic injuries have incomplete lesions of neural circuits whose function can be partially restored from the reconfiguration of the spared circuits with rehabilitative training. But the mechanisms are not well understood.

How does memory occur? And what about movement, or thinking? One key element to understand all these brain functions are the synapses. A synapse is the contact point between two neurons, where a signal is transmitted one-way, from one neuron to another. Specifically, from the pre-synaptic part of one neuron, to the post-synaptic part of another neuron. This communication process involves many types of proteins, and allows us, for example, to memorize a friend's name.

Brazilian researchers from the D'Or Institute for Research and Education (IDOR) and Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) have demonstrated the harmful effects of ZIKA virus (ZIKV) in human neural stem cells, neurospheres and brain organoids. Since ZIKV has been gradually established as a direct cause of central nervous system malformations, this study help to elucidate the etiological nature of the recently increasing number of microcephaly cases in Brazil.

This paper will be published online by the journal Science on Sunday, 10 April, 2016.

This news release is available in French.

Chemists at the University of California San Diego have designed a set of molecules that promote microscopic, anatomical changes in neurons associated with the formation and retention of memories. These drug candidates also prevent deterioration of the same neuronal structures in the presence of amyloid-beta, a protein fragment that accumulates in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease.