Brain

Researchers have known for decades that alcohol can initially deepen sleep during the early part of the night but then disrupt sleep during the latter part of the night; this is called a "rebound effect." A new study of the influence of gender and family history of alcoholism on sleep has found that intoxication can increase feelings of sleepiness while at the same time disrupt actual sleep measures in healthy women more than in healthy men.

Peer support offers promise as an effective, low-cost tool for fighting depression, a new study by the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System and University of Michigan Health System finds.

Programs in which patients and volunteers share information were found to reduce symptoms of depression better than traditional care alone and were about as effective as cognitive behavioral therapy, researchers found after analyzing 10 randomized trials of peer support interventions for depression dating from 1987 to 2009.

Scientists today agree that there are five molecules that are known to affect or cause Alzheimer's disease, which plagues an estimated five million Americans. The potency of these molecules is linked to environmental factors such as diet and lifestyle.

Prof. Daniel Michaelson of Tel Aviv University's Department of Neurobiology at the George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences has illuminating news about one of these five molecules — APOE, created by the apolipoprotein E. gene found in all of our bodies.

It's a frustrating problem for many of today's parents: Little Jacob or Isabella is utterly indifferent to schoolwork during the day but then happily spends all evening engrossed in the latest video game.

The solution isn't to banish the games, says one Florida State University researcher. A far better approach, advises Valerie J. Shute, is to make the learning experience more enjoyable by creating video games into which educational content and assessment tools have been surreptitiously added — and to incorporate such games into school curricula.

DALLAS – Feb. 15, 2011 – Breast-cancer patient Kristin Wiginton is the first to be treated at UT Southwestern Medical Center with high-beam radiation using the Accuray CyberKnife System, which offers improved cosmetic results, less radiation exposure to surrounding tissue and a shorter treatment period.

The drug known as ecstasy has been used by 12 million people in the United States alone and millions more worldwide. Past research has suggested that ecstasy users perform worse than nonusers on some tests of mental ability.But there are concerns that the methods used to conduct that research were flawed, and the experiments overstated the cognitive differences between ecstasy users and nonusers.

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Measurements of hand movement control may help determine the severity of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children, according to joint studies published in the February 15, 2011, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. ADHD is a brain disorder characterized by impulsiveness, hyperactivity, such as not being able to sit still, and inattention or difficulty staying focused.

(Baltimore, MD) – Two research studies published today in Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, found markers for measuring the ability of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) to control impulsive movements, which may reveal insights into the neurobiology of ADHD, inform prognosis and guide treatments.

WORCESTER, Mass. – Year-end test scores of Massachusetts middle school students whose teachers used a Web-based tutoring platform called ASSISTments as a central part of their mathematics instruction were significantly better than those of students whose teachers did not use the platform, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Educational Computing Research. Conducted by Neil T. Heffernan, PhD, of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), and Kenneth R. Koedinger, PhD, and Elizabeth A.

A group of University of Cincinnati seniors in the psychology program will nationally present their comparison of educational technology alternatives to purchasing college textbooks that can run into hundreds of dollars per academic quarter. Their research as part of the statewide Ohio Digital Bookshelf Project will be presented on Monday, Feb. 14, at the national EDUCAUSE Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.

When psychotherapy is helping someone get better, what does that change look like in the brain? This was the question a team of Canadian psychological scientists set out to investigate in patients suffering from social anxiety disorder. Their findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association of Psychological Science.

Neurobiologists at UC San Diego have discovered new ways by which nerves are guided to grow in highly directed ways to wire the brain during embryonic development.

Their finding, detailed in a paper in the February 15 issue of the journal Developmental Cell, provides a critical piece of understanding to the longstanding puzzle of how the human brain wires itself into the complex networks that underlie our behavior.

For the last several years, neurologists have been probing a connection between Parkinson's disease and problems with mitochondria, the miniature power plants of the cell.

Toxins that mimic Parkinson's effects act specifically to poison mitochondria, and mitochondria appear to be damaged in the brain cells that are endangered in the disease. But one unresolved question has been: are mitochondria simply the vulnerable "canaries in the coal mine" or is their deterioration a key step on the way to neurodegeneration?

Tampa, Fla. (Feb. 14, 2011) – Transplanting autologous renal progenitor cells (RPCs), (kidney stem cells derived from self-donors), into rat models with kidney damage from pyelonephritis - a type of urinary infection that has reached the kidney - has been found to improve kidney structure and function.

The objective of this research is to understand how cooperation works in nature in general, and among humans in particular. "From the evolutionary point of view it is very difficult to understand why we would help others when what interests us is helping ourselves," explained the authors of this study, which was recently published in the journal PLoS ONE.