Brain

PHILADELPHIA, April 4, 2013 – – A new report on teen driver safety released today by The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and State Farm® shows encouraging trends among teen passengers. In 2011 more than half of teen passengers (54 percent) reported "always" buckling up.

HOUSTON – (April, 3 2013) – Vermont's aggressive health care reform initiatives can serve as a roadmap for other states, according to a Master of Public Health candidate at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). The paper, "Lessons from Vermont's Health Care Reform," will appear tomorrow in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study's author, Laura Grubb, M.D., of The University of Texas School of Public Health, part of UTHealth, wrote that Vermont is well ahead of most other states in implementing federal and state health care reforms.

WASHINGTON -- Significant investments over the past decade into disease surveillance and notification systems appear to have "paid off" and the systems "work remarkably well," says a Georgetown University Medical Center researcher who examined the public health response systems during the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. The findings are published online today in PLOS ONE.

Humans favor speech as the primary means of linguistic communication. Spoken languages are so common many think language and speech are one and the same. But the prevalence of sign languages suggests otherwise. Not only can Deaf communities generate language using manual gestures, but their languages share some of their design and neural mechanisms with spoken languages.

New research by Northeastern University's Prof. Iris Berent further underscores the flexibility of human language and its robustness across both spoken and signed channels of communication.

New genetic factors predisposing to schizophrenia have been uncovered in five families with several affected relatives. The psychiatric disorder can disrupt thinking, feeling, and acting, and blur the border between reality and imagination.

Dr. Debby W. Tsuang, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and Dr. Marshall S. Horwitz, professor of pathology, both at the University of Washington in Seattle, led the multi-institutional study. Tsuang is also a staff physician at the Puget Sound Veterans Administration Health Care System.

Coral Gables, Fla. – April 2, 2013 -- New research from the University of Miami School of Business Administration offers marketers a strategy for how best to structure free giveaways with products in order to maximize sales.

Could drug addiction treatment of the future be as simple as an on/off switch in the brain? A study in rats has found that stimulating a key part of the brain reduces compulsive cocaine-seeking and suggests the possibility of changing addictive behavior generally. The study, published in Nature, was conducted by scientists at the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health, and the University of California, San Francisco.

JUPITER, FL, April 3, 2013 – Human diseases caused by misfolded proteins known as prions are some of most rare yet terrifying on the planet—incurable with disturbing symptoms that include dementia, personality shifts, hallucinations and coordination problems. The most well-known of these is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which can be described as the naturally occurring human equivalent of mad cow disease.

ATLANTA – Humans' closest animal relatives, chimpanzees, have the ability to "think about thinking" – what is called "metacognition," according to new research by scientists at Georgia State University and the University at Buffalo.

Michael J. Beran and Bonnie M. Perdue of the Georgia State Language Research Center (LRC) and J. David Smith of the University at Buffalo conducted the research, published in the journal Psychological Science of the Association for Psychological Science.

By stimulating one part of the brain with laser light, researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at UC San Francisco (UCSF) have shown that they can wipe away addictive behavior in rats – or conversely turn non-addicted rats into compulsive cocaine seekers.

UCLA researchers have used a brain-imaging tool and stroke risk assessment to identify signs of cognitive decline early on in individuals who don't yet show symptoms of dementia.

The connection between stroke risk and cognitive decline has been well established by previous research. Individuals with higher stroke risk, as measured by factors like high blood pressure, have traditionally performed worse on tests of memory, attention and abstract reasoning.

Diversity training programs lead people to believe that work environments are fair even when given evidence of hiring, promotion or salary inequities, according to new findings by psychologists at the University of Washington and other universities.

The study also revealed that participants, all of whom were white, were less likely to take discrimination complaints seriously against companies who had diversity programs.

SAN FRANCISCO – April 3, 2013 – Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) continues to be the leading cause of visual impairment in the United States for people over age 65, according to a study recently published online in Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology. AMD is a potentially blinding disease that affects more than 9.1 million Americans.

Using new technology and new approaches, researchers at Lund University in Sweden hope to be able to explain why people suffer vision loss in eye diseases such as retinal detachment and glaucoma.

Research on diseases of the eye such as retinal detachment and glaucoma has until now focused on the biochemical process that takes place in the eye in connection with the diseases.

The scientific tools are not yet available to build a comprehensive map of the activity in the most complicated 3 pounds of material in the world — the human brain, scientists say in a newly published article. It describes the technologies that could be applied and developed for the Brain Activity Mapping (BAM) Project, which aims to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.