Brain

New recommendations to limit the work hours of medical residents could cost the nation's teaching hospitals about $1.6 billion annually to hire substitute workers, according to a new report from the RAND Corporation and UCLA.

While society may benefit if such changes reduce medical errors as intended, limiting trainee workloads would create a substantial new expense for academic medical centers, according to the study published in the May 21 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Washington, D.C. -- This is the time of year when even teens who have never tried a drop of alcohol may be tempted. Middle and high school proms and graduation are big events and there will be multiple parties to attend and a wide array of opportunities for alcohol to be served.

Assume that your child will be tempted to drink alcohol at the end of the school year, advises the Science Inside Alcohol Project of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). So start talking to your child about alcohol right now.

Cambridge University researchers have discovered that whether someone is a 'people-person' may depend on the structure of their brain: the greater the concentration of brain tissue in certain parts of the brain, the more likely they are to be a warm, sentimental person.

Scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have discovered a set of brain proteins responsible for some of the most common and devastating brain diseases. The proteins underlie epilepsy, depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disease, mental retardation and neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's and Huntington's diseases.

University of Minnesota McKnight professor and Director of Center for Neuroengineering Bin He has developed a new technique that has led to preliminary successes in noninvasive imaging of seizure foci. He's technique promises to play an important role in the treatment of epileptic seizures.

To view a video explaining the procedure, visit: http://www1.umn.edu/urelate/newsservice/Multimedia_Videos/bin_he.htm

People who can speak two languages are more adept at learning a new foreign language than their monolingual counterparts, according to research conducted at Northwestern University. And their bilingual advantage persists even when the new language they study is completely different from the languages they already know.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 19, 2009 – Some people say they never forget a face, a claim now bolstered by psychologists at Harvard University who've discovered a group they call "super-recognizers": those who can easily recognize someone they met in passing, even many years later.

Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Sinatra and Hendrix – these and many other of the world's most famous musicians have had "perfect" or "absolute" pitch. The ability, defined as recognizing the pitch of a musical note without having to compare it to any reference note, is quite rare in the U.S. and Europe, where only about one person in 10,000 is thought to have it. Often lumped into the mysterious realm of Talent, perfect pitch is – according to Diana Deutsch of the University of California, San Diego – probably more the result of nurture than nature, more environment than genes.

PASADENA, Calif.--You can tell without looking whether you've been stuck by a pin or burnt by a match. But how? In research that overturns conventional wisdom, a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), have shown that this sensory discrimination begins in the skin at the very earliest stages of neuronal information processing, with different populations of sensory neurons--called nociceptors--responding to different kinds of painful stimuli.

AUGUSTA, Ga. - A new protein identified as critical to insulating the wiring that connects the brain and body could one day be a treatment target for divergent diseases, from rare ones that lower the pain threshold to cancer, Medical College of Georgia researchers say.

WASHINGTON – Helping middle school students with their homework may not be the best way to get them on the honor roll. But telling them how important academic performance is to their future job prospects and providing specific strategies to study and learn might clinch the grades, according to a research review.

Studying the way a person's brain 'sings' could improve our understanding of conditions such as epilepsy and schizophrenia and help develop better treatments, scientists at Cardiff University have discovered.

Research by a team working in Cardiff University's Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC) has discovered that a person's brain produces a unique electrical oscillation at a particular frequency when a person looks at a visual pattern.

Chinese researchers have unlocked the mechanism of an emerging mind-body technique that produces measurable changes in attention and stress reduction in just five days of practice.

The practice -- integrative body-mind training (IBMT) -- was adapted from traditional Chinese medicine in the 1990s in China, where it is practiced by thousands of people. It is now being taught to undergraduates involved in research on the method at the University of Oregon.

Abnormal levels of trace elements may explain dialysis morbidity. A systematic review published in the open access journal BMC Medicine has shown that, compared to healthy controls, dialysis patients have significantly different blood concentrations of trace elements.