Brain

DALLAS – Aug. 11, 2014 – Two years ago, the parents of Chloe Olivarez watched painfully as their daughter experienced epileptic seizures hundreds of times a day. The seizures, caused by a rare metabolic disease that depleted her brain of needed glucose, left Chloe nearly unresponsive, and slow to develop.

Within hours, treatment with an edible oil dramatically reduced the number of seizures for then-4-year-old Chloe, one of 14 participants in a small UT Southwestern Medical Center clinical trial.

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. (August 11, 2014) --The human brain remains one of the least understood organs in the human body, because of its complexity and the difficulty of studying its physiology in the living body. Tufts University researchers today announced development of the first reported complex three-dimensional model made of brain-like cortical tissue that exhibits biochemical and electrophysiological responses and can function in the laboratory for months. The engineered tissue model offers new options for studying brain function, disease and trauma, and treatment.

Bioengineers have created three-dimensional brain-like tissue that functions like and has structural features similar to tissue in the rat brain and that can be kept alive in the lab for more than two months.

Empathy is important for navigating complex social situations, and is considered a highly desirable trait. Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, discussed how exposure to narrative fiction may improve our ability to understand what other people are thinking or feeling in his session at the American Psychological Association's 122nd Annual Convention.

Exposure to stories

Researchers have strived for years to determine how neurons are produced and integrated into the brain throughout adult life. In an intriguing twist, scientists reporting in the August 11 issue of the Cell Press journal Developmental Cell provide evidence that adult-born neurons are derived from a special type of circulating blood cell produced by the immune system. The findings—which were made in crayfish—suggest that the immune system may contribute to the development of the unknown role of certain brain diseases in the development of brain and other tissues.

West Orange, NJ. August 11, 2014 -- Kessler Foundation scientists have published results of cognitive research that show the negative effects that unexpected task constraint, following self-generated task choice, has on task-switching performance. The article, "You can't always get what you want: The influence of unexpected task constraint on voluntary task switching", was published online on June 11 by The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (DOI:10.1080/17470218.2014.917115). The authors are Starla Weaver, PhD, and Glenn Wylie, DPhil, of Kessler Foundation, John J.

As a national push continues to recruit talented girls and young women into math and science-related careers, a new study underlines the importance of mentoring and other social support systems for women pursuing those research professions. Mary Jean Amon, a doctoral student in the University of Cincinnati's psychology program, will present her findings at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in Washington, D.C.

Philadelphia, PA, August 11, 2014 – Testosterone, a steroid hormone, is well known to contribute to aggressive behavior in males, but the neural circuits through which testosterone exerts these effects have not been clear.

Prior studies found that the administration of a single dose of testosterone influenced brain circuit function. Surprisingly, however, these studies were conducted exclusively in women.

Visual impairment comes in many forms, and it's on the rise in America.

A University of Cincinnati experiment aimed at this diverse and growing population could spark development of advanced tools to help all the aging baby boomers, injured veterans, diabetics and white-cane-wielding pedestrians navigate the blurred edges of everyday life.

These tools could be based on a device called the Enactive Torch, which looks like a combination between a TV remote and Captain Kirk's weapon of choice. But it can do much greater things than change channels or stun aliens.

Designing structures and devices that protect the body from shock and vibrations during high-velocity impacts is a universal challenge.

Scientists and engineers focusing on this challenge might make advances by studying the unique morphology of the woodpecker, whose body functions as an excellent anti-shock structure.

Discovery of a new mechanism of drug action could lead to the next generation of drugs to treat schizophrenia.

Affecting one per cent of the world's population, schizophrenia is a major health condition. It affects a person's ability to think, feel and act and is associated with distressing symptoms including hallucinations and delusions.

Autophagy is a basic catabolic mechanism by which unnecessary or dysfunctional cellular components are degraded by lysosomes. Damaged organelles such as mitochondria are scavenged by autophagic processes to maintain the stability of nerve cells. Excessive activation of autophagy leads to cell death. However, it remains unclear whether autophagy affects hippocampal neuronal injury in vascular dementia. Prof. Bin Liu and co-workers from the Affiliated Hospital of Hebei United University, China intraperitoneally injected wortmannin into a rat model of vascular dementia.

In the central nervous system, Asiaticoside has been shown to attenuate in vitro neuronal damage caused by exposure to β-amyloid. However, its potential neuroprotective properties in glutamate-induced excitotoxicity have not been fully studied. Researchers from Fourth Military Medical University of Chinese PLA, China reported that pretreatment with Asiaticoside decreased neuronal cell loss in a concentration-dependent manner and restored changes in expression of apoptotic-related proteins Bcl-2 and Bax.

The fornix, a part of the Papez circuit, transfers information of episodic memory between the medial temporal lobe and the medial diencephalon. It is difficult to precisely assess the fornix due to its long, thin appearance and its location within the brain. In addition, discrimination of the whole fornix from adjacent neural structure using conventional brain CT or MRI is impossible. By contrast, diffusion tensor tractography (DTT) has enabled three-dimensional visualization of the fornix, and many studies have reported on fornix injury using DTT. Dr.

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 10, 2014 — No longer just fantastical fodder for sci-fi buffs, cyborg technology is bringing us tangible progress toward real-life electronic skin, prosthetics and ultraflexible circuits. Now taking this human-machine concept to an unprecedented level, pioneering scientists are working on the seamless marriage between electronics and brain signaling with the potential to transform our understanding of how the brain works — and how to treat its most devastating diseases.