Brain

WASHINGTON — A nationwide study of children who have witnessed domestic violence found that parents or caregivers were physically injured in more than a third of the cases, yet only a small fraction of offenders went to jail and just one in four incidents resulted in police reports, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

LA JOLLA, CA—April 6, 2014—A study led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has helped solve a long-standing mystery about the sense of touch.

NEW YORK, NY, April 6, 2014 — In a study published in the April 6 online edition of the journal Nature, a team of Columbia University Medical Center researchers led by Ellen Lumpkin, PhD, associate professor of somatosensory biology, solve an age-old mystery of touch: how cells just beneath the skin surface enable us to feel fine details and textures.

A new UCLA psychology study provides evidence that being overweight makes people tired and sedentary — not the other way around.

Life scientists led by UCLA's Aaron Blaisdell placed 32 female rats on one of two diets for six months. The first, a standard rat's diet, consisted of relatively unprocessed foods like ground corn and fish meal. The ingredients in the second were highly processed, of lower quality and included substantially more sugar — a proxy for a junk food diet.

A new way to artificially control muscles using light, with the potential to restore function to muscles paralysed by conditions such as motor neuron disease and spinal cord injury, has been developed by scientists at UCL and King's College London.

The technique involves transplanting specially-designed motor neurons created from stem cells into injured nerve branches. These motor neurons are designed to react to pulses of blue light, allowing scientists to fine-tune muscle control by adjusting the intensity, duration and frequency of the light pulses.

Deep brain stimulation has been widely used to treat patients with movement disorders and increasing attention has been paid to its use in the treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders. However, the influence of subthalamic nucleus or pallidal deep brain stimulation on cerebral vasculature is poorly understood. Even though the metabolic changes caused by deep brain stimulation are being studied using positron emission tomography, the structural changes in cerebral areas like the intracerebral vasculature have not yet been evaluated. Dr.

Activated microglia-mediated inflammation promotes neuronal damage under cerebral hypoxic-ischemic conditions, so it is likely that inhibiting hypoxia-induced activation of microglia will alleviate neuronal damage. To test this hypothesis, Dr. Lining Ke and co-workers from Southern Medical University and Fujian Medical University in China co-cultured ginsenoside Rb1, an active component of ginseng, and cortical neurons.

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Life Science Technologies, in collaboration with Osaka City University and Kansai University of Welfare Sciences, have used functional PET imaging to show that levels of neuroinflammation, or inflammation of the nervous system, are higher in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome than in healthy people.

Chronic fatigue syndrome, which is also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, is a debilitating condition characterized by chronic, profound, and disabling fatigue. Unfortunately, the causes are not well understood.

Suppose you're trying to navigate an unfamiliar section of a big city, and you're using a particular cluster of skyscrapers as a reference point. Traffic and one-way streets force you to take some odd turns, and for a while you lose sight of your landmarks. When they reappear, in order to use them for navigation, you have to be able to identify them as the same buildings you were tracking before — as well as your orientation relative to them.

(PHILADEPHIA) – Parents who have not attended college are at a disadvantage when it comes to talking about higher education with their kids – yet these are the students who most need a parent's guidance.

A new approach developed and tested by researchers at University of the Pacific's Gladys L. Benerd School of Education may help solve the problem. It was presented today at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. [April 4, 8:15 a.m. EDT, Philadelphia Convention Center Terrace Level, Terrace IV]

Montreal, April 3, 2014 – Bruno Giros, PhD, a researcher at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute and a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University, has demonstrated, for the first time, the role that dopamine plays in a region of the brain called the hippocampus. Published in Biological Psychiatry, this discovery opens the door to a better understanding of psychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia.

BUFFALO, N.Y. — A joint study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, the University at Buffalo, and the University of Toronto has found that a computer–vision system can distinguish between real or faked expressions of pain more accurately than can humans.

This ability has obvious uses for uncovering pain malingering — fabricating or exaggerating the symptoms of pain for a variety of motives — but the system also could be used to detect deceptive actions in the realms of security, psychopathology, job screening, medicine and law.

Analyzing federal health care data, a team of researchers led by a Johns Hopkins specialist concluded that doctors overlook or discount the early signs of potentially disabling strokes in tens of thousands of American each year, a large number of them visitors to emergency rooms complaining of dizziness or headaches.

The default mode network is a key area in the resting state, involving the posterior cingulate cortex, precuneus, medial prefrontal and lateral temporal cortices, and is characterized by balanced positive and negative connections classified as the "hubs" of structural and functional connectivity in brain studies. Resting-state functional connectivity MRI is based on the observation that brain regions exhibit correlated slow fluctuations at rest, and has become a widely used tool for investigating spontaneous brain activity.

A team of researchers from the Center for Imaging Science at the Johns Hopkins University and the CMLA of the École Normale Supérieure Cachan have demonstrated new algorithmic technologies for the parametric representation of human shape and form. Coupled with advanced imaging technologies, this presents opportunities for tracking soft-tissue deformations associated with cardiovascular studies, radiation treatment planning in Oncology, and neurodegenerative brain illnesses.