Brain

Children believe the world is far more segregated by gender than it actually is, implies a new study led by a Michigan State University scholar.

Jennifer Watling Neal and colleagues examined classroom friendships in five U.S. elementary schools. Their findings, published in the journal Child Development, found boys and girls had no problems being friends together but for some reason had a perception that only boys played with boys and girls played with girls.

The belief that we consider ourselves better than our peers holds true to convicted criminals as well.

Research from the University of Southampton has shown that prisoners believe themselves to have more pro-social characteristics – such as kindness, morality, self-control, and generosity – than non-prisoners.

The research also showed that prisoners did not rate themselves as more law abiding than non-prisoners, but they did rate themselves as equal.

A study led by University of British Columbia scientists calls into question a widely used method of diagnosing acute mountain sickness.

The Lake Louise Score Questionnaire has been used for more than two decades to determine if someone was suffering from acute mountain sickness (AMS), which strikes people at elevations above 2,500 metres. The lack of oxygen causes a spectrum of ailments, from headaches to vomiting to potentially fatal swelling of the brain or lungs.

An Oxford University study has concluded that our ancient ancestors who lived in East Africa between 2.4 million-1.4 million years ago survived mainly on a diet of tiger nuts. Tiger nuts are edible grass bulbs still eaten in parts of the world today. The study published in the journal, PLOS ONE, also suggests that these early hominins may have sought additional nourishment from fruits and invertebrates, like worms and grasshoppers.

One of the primary social motivations for scientific research is the ability to make better decisions based on the results. But whether it is deciding what material to use in making a solar panel, what antibiotic to use on an infection or when to launch a satellite, most decisions involve weighing multiple factors, all of which interact with one another in determining the best course of action.

A brain protein, S100B, which may soon be detected by a simple finger-stick blood test, accurately distinguishes a sports-related concussion from sports exertion, according to a study of college athletes in Rochester, N.Y., and Munich, Germany, and published in PLOS ONE by Jeffrey J. Bazarian, M.D., professor at the University of Rochester.

NEW YORK, NY (January 8, 2014) – Scientists at The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute in collaboration with scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) successfully generated a stem cell model of familial Alzheimer's disease (FAD). Using this stem cell model, researchers identified fourteen genes that may be implicated in the disease and one gene in particular that shows the importance that inflammation may play in the brain of Alzheimer's patients.

Common methods of assessing mental or physical disorders may consistently underestimate the prevalence of mental disorders among middle-aged and older adults, a new study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has found.

The analysis, led by postdoctoral fellow Dr. Yoichiro Takayanagi, and published in the January 8 online edition of JAMA Psychiatry, reveals substantial discrepancies among mid-life and late-life adults in reporting past mental health disorders, including depression, compared with physical disorders such as arthritis and hypertension.

LA JOLLA, CA - January 8, 2014 - Collaborating scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the University of Camerino in Italy have published new findings on a system in the brain that naturally moderates the effects of stress. The findings confirm the importance of this stress-damping system, known as the nociceptin system, as a potential target for therapies against anxiety disorders and other stress-related conditions.

Even before babies have language skills or much information about social structures, they can infer whether other people are likely to be friends by observing their likes and dislikes, a new study on infant cognition has found.

The results offer a new window into humans' earliest understanding of the social world around them. It suggests that even nine-month-old infants can engage in reasoning about whether the people they observe are friends or not.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — If you're one of the millions of people who count losing weight among their top New Year's resolutions, you might want to pay careful attention to some new findings by UC Santa Barbara psychology professor Brenda Major.

It turns out that the weight-stigmatizing messages presented by the media — the ones that characterize overweight individuals as lazy, weak-willed, self-indulgent and contributing to rising health care costs — may be tipping the scales in the wrong direction. Designed to encourage weight loss, they may actually have the opposite effect.

Today the scientific journal Neuron published results on the Roche-designed Brain Shuttle technology that efficiently transfers investigational antibodies from the blood through the blood-brain barrier (BBB) into the brain in preclinical models1. Roche Pharma Early Research and Development (pRED) scientists found that such enhanced transfer of antibodies through the BBB was associated with a marked improvement in amyloid reduction in the brain of a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease.

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and deadly form of primary malignant brain cancer accounting for approximately 15% of all brain tumours and occurring mostly in adults between the ages of 45 and 70. The aggressive recurrent nature of this cancer is only temporarily contained by combined surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment. The recurrence of GBM is usually fatal, resulting in an average patient survival time of less than two years.

Research from Western University (London, Canada) has revealed a possible new target for treating movement disorders such as Huntington's disease (HD) and Parkinson's disease. Stephen Ferguson, PhD, a scientist at Western's Robarts Research Institute, and Fabiola Ribeiro, PhD, of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil found a definite improvement in motor behaviors in a HD mouse model when one of the major neurotransmitters in the brain, called Metabotropic Glutamate Receptor 5 (mGluR5) was deleted. The research is published online in Human Molecular Genetics.

The World health Organization calls depression "the leading cause of disability worldwide," causing more years of disability than cancer, HIV/AIDS, and cardiovascular and respiratory diseases combined. In any given year, 5-7% of the world's population experiences a major depressive episode, and one in six people will at some point suffer from the disease.