Brain

Common advice to new parents is that the more words babies hear the faster their vocabulary grows. Now new findings show that what spurs early language development isn't so much the quantity of words as the style of speech and social context in which speech occurs.

Despite the way that mobile technologies and social networking sites have made it easier to stay in touch with large numbers of acquaintances, a new study has shown that people still put most of their efforts into communicating with small numbers of close friends or family, often operating unconscious one-in, one-out policies so that communication patterns remain the same even when friendships change.

TEMPE, Ariz.—One of the most hotly debated issues in current human origins research focuses on how the 4.4 million-year-old African species Ardipithecus ramidus is related to the human lineage. "Ardi" was an unusual primate. Though it possessed a tiny brain and a grasping big toe used for clambering in the trees, it had small, humanlike canine teeth and an upper pelvis modified for bipedal walking on the ground.

PHILADELPHIA (Jan. 6, 2014)— A queen in a paperwasp colony largely stays in the dark. The worker wasps, who fly outside to seek food and building materials, see much more of the world around them. A new study indicates that the brain regions involved in sensory perception also develop differently in these castes, according to the different behavioral reliance on the senses. The study is published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

MADISON—A cancer-research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has identified a protein that may be a major culprit when breast cancer metastasizes to the brain.

Brain metastasis is a terrifying complication of advanced breast cancer, with a grim prognosis and few treatment options. The cancer's spread to the brain is often undetected until patients start to develop symptoms such as seizures, headaches, and trouble thinking. Scientists hope a better understanding of the molecular events that regulate brain metastasis will lead to earlier diagnosis and improved therapies.

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Researchers at the University at Buffalo have found a way to change alcohol drinking behavior in rodents, using the emerging technique of optogenetics, which uses light to stimulate neurons.

Their work could lead to powerful new ways to treat alcoholism, other addictions, and neurological and mental illnesses; it also helps explain the underlying neurochemical basis of drug addiction.

New Rochelle, NY, January 6, 2014—The U.S. Department of Defense funds more than 500 neurotrauma research projects totaling over $700 million. Yet there remains a large unmet medical need for effective treatments of traumatic brain injury (TBI), a major cause of disability and mortality. The U.S. Army's new strategic research plan for developing improved drug therapies for TBI is published in Journal of Neurotrauma, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers.

A Vanderbilt University Medical Center study released today shows there is no evidence that the risk of suicide differs with two commonly prescribed antidepressants prescribed to children and adolescents.

The population-based study, published today in the journal Pediatrics, tracked children and adolescents who recently began taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs).

Philadelphia, PA, January 6, 2014 – The benefit that premature infants gain from skin-to-skin contact with their mothers is measurable even 10 years after birth, reports a new study in Biological Psychiatry.

Earlier amyloid-beta assemblies may be one of the most important causes of Alzheimer's disease. Passive immunization of anti-amyloid-beta antibodies can reduce amyloid-beta burden and improved memory performance in various Alzheimer's disease animal models or patients. Screening humanized antibodies from a human Fab phage display library is an effective and quick method to obtain beta-amyloid oligomers. Thus, a recent study published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No.

Currently intraoperative monitoring using somatosensory evoked potentials has been widely recognized to prevent iatrogenic spinal cord injury. Previous studies only reported the monitoring effects of somatosensory evoked potentials after mechanical factors-caused spinal cord injury. However, spinal cord injury is not only triggered by mechanical factors, biochemical factors and vascular factors may cause spinal cord ischemia-reperfusion injury.

Diffusion-tensor imaging can be used to observe the microstructure of brain tissue. Fractional anisotropy reflects the integrity of white matter fibers. Fractional anisotropy of a young adult brain is low in gray matter, high in white matter, and highest in the splenium of the corpus callosum. A recent study by Dr. Jun Pu and colleagues from Second Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University in China investigated anisotropy values in major white matter tracts and gray matter nuclei in the brains of healthy adult rhesus monkeys.

The main component of the Chinese herb Rehmannia, mannotriose, can improve learning and memory. Dr. Lina Zhang and colleagues from Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in China used 1 × 10 mol/L mannotriose to treat primary hippocampal neurons insulted with 1 × 10 mol/L corticosterone. They found that hippocampal neuron survival rates and protein levels of glucocorticoid receptor, serum and glucocorticoid-regulated protein kinase, and brain-derived neurotrophic factor were all dramatically decreased after high-concentration corticosterone-induced injury.

Gabapentin is a gamma-aminobutyric acid derivative, and was approved for the treatment of neuropathic pain by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2002. However, little evidence is available on the effects and me-chanisms of action of gabapentin during the migraine attack period. A recent study by Yanbo Zhang and colleague from Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University in China showed that excitatory amino acids and protein kinase C are involved in the formation and maintenance of central sensitization during migraine.

People with severe mental illness such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder have a higher risk for substance use, especially cigarette smoking, and protective factors usually associated with lower rates of substance use do not exist in severe mental illness, according to a new study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health.