Brain

Smokers who are addicted to cocaine or methamphetamine can quit smoking while being treated for their stimulant addiction, without interfering with stimulant addiction treatment. This is according to new research funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- To evaluate school quality, states require students to take standardized tests; in many cases, passing those tests is necessary to receive a high-school diploma. These high-stakes tests have also been shown to predict students' future educational attainment and adult employment and income.

Augusta, Ga. – A faultily formed memory sounds like hitting random notes on a keyboard while a proper one sounds more like a song, scientists say.

When they turned off a major switch for learning and memory, brain cells communicated, but the relationship was superficial, said Dr. Joe Tsien, neuroscientist at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University and Co-Director of the GRU Brain & Behavior Discovery Institute.

Historically, social justice and action for change have been among the nursing profession's core values. However, current curricular content on social entrepreneurship for nurses is not as well developed as the educational programs for students in business, engineering or public policy.

A mechanism in the brain which controls tics in children with Tourette Syndrome (TS) has been discovered by scientists at The University of Nottingham.

The study, which has been published in the British Psychological Society's Journal of Neuropsychology, could herald new non-drug therapies to help young people with TS overcome the repetitive physical movements and vocal sounds which characterise their condition.

The work was funded with a £150,000 grant from the James Tudor Foundation and was carried out by PhD student Amelia Draper.

Johns Hopkins surgeons say skipping one commonly taken step during a routine procedure to insert a wire mesh stent into a partially blocked carotid artery appears to prevent patients from developing dangerously low blood pressure, an extremely slow heart rate or even a stroke or heart attack.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — A new study contradicts the popular theory that students perform better when surrounded by higher achieving classmates.

Michigan State University's Scott Imberman and colleagues found that marginal students in a middle school gifted and talented program – despite learning alongside the "best and brightest" – performed no better on national tests than a similar group of students who didn't qualify for the program.

Muscle cell therapy to treat some degenerative diseases, including Muscular Dystrophy, could be a more realistic clinical possibility, now that scientists have found a way to isolate muscle cells from embryonic tissue.

PhD Student Bianca Borchin and Associate Professor Tiziano Barberi from the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (ARMI) at Monash University have developed a method to generate skeletal muscle cells, paving the way for future applications in regenerative medicine.

COLLEGE PARK, MD—You're shopping for holiday gifts when you spot someone pocketing a nice pair of leather gloves. What do you do?

A new study by University of Maryland researchers appearing this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B predicts that whether you alert a manager to the theft or decide to do nothing may depend on whether you're shopping in a local store where you know the owners or in a city far from home.

Charlottesville, VA (December 10, 2013). It started as a medical mystery and became a cautionary tale. Fatal hemorrhages occurred in the brains of two patients several days after successful cerebral aneurysm treatment with the Pipeline™ Embolization Device (PED). These hemorrhages were located in the same vascular territory as the treated aneurysms but were not close enough to the lesions to be directly linked to the aneurysms or their treatment.

Irvine, Calif. — Stepping away from the television, computer screen or smartphone in the aftermath of terrorist attacks or mass shootings may be beneficial to your mental health. That's the takeaway from a new study by UC Irvine researchers showing that six or more daily hours of exposure to media coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings in the week afterward was linked to more acute stress than having been at or near the marathon. Acute stress symptoms increased with each additional hour of bombing-related media exposure via television, social media, videos, print or radio.

Scientists from Case Western Reserve University and University of Kansas Medical Center have restored behavior—in this case, the ability to reach through a narrow opening and grasp food—using a neural prosthesis in a rat model of brain injury.

In mice with a rodent form of multiple sclerosis (MS), vitamin D appears to block damage-causing immune cells from migrating to the central nervous system, offering a potential explanation for why the so-called "sunshine vitamin" may prevent or ease symptoms of the neurodegenerative disease, according to results of a study at Johns Hopkins.

Baltimore, MD—In researching neural pathways, it helps to establish an analogous relationship between a region of the human brain and the brains of more-easily studied animal species. New work from a team led by Carnegie's Marnie Halpern hones in on one particular region of the zebrafish brain that could help us understand the circuitry underlying nicotine addiction. It is published the week of December 9 by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- To learn new motor skills, the brain must be plastic: able to rapidly change the strengths of connections between neurons, forming new patterns that accomplish a particular task. However, if the brain were too plastic, previously learned skills would be lost too easily.

A new computational model developed by MIT neuroscientists explains how the brain maintains the balance between plasticity and stability, and how it can learn very similar tasks without interference between them.