Brain

ANN ARBOR --- Using the hi-tech tools of a new field called neurogenetics and a few simple questions for parents, a University of Michigan researcher is beginning to understand which boys are simply being boys and which may be headed for trouble.

“When young children lie or cheat or steal, parents naturally wonder if they’ll grow out of it,” says Luke Hyde, a U-M psychologist who is studying the development and treatment of antisocial behavior.

ITHACA, N.Y. – Cornell University engineers have taught a robot to work in a mock-supermarket checkout line, modifying a Baxter robot from Rethink Robotics in Boston to "coactively learn" from humans and make adjustments while an action is in progress.

"We give the robot a lot of flexibility in learning," said Ashutosh Saxena, assistant professor of computer science. "The robot can learn from corrective human feedback in order to plan its actions that are suitable to the environment and the objects present."

LA JOLLA, CA – November 4, 2013 – The generic drug gabapentin, which is already widely prescribed for epilepsy and some kinds of pain, appears to be safe and effective in the treatment of alcohol dependence. The finding comes from a 150-patient randomized, placebo-controlled, double blind clinical trial conducted by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI).

November 4, 2013 04:00 PM EST WASHINGTON, D.C. A national panel of medical education experts recommends that osteopathic medical schools, which enroll nearly one in four medical students in the U.S., develop programs in partnership with teaching hospitals and other training sites to provide more hands-on learning, and provide students with the opportunity to advance in their training based upon satisfying measures of competency instead of a prescribed number of months of study.

For the first time in a large study sample, the decline in brain function in normal aging is conclusively shown to be influenced by genes, say researchers from the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio and Yale University.

Marriage can be a battlefield. But a new study conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, has found that, when it comes to keeping the peace, it's more important for wives – than for husbands – to calm down after a heated argument.

While both spouses were equally able to cool down during conflicts, the husbands' emotional regulation had little or no bearing on long-term marital satisfaction, according to the study's findings published online today (Nov. 4) in the journal, Emotion.

PITTSBURGH—The failure to detect infrequent, but obvious security threats at airport screenings and other checkpoints may have less to do with incompetence or poor training than a human tendency to overlook rare events. But a Carnegie Mellon University researcher suggests guards could improve their detection rates the same way adults learn vocabulary words — through repetition.

A paper published in a special edition of the journal Science proposes a novel understanding of brain architecture using a network representation of connections within the primate cortex. Zoltán Toroczkai, professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Network Science and Applications, is a co-author of the paper "Cortical High-Density Counterstream Architectures."

A study in The Journal of Cell Biology describes how neurons activate the protein PP1, providing key insights into the biology of learning and memory.

WASHINGTON, DC (November 4, 2013)—In recent years, there has been growing recognition that mental health status impacts physical health and vice versa. As a result, there is growing interest in the coordination of medical and behavioral health services as part of patient-centered primary health care. A new analysis by a team led by researchers at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS) examines factors affecting the integration of mental health and substance abuse treatment services with medical care at community health centers.

For long, brain development and maturation has been thought to be a one-way process, in which plasticity diminishes with age. The possibility that the adult brain can revert to a younger state and regain plasticity has not been considered, often. In a paper appearing on November 4 in the online open-access journal Molecular Brain, Dr.

Philadelphia, PA, November 4, 2013 – Children of survivors of extremely stressful life events face adjustment challenges of their own, as has been most carefully studied among the children of Nazi Death Camp survivors. This "intergenerational" transmission of stress response has been studied predominately from the psychological perspective. However, recent research points to biological contributions as well.

Non-motor symptoms, including abnormalities in cognition, mental behaviors, autonomic nerves and sensory perception, have the greatest effect on the quality of in Parkinson's disease patient life. Voxel-based morphometry can be used to quantitatively compare structural differences and func-tional changes of gray matter in subjects. According to a study, Gray matter images of 32 Parkinson's disease patients and 25 healthy controls were compared using voxel-based morphometry to investigate the correlation between brain structural loss and non-motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease.

Parents who conceive through assisted reproductive technologies (ART) are likely to receive different medical advice in relation to prenatal testing than those who conceive naturally, academics have suggested.

An international study has revealed that almost 45% of clinicians would immediately recommend a 37-year-old mother undergo amniocentesis – an invasive prenatal test which screens for Down's syndrome – if she had conceived naturally. However, just 19% of doctors would recommend the procedure for a mother whose baby had been conceived through assisted technologies.

Metformin may reduce food intake and body weight, but the anorexigenic effects of metformin are still poorly understood. Under normal physiological conditions, Prof. Zheng Zhao and his team from the Key Laboratory of Brain Functional Genomics, Ministry of Education, China observed the changes in food intake after administration of metformin.