Brain

The Toxoplasma parasite can be deadly, causing spontaneous abortion in pregnant women or killing immune-compromised patients, but it has even stranger effects in mice.

Infected mice lose their fear of cats, which is good for both cats and the parasite, because the cat gets an easy meal and the parasite gets into the cat's intestinal track, the only place it can sexually reproduce and continue its cycle of infection.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- If you got beat up by a bully on your walk home from school every day, you would probably become very afraid of the spot where you usually met him. However, if the bully moved out of town, you would gradually cease to fear that area.

Neuroscientists call this phenomenon "memory extinction": Conditioned responses fade away as older memories are replaced with new experiences.

MILWAUKEE – The loss of estrogens at menopause increases a woman's risk of dementia and Alzheimer's disease, yet hormone replacement therapy can cause harmful side effects.

Knowing the exact mechanism of estrogen activation in the brain could lead to new targets for drug development that would provide middle-aged women the cognitive benefits of hormone replacement therapy without increasing their risk for cardiovascular disease or breast cancer.

The development of fine motor control—the ability to use your fingertips to manipulate objects—takes longer than previously believed, and isn't entirely the result of brain development, according to a pair of complementary studies.

The research opens up the potential to use therapy to continue improving the motor control skills of children suffering from neurodevelopmental disorders such as cerebral palsy, a blanket term for central motor disorders that affects about 764,000 children and adults nationwide

What if doctors could visualize all of the processes that take place in the brain during the development and progression of Alzheimer's disease? Such a window would provide a powerful aid for diagnosing the condition, monitoring the effectiveness of treatments, and testing new preventive and therapeutic agents.

Market bubbles that lead to financial crashes may be self-made because of instinctive biological mechanisms in traders' brains that lead them to try and predict how others behave, according to a study part-funded by the Wellcome Trust.

The research offers the first insight into the processes in the brain that underpin financial decisions and behaviour leading to the formation of market bubbles. Publication of the study coincides with the five year anniversary of the infamous collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank in 2008.

Several psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, autism and intellectual disabilities share the same brain cell abnormalities: the contacts (synapses) between brain cells are poorly developed and not functional. Claudia Bagni and her group associated with the VIB, KU Leuven, and Tor Vergata University in Italy, in collaboration with leading laboratories in the Netherlands, France, USA and UK have unraveled how a single protein (CYFIP1) orchestrates two biological processes to form proper contacts between brain cells.

A new technique that allows scientists to measure the electrical activity in the communication junctions of the nervous systems has been developed by a researcher at Queen Mary University of London.

The junctions in the central nervous systems that enable the information to flow between neurons, known as synapses, are around 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair (one micrometer and less) and as such are difficult to target let alone measure.

EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Physical, sexual and emotional abuse among young gay black men is a pervasive problem, yet there remains a lack of social services and resources available to help them, a Michigan State University scholar argues in a new study.

The trauma they experience -- often at a young age -- is related to depression, substance abuse and high-risk sexual behavior, said Robin Lin Miller, professor of psychology.

The obesity epidemic has massive socio-economic consequences, and decades of health campaigns have not made significant headway. Researchers at the University of Copenhagen are therefore pursuing the development of new, interdisciplinary methods for preventing and treating this widespread problem.

The subjects in the test group that exercised the least talk about increased energy levels and a higher motivation for exercising and pursuing a healthy everyday life.

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Children with a genetic disorder called 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, who frequently are believed to also have autism, often may be misidentified because the social impairments associated with their developmental delay may mimic the features of autism, a study by researchers with the UC Davis MIND Institute suggests.

A team from the University of Rochester Medical Center has shown scientifically what many women report anecdotally: that the breast cancer drug tamoxifen is toxic to cells of the brain and central nervous system, producing mental fogginess similar to "chemo brain."

However, in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers also report they've discovered an existing drug compound that appears to counteract or rescue brain cells from the adverse effects of the breast cancer drug.

Washington, DC — People who are better able to move to a beat show more consistent brain responses to speech than those with less rhythm, according to a study published in the September 18 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings suggest that musical training could possibly sharpen the brain's response to language.

BOSTON (Sept. 17, 2013) — Researchers from the Eaton-Peabody Laboratories of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Harvard Medical School have created a new mouse model in which by expressing a gene in the inner ear hair cells -- the sensory cells that detect sound and sense balance -- protects the mice from age-related hearing loss (ARHL) and noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL), the two most common forms of deafness.

The findings of a Northwestern University study of more than 100 high school students lend proof to the surprising link between music, rhythmic abilities and language skills.

The study -- the first to provide biological evidence linking the ability to keep a beat to the neural encoding of speech sounds -- has significant implications for reading, according to Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory.