Have you ever lost your keys or stuck the milk in the cupboard and the cereal in the refrigerator and wondered what happened? Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have a new explanation. They found that some nerve cells in a sleep-deprived yet awake brain can briefly go “off line,” into a sleep-like state, while the rest of the brain appears awake. ...

A study, completed by researchers from Trinity College and the Research Institute for a Tobacco Free Society, Dublin, Ireland, compares former smokers to current smokers, and obtains insight into how to quit smoking might be discovered by studying the brains of those who have successfully managed to do so. ...

From a glance at the magazine stands, Americans appear obsessed with losing weight, cutting their cardiac risks and seeking to improve their odds against cancer. But where’s the focus on brain health? The brain always has been mysterious and many people seem to believe little can be done to keep it sharp or to reduce its risk of injury and disease. Too many of us think it is a matter of our genes or happens ...

By shedding new light on how cells migrate in the developing brain, researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center also may have found a new mechanism by which other types of cells, including cancer cells, travel within the body. The findings by Jonathan Cooper, Ph.D., member and director of the Hutchinson Center’s Basic Sciences Division, and Yves Jossin, Ph.D., a research fellow in Cooper’s laborat ...

Engineering researchers the University of Southern California have made a significant breakthrough in the use of nanotechnologies for the construction of a synthetic brain. They have built a carbon nanotube synapse circuit whose behavior in tests reproduces the function of a neuron, the building block of the brain. ...

Research at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California's (USC) Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute shows for the first time that the human placenta plays an active role in synthesizing serotonin, paving the way to new treatment strategies that could mitigate health impacts, such as cardiovascular disease and mental illness. The groundbreaking findings, conducted with researchers from Van ...

A team of neuroscientists at the University of Leicester, UK, in collaboration with researchers from Poland and Japan, has announced a breakthrough in the understanding of the ‘brain chemistry’ that triggers our response to highly stressful and traumatic events. The discovery of a critical and previously unknown pathway in the brain that is linked to our response to stress is announced today in the journal ...

Activating neurons in a brain structure linked to disappointment increased depression-like behaviors in rats, while suppressing the neurons' activity reduced the behaviors, according to an NIMH-funded study. The findings help to explain previous research linking this brain structure to depression in humans and highlight a cellular process that had not been previously explored in mood disorders research. The ...

Queen's University professor Kate Harkness has found that a history of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse in childhood substantially increases the risk of depression in adolescence by altering a person's neuroendocrine response to stress. Adolescents with a history of maltreatment and a mild level of depression were found to release much more of the stress hormone cortisol than is normal in response to ps ...

If a friend or relative won $100 and then offered you a few dollars, would you accept this windfall? The logical answer would seem to be, sure, why not? "But human decision making does not always appear rational," said Read Montague, professor of physics at Virginia Tech and director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. The publisher made the original resear ...