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We thought we knew what neurons looked like. Guess again.
Researchers have shown that an essential protein involved in Alzheimer’s causes cells to overheat, which may explain how the disease appears.
Bliss, it seems, may actually come in a pill after all.
Bionic chips could one day offer a novel therapy for sleep apnoea and heart failure.
"We might think of different scenarios where people aren't motivated like depression and block these neurons and receptors to help them feel better," the authors explain.
This is an exciting new twist on neurogenesis.
Larger branched neural extensions (dendrites) may make some people more intelligent.
Are these neurons what makes humans so smart? Could be.
Physical exercise is critical to brain health.
The results astonishingly suggest that Alzheimer's effects on the brain could be reversed.
German researchers reprogramed brain cells to investigate how place memories are formed.
Neurogenesis fully stops after the age of thirteen, researchers suggest.
In a dark way, these findings are quite soothing.
It's really, really good for you.
A groundbreaking study suggests the human brain works fundamentally different than science thought.
Sleep is as mysterious as it is vital for our wellbeing.
Science is getting closer to a computer that mimics the human brain.
A 28-year old who has been paralyzed for more than a decade following a spinal cord injury has become the first person to be able to “feel” physical sensations, through a special prosthetic developed by DARPA – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a US agency responsible for the development of emerging technologies, mostly for military purposes. The […]
The human brain is one of the biggest and most intriguing mysteries scientists are tackling. It's an incredibly active, bustling place that keeps us going and effectively makes us the people we are. There are about 100 billion neurons processing and transmitting information through electrical and chemical signals and to make things even more complicated, each of these neurons has about 10,000 different connections to neighboring brain cells.
The human brain is often described as the most beautiful organism in the Universe. We say this because of the beautiful things the mind, sustained by the brain, can create and imagine. Greg Dunn earned his PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania in 2011, but while his colleagues are fiddling with microscopes to unravel the inner workings of brain cells, he works with a paintbrush to magnify neurons on a canvas. His work shows a brain whose beauty transcends romanticism and awes in its raw form.
For a while, the general consensus was that long term memories are stored in synapses. A new UCLA research topples this paradigm after experiments made on snails suggests that synapses aren’t that crucial storing memories as previously believed, but only facilitate the transfer of information someplace else, most likely in the nucleus of the neurons themselves […]
Oh, boy. This week’s freaky science story comes from the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York where researchers grafted mouse pups with human glial cells. Within one year, half the brain cells of the by now adult mice were human. A study made last year by the same team suggests that mice whose […]
A Chinese woman has shocked doctors when it was revealed that she reached 24 years without having a cerebellum. It is not the first time a person was living fine without having a cerebellum, but she entered an extremely select group, which only features 9 other people. The woman checked in at the Chinese PLA General Hospital […]
Scientists have "reprogrammed" skin cells to act as neurons and then successfully implanted them into the brain of mice. After 6 months, the new nerve tissue was fully functional and there was no sign of rejection or other side effects.
Researchers have erased and then reactivated memories in rats, profoundly impacting the animals’ reaction to past events. This is the first study ever to demonstrate the ability to selectively erase and then reactivate a memory by stimulating nerves in the brain at frequencies that strengthen synapses, the connection between neurons. The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless […]
If you’re trying to hold on to old memories, then some new, fresh brain cells may be the last thing you need – a new research published in Science suggests that newly formed neurons in the hippocampus (an area in the brain responsible for memory formation) could remove previously stored information. This is perhaps the […]
A new study which involved the analysis of over 1.000 brain scans confirmed what many intuitively believed for a long time: men and women’s brains are hard wired differently. Maps of neural circuitry showed that on average women’s brains were highly connected across the left and right hemispheres, while men had better connections between the […]
Trying to better understand how memories are stored inside a human brain, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Freiburg University used a video game in which people navigate through a virtual town delivering objects to specific locations; they found that brain cells add a geo-tag with spatial information to some memories, and this spacial […]
An itch is a sensation that causes the desire or reflex to scratch. Researchers have long tried to characterize itch, but in its typical annoying fashion, the sensation resisted any such attempts. For a very long time, the itch has been thought of as a low-level form of pain, but now, a new study conducted […]
A single molecular switch can make the transition between the active, malleable brain of an adolescent and the mature, stable brain of an adult; yep, a single gene can turn us back to the childlike curiosity we exhibit as adolescents. Researchers have known for quite a while that adolescent brains are typically more malleable (or […]
This week, the Obama administration has announced plans to pursue a 10-year, $3 billion research effort aimed at mapping the human brain in “its entirety”. The project, called the Brain Activity Map, is designed to help scientists better understand how the ~100 billion neurons interact in our brains. Initially, the announcement was met with applause, […]
Scientists at University of Sydney have been studying for the past few years one of the most peculiar events in nature. It seems that a living slime, no less, no more, is capable of reading information and remembering its past “steps” acting on some sort of external memory, this despite the fact that it has no […]
Neurons are the absolute core components of the nervous system that transmit information through electrical and chemical signals. I once wondered how neural activity might sound like, and I imagined something like a huge gridline sprinkled with electricity bolts though out. I didn’t know about the SpikerBox, back then, though. It’s a gadget, developed by educational […]
From a certain age onward, humans seem to process information at a slower pace – learning new things becomes more difficult, remembering where you put the car keys seems to give headaches, and it gets ever worse as we age even more. Neuroscientists at the University of Bristol studying dysfunctional neural communication in Alzheimer patients demonstrated that the […]
The effects alcohol has on our brain are still not perfectly understood, and the general opinion and even some studies are biased because… well, generally speaking, alcohol is bad for you, and we tend to forget that students drink, teachers drink, scientists and artists drink. But according to a study conducted by the Waggoner Center […]
The typical healthy human brain contains about 200 billion nerve cells, called neurons, all of which are connected through hundreds of trillions of small connections called synapses. One single neuron can lead to up to 10.000 synapses with other neurons, according to Stephen Smith, PhD, professor of molecular and cellular physiology. Along with a team […]
Mycobacterium vaccae is a type of bacteria that naturally leaves in soil and has been in the attention of researchers for a while now, due to the fact that it decreases anxiety. Recent studies sugest that in fact, it also stimulates neuron growth and thus intelligence and the ability to learn. Dorothy Matthews and Susan […]
Just like any muscle in your body, if not used, the brain starts to degrade as time passes; this has been known for quite a while, but recently, a team from UC Irvine provided the first visual evidence of how learning protects the brain, thus proving that mental stimulation fights against the degrading effects that […]
We’ve all endured some kind of physical pain, more or less intense. When you hit your finger while hammering, for example, the pain is really intense, but passes away (at least mostly) in just a few moments. So scientists were trying to find out why is it that some intense pains pass so quickly and […]
Contrary to almost a half of century of research, Elly Nedivi, associate professor of neurobiology at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and colleagues found that a certain type of neuron that plays a crucial part in autism spectrum disorders is able in fact to remodel itself. It can do this in a strip […]
Since there are still a big number of things we fail to understand about our brain it is somewhat understandable that such misbeliefs appear. They turn into myths and thanks to the oh so well documented media everybody ends up believing that they are true; and such a belief is hard to shatter even when […]
