Category: MIND & BRAIN

Aging vessels connecting the brain and the immune system play critical roles in both Alzheimer’s disease and the decline in cognitive ability that comes with time, new research reveals. By improving the function of the lymphatic vessels, scientists at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have dramatically enhanced aged mice’s ability to learn and improved their memories. The work may provide doctors an entirely new path to treat or prevent Alzheimer’s disease, age-related memory loss and other neurodegenerative diseases. The research … Continue reading “Brain Discovery Could Block Aging’s Terrible Toll On The Mind”

The way people think and act not only affects the way the brain operates, but also its shape, according to researchers at the University of Zurich (UZH). They found that each brain has physical properties as unique as fingerprints that can alter over time. “Professional musicians, golfers or chess players, for example, have particular characteristics in the regions of the brain which they use the most for their skilled activity,” stated a press releaseexternal link. Lead researcher and neuropsychology professor Lutz … Continue reading “Life Experience Changes Structure Of Brain”

A major scientific publishing group is taking aim at a social networking site for allowing researchers to illegally post copies of their journal papers. The International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) in Oxford, U.K., and The Hague, the Netherlands, has written to ResearchGate, a networking website for researchers, to express concerns over its article-sharing practices. ResearchGate, the world’s largest academic social network site with more than 13 million members, has been criticized before for facilitating the upload of paywalled papers. … Continue reading “Publishers go after networking site for illicit sharing of journal papers”

Summary: Kisspeptin has already been identified as the key molecule within the brain responsible for triggering puberty and controlling fertility. A new study in mice reveals that a subset of neurons in an evolutionarily ancient part of brain, the hypothalamus, drive both attraction to the opposite sex and sexual behavior by two independent mechanisms A research team led by Professor Julie Bakker at Liège University (Belgium) and Professor Ulrich Boehm at Saarland University (Germany) has made a major advancement in … Continue reading “Kisspeptin: Mouse study shows how the brain controls sex”

Single-celled algae known as diatoms, long thought to reproduce asexually, were recently found to be friskier than expected. Researchers discovered that diatoms do engage in sexual reproduction — and are especially likely to do it when in the presence of the compound ammonium, a waste product generated by most animals. Previously, scientists had observed the complete life cycles in barely a handful of diatom species, and even among well-studied diatoms, sexual reproduction had never been seen, the researchers wrote in … Continue reading “Diatoms Have Sex, and Ammonium Is a Turn-On”