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A University of Toronto scientist has discovered the brain’s frontal lobe is involved in pain transmission to the spine. If his findings in animals bear out in people, the discovery could lead to a new class of non-addictive painkillers. For 20 years, Min Zhuo, a professor of physiology in the Faculty of Medicine, has been intrigued by invisible pain, in particular chronic […]
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Planning a trip to Mars? You’ll want to remember your anti-radiation pills. NASA and private space companies like SpaceX plan to send humans to the red planet within the next 15 years—but among the major challenges facing future crewed space missions is how to protect astronauts from the dangerous cosmic radiation of deep space. Now the lab of UCSF neuroscientist […]
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Whether you learn to play a musical instrument or speak another language, you’re training your brain to be more efficient, suggests a Baycrest study. Researchers found that musicians and people who are bilingual utilized fewer brain resources when completing a working memory task, according to recently published findings in the journal, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Individuals […]
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Our brains are obsessed with being social even when we are not in social situations. A Dartmouth-led study finds that the brain may tune towards social learning even when it is at rest. The findings published in an advance article of Cerebral Cortex, demonstrate empirically for the first time how two regions of the brain experience increased connectivity during rest […]
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Scientists in the USA have developed a new deep brain stimulation method to treat the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. While present deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s is constant, the new method is ‘adaptive’. This means the stimulation changes in real time, based on the patient’s neural signals. The study, published today in the Journal of Neural Engineering, used brief in-clinic […]
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Individual regions of the brain have to team up to get things done. And like in any team, the key to working together is communication. Duke researchers used brain imaging to identify how patterns of brain connectivity—the ability of different brain regions to talk to each other—can affect a person’s likelihood of developing common forms of mental illness. Surprisingly, they […]
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Erythropoietin (EPO) helps to protect and repair vulnerable brains though it remains a mystery how the anemia drug does so. Genetic analyses conducted by a multi-institutional research team finds that EPO may work its neuroprotective magic by modifying genes essential for regulating growth and development of nervous tissue as well as genes that respond to inflammation and hypoxia. Findings from […]
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Do you want to live forever? If so, there’s some good news. Or so it seems. For it appears that we may have taken a step closer to making immortality reality. In a recent meeting at the National Institutes of Health, Yale neuroscientist Nenad Sestan revealed that his team has successfully reanimated the brains of dead pigs recovered from a […]
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In studies with monkeys, Johns Hopkins researchers report that they have uncovered significant new details about how the cerebellum—the “learning machine” of the mammalian brain—makes predictions and learns from its mistakes, helping us execute complex motor actions such as accurately shooting a basketball into a net or focusing your eyes on an object across the room. In a summary of […]
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A team of researchers from several institutions in Japan has found that a certain drug in conjunction with physical therapy has resulted in improved recovery from a stroke in mice and monkeys. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their study of the impact of the drug on mice and monkeys and what they found. Simon […]
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