Knight Initiative News

First came the burritos, then the brains. Somewhere in between, more than 50 undergraduates who showed up for the Stanford Undergraduate Neuroscience Society’s “Brains and Burritos” heard from researchers and mingled with others curious about brain scienc

Some of the most important discoveries come not from plowing ahead, but instead from stepping back to gain a fresh perspective, whether that means revisiting old assumptions or seeking a new lens outside one’s academic field.

Navigation is an essential computational skill that is closely related to memory and learning, and getting lost is an early symptom of Alzheimer’s, so it’s important to understand how it works.

JUUL is the most popular "stealth" vaping device and is a huge fad, particularly among teenagers. Stealth e-cigarettes are clever vapor devices disguised as USB sticks, mobile phones, car fobs, remote controls, and even asthma inhalers to hide their use f

For about a dozen years now, the drug ketamine has been a buzz word in psychiatric research circles. Many considered it the most exciting thing to emerge in decades to successfully treat treatment-resistant depression as well as other severe forms of psyc

In a new book, Stanford pain psychologist Beth Darnall offers practical tools for health care providers to help their patients reduce pain.

Autism spectrum disorder is marked by severe social deficits. Stanford researchers were able to reverse those types of deficits in mice by activating a single brain circuit.

Stanford mechanical engineering PhD student Sean Sketch is working to better understand proprioception — in the hope of one day helping people for whom sense has been impaired by stroke or other diseases.

The release of a single signaling chemical from a specific nerve-cell tract in a particular part of the brain, like an on/off switch, may spell the difference between sociability and social awkwardness.

Neurons in the brain and body send chemical signals from one to the next. Now, scientists led by Stanford's Steven Chu are a step closer to watching those signals take shape inside individual neurons.

The FDA has approved the use of an implanted device that releases periodic electrical discharges in the brain to counteract seizures in people with epilepsy. In an interview, neurologist Robert Fisher described the technology and Stanford’s role in testin

Stanford psychiatric researcher Natalie Rasgon, MD, PhD, and her collaborators in a multicenter study have identified a substance, acetyl-L-choline, whose levels in the blood of people suffering from depression are correspondingly depressed.

Investigators at Stanford and elsewhere have shown, for the first time in humans, that low blood levels of acetyl-L-carnitine track with the severity and duration of depression.

Stanford neuroscientist Lisa Giocomo, PhD, and her colleagues examined the navigational behavior and brain-activity patterns of mice traveling through a virtual reality environment.

ŁUKASZ KIDZIŃSKI, a postdoctoral scholar in bioengineering at Stanford, cooked up a contest with a serious goal: designing better prosthetic limbs and helping patients adapt to them.

Researchers Marinka Zitnik, PhD; Monica Agrawal; and Jure Leskovec, PhD, have designed a new system to deal with the literally billions of possibilities when considering any two drugs — out of about 5,000 on the U.S. market — and one of around a thousand

Lukasz Kidziński hit on the idea of a competition, in which teams from around the world would compete to design artificial intelligence algorithms that would, along with virtual bodies informed by Scott Delp’s data and models, learn to walk, run and event

Millions of people take upwards of five medications a day, but testing the side effects of such combinations is impractical. Now, Stanford computer scientists have figured out how to predict side effects using artificial intelligence.

By Nathan Collins

It's not a secret that William Newsome, PhD, a world-renowned neurobiologist, is also a Christian. But on the other hand, it's not something he wears on his sleeve — so most people probably don't realize that his faith helped inspire his interest in the brain, that his mother and father encouraged his interest in science or that he sees parallels between his father's pastoral work and his own work leading a lab at Stanford.

Your brain doesn't just sits still inside your skull, it rhythmically bulges and shrinks with each heartbeat, by an amount equivalent to a bit less the width of a human hair.