Knight Initiative News

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The audible world contains vast amounts of information about the world around us. Scholars from across Stanford are exploring this invisible landscape as a research tool and as a way of understanding each other.

By Nathan Collins

Nicotine — a highly addictive substance that keeps tobacco smokers hooked on the habit — has actually been shown to have therapeutic properties.

The mind can shape health, behavior and maybe even society as a whole. Stanford researchers are bridging disciplines to understand what our minds can do and how they do it.

Anthony Ricci, a professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery, and a self-confirmed lab rat, has seen firsthand how certain life-saving antibiotics can wreak havoc on what is his area of expertise — the inner ear.