Knight Initiative News

Engineers, biologists and doctors focus on a win

It probably comes as no surprise that kids see the world differently from adults, or that the difference in viewpoint extends to how they see things like words. What may come as a surprise is that to most easily process the words they see, they need to lo

A new study finds that young children’s brains have not yet fully developed the vision circuits they need to understand words and recognize faces, a finding that could help in understanding how children learn to read.

Mentally running through a routine improves performance, but how that works isn’t clear. Now, a new tool — brain-machine interface — suggests the answer lies in how our brains prepare for action.

New research suggests that targeting mitochondria could be a way to treat Parkinson's disease.

Defective architecture in the nanoscopic power plants that provide energy to every cell in our bodies may underlie the movement difficulties of Parkinson's disease, a new study by Stanford neuroscientist Xinnan Wang, MD, and her associates suggests.

Mentally running through a routine improves performance. A new tool – brain-machine interface – sheds light on how.

A bout of exercise is about the last thing you'd imagine a person with chronic fatigue syndrome – also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis and often designated by the acronym ME/CFS – would want to endure. And you'd probably be right.

Mentally running through a routine improves performance, but how that works isn’t clear. Now, a new tool – brain-machine interface – suggests the answer lies in how our brains prepare for action.

In the United States, there are more than 20 drugs on the market for treating epilepsy. But between 30 and 40 percent of the time, these drugs fail to halt seizures, resulting in a chronic vulnerability to sometimes ultra-frequent seizures and consequent

Stanford researchers have found that a small set of nerve cells in the brain regulates the debilitating seizures and cognitive deficits characteristic of the most common form of epilepsy in adults. This discovery could lead to new and better treatments.

A new method of brain stimulation designed by Stanford researchers to treat depression rapidly improved depressive symptoms in a small group of treatment-resistant patients who had suffered for decades with no relief, according to a study published in Bra

A new method of brain stimulation designed by Stanford researchers to treat depression rapidly improved depressive symptoms in a small group of treatment-resistant patients who had suffered for decades with no relief, according to a study published in Bra

A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has something to tell us about why, at a certain point in our lives, we all wind up looking for our sunglasses for ten minutes before finding them on top of our heads.

The same tools that Ellen Kuhl once applied to studying concrete are now revealing mysteries in how the brain folds and functions.

In a multicenter study led by Stanford researchers, the number of stroke patients who died or required confinement to nursing homes was nearly cut in half, the biggest improvement seen in any stroke-related trial to date.

Ischemic strokes account for about 85 percent of the roughly 750,000 strokes suffered annually in the United States, Stanford neurologist Greg Albers, MD, said.

​It’s a question biologists have asked for years. Now, researchers exploring cell and tissue mechanics are finding answers that might one day help engineers rebuild our bodies.

Biologists have wondered for centuries why plants and animals take the shapes they do. Now, researchers exploring the mechanics of cells and tissues are finding answers that might one day help engineers rebuild our bodies.

It’s probably not all that surprising that brand new Stanford undergraduates would be interested in messing around with robots, computer programming and touch-based feedback systems, but mechanical engineering professor Allison Okamura, PhD., found it int