Knight Initiative News

A characteristic electrical-activity pattern in a key brain region predicts impulsive actions just before they occur. A brief electrical pulse at just the right time can prevent them, Stanford scientists have found.

Stanford researchers led by neurosurgeon Casey Halpern, MD, have identified, both in mice and in a human subject, a signature pattern of electrical activity in a small but important deep-brain region called the nucleus accumbens just a second or two befor

Students in Allison Okamura’s freshman Introductory Seminar designed touch-based devices to help pedestrians navigate, enhance a classic game and create depth perception for the blind.

A new home for interdisciplinary life sciences at Stanford, set to open in mid-2019, reached an important milestone on Friday when workers put the building’s highest steel beam in place, an event known as “topping out.”

Five new categories of mental illness that cut across the current more broad diagnoses of anxiety and depression have been identified by researchers in a Stanford-led study.

Worrying actually helps alleviate the negative effects on memory and cognitive processing caused by depression and anxiety in older adults, according to a new study published recently in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.

The grant will help Stanford investigators find out if variants in many different autism-linked genes trigger the condition by affecting molecular pathways and cellular processes.

While the popular imagination was piqued by the thought that, just maybe, Count Dracula had it right, more sober minds reflected on the discovery’s potential medical applications. Wyss-Coray, co-founded a biotechnology company which has funded a clinical

In a small safety trial based on preclinical work by a Stanford researcher, participants receiving blood plasma infusions from young donors showed some evidence of improvement.

A study in Cell from the lab of Stanford psychiatrist, neuroscientist and bioengineer Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD, demonstrates a new technology’s power — it helped identify hitherto-unsuspected neuronal circuity in that all-important internal brain state ca

Stanford investigators were able to simultaneously monitor activity in every nerve cell of a zebrafish’s brain and determine which types of neurons were tied to alertness.

Brainstorm’s first event featured a competition between researchers who designed virtual-reality products for diagnosing and treating mental illness.

The jury’s still out on rock ’n’ roll. But the link between sex and at least one drug, marijuana, has been confirmed.

The first study to examine the relationship between marijuana use and frequency of sexual intercourse at the population level in the United States shows a positive correlation between the two.

In its first 10 years, the Stanford Center on Longevity helped expand discussion of the world’s aging population, making that discussion both more inclusive and more optimistic.

As scientists get better at interpreting the language of the brain, they get closer to not just treating disease, but also enhancing our senses and our intellects. Should they go there?

People have been imagining what would happen if we stuck computers in our brains for a surprisingly long time — since at least 1879 in fact, when Edward Page Mitchell first published “The Ablest Man in the World”.

Brain-machine interfaces now treat neurological disease and change the way people with paralysis interact with the world. Improving those devices depends on getting better at translating the language of the brain.

Leanne Williams, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, envisions a time when a clinician can order a brain scan to help with the diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders, much like a orthopedic surgeon now orders X-ra

As scientists get better at interpreting the language of the brain, they get closer to not just treating disease, but also enhancing our senses and our intellects. Should they go there?