Knight Initiative News

Understanding the brain's mechanics isn't enough to reverse-engineer a functional copy. What's needed is a theory of how those pieces add up to a human being.

Imaging studies have delineated brain networks consisting of discrete brain regions acting in synchrony. This view of the brain’s functional architecture has now been confirmed by a study showing coordination at the genetic level as well.

How often does the accountant turn out to be the life of the party? How often do the Nike sneakers, rather than the Armani suits, call the shots? Yet that may be the case when it comes to – of all things! – creativity.

A new study is the first to directly implicate the cerebellum in the creative process. As for the brain’s higher-level executive-control centers? Not so much.

On a small darkened platform a handful of fruit flies wander aimlessly. There is a brief flash of light and a robotic arm darts downward, precisely targeting a fly’s thorax, a moving target roughly the size of a pinhead.

A key message from Stanford’s annual big data conference was that realizing the potential of precision health means sharing massive amounts of medical and behavioral data.

Genetic Privacy: The Right (Not) to Know

Two Stanford University faculty members developing techniques for monitoring neurons as they fire signals throughout the brain got a boost in the first round of funding by California’s neuroscience research grants program, Cal-BRAIN.

The ability to detect successful engraftment, integration and function of human cells implanted into the brain of a living animal could potentially speed stem-cell therapies’ path to clinical use.

My recent trip to Washington D.C. to speak before a congressional subcommittee on the problem of opioid misuse was all about unmet expectations.

Electrical recordings directly from the human brain show remarkable precision in the coordination of widely distributed regions involved in memory recall, at rest and during sleep.

A computer model of brain function helps explain a 20-year-old finding that the way a single noisy neuron fires in the brain can predict an animal's decisions. It turns out neurons without noise can't learn. The type of learning the group modeled reflects

Interestingly, and on a cheerier note, one of the biggest themes programmed into the Davos agenda this January was a series of events on the new scientific developments about the brain.

BY Bruce Goldman

Psychiatric disorders, traditionally distinguished from one another based on symptoms, may in reality not be as discrete as we think.

A meta-analysis of 193 brain-imaging studies shows similar gray-matter loss in the brains of people with diagnoses as different as schizophrenia, depression and addiction.

Researchers say that the appearance in the brain of a type of immune cell has been implicated in delayed dementia in mice and humans who have suffered a stroke.

Depressing but true: people are less able to form new brain connections as they grow older. Undergraduate Richie Sapp was part of a team whose research could make it easier for adults to learn, and possibly heal after brain injuries.

A raft of rodent experiments has demonstrated that blood transfusions from a young donor reverse the effects of aging in older recipients over recent years.

A study in mice has found that a commonly used antibiotic can be modified to eliminate the risk that it will cause hearing loss.

Brain cells called microglia chew up toxic substances and cell debris, calm inflammation and make nerve-cell-nurturing substances. New research shows that keeping them on the job may prevent neurodegeneration.