Knight Initiative News

During a stressful time, smelling a partner’s scent might help ease anxiety, a study suggests.

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

Once data have been extracted from the brain, how can they be employed to best effect?

Paul Yock is being honored for establishing Stanford Biodesign to help innovators create devices and technologies that improve health care.

We hear a lot about aging societies these days. At the same time, we hear relatively little about being old from older people themselves. In part, this is because most people in their 60s, 70s and older still don’t think of themselves as “old.” We often r

Barres died Wednesday of pancreatic cancer, Stanford announced. He was 63. Within neuroscience, he was known as “the godfather of glia” for his pioneering work on the cells that make up 90 percent of the human brain. And across academia, Barres was belove

The Stanford neuroscientist's research focused on the cells in the brain that aren't nerve cells. Collectively called glia, these "other" cells play a central role in sculpting and maintaining the brain's wiring diagram.

Mark Tessier-Lavigne shares a piece that he wrote in tribute to Ben almost a year ago.

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.

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

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.

By Amy B. Wang

A former Facebook executive is making waves after he spoke out about his “tremendous guilt” over growing the social network, which he feels has eroded “the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other.”

Chamath Palihapitiya began working for Facebook in 2007 and left in 2011 as its vice president for user growth. When he started, he said, there was not much thought given to the long-term negative consequences of developing such a platform.

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.”

Stopping a plan once it's underway requires a lot of brainpower. Stopping an action required three key brain areas to communicate with eight other areas and all the communication had to occur within about one-tenth of a second.

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.

Strong friendships are a precious resource, but scientists know surprisingly little about them. In particular, it’s difficult to predict what about a person makes it likely that they will attract close friends or be viewed as a close friend by others.

A brain system involved in everything from addiction to autism appears to have evolved differently in people than in great apes, a team reports Thursday in the journal Science.

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.

Ultrasonic energy can be harnessed to alter brain activity and treat disease — but first, scientists need to learn how it works.