Neuroscience News

Stanford researchers have used a revolutionary 3-D culture technique to nurse a very slowly developing set of brain cells known as astrocytes to maturity in laboratory glassware.

If you’re a scientist who wants to do something to help kids with cerebral palsy, your first strategy probably isn’t to launch an internet contest with freaky skeleton videos, but that is more or less what Łukasz Kidziński, PhD, did.

A Stanford study suggests that aspects of autism reflect a signaling imbalance in certain neurons in the forebrain. Could reversing this imbalance alleviate some symptoms?

Jennifer Cochran, whose research focuses on development of new technologies for high-throughput protein analysis and engineering, succeeds Norbert Pelc.

Better models of the bone, muscles and nerves that control our bodies could help doctors manage movement disorders like cerebral palsy. A new competition is crowdsourcing the search for those tools.

Stanford researchers used advanced lab technologies to show, in mice, that symptoms of autism can be countered by reducing the ratio of excitatory to inhibitory neuronal firing in the forebrain.

A new study, conducted by Stanford psychiatrist, neuroscientist and inventor Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD, and colleagues, suggests that key features of autism reflect an imbalance in signaling from two kinds of neurons in a portion of the forebrain.

A new study led by Stanford chronic fatigue syndrome expert Jose Montoya, MD, has linked chronic fatigue syndrome to variations in 17 immune-system signaling proteins, or cytokines, whose concentrations in the blood correlate with the disease’s severity.

Stanford investigators used high-throughput analysis to link inflammation to chronic fatigue syndrome, a difficult-to-diagnose disease with no known cure.

Male mice are naturally territorial. In the wild or in the lab, they attack other male mice even if plenty of room, food and females are available. This behavior is under the control of a small nerve circuit in the male mouse’s brain; disabling the circui

A tiny set of nerve cells in a male mouse’s brain activates aggression. But a new Stanford study shows that the male’s susceptibility to this activation depends on whether it has been housed with other mice or in isolation.

A Stanford team found that amyloid beta did not form into the plaques and fibrils characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease when in the presence of cathelicidin. Instead, the results indicate the two compounds form a stable non-toxic complex.

Using neuroscience to help determine the best treatment plans for patients with psychiatric conditions — everything from depression to anxiety to bipolar disorder — is a growing area of research in a field that is in desperately in need of better treatmen

Addiction, like riding a bike, is a learned behavioral pattern you don’t unlearn even if you haven’t performed it for decades. Your brain’s semi-permanently hot-wired reward system has to be stripped down, reordered, and re-insulated again.

Legal and illegal drugs are killing more people than AIDS ever did, yet the nation’s drug policies are based on unproven assumptions about addiction. Neuroscience could help shape more effective policies and save lives.

New technologies and new hypotheses have generated a growing pile of evidence that there are inherent differences in how men’s and women’s brains are wired and how they work.