Neuroscience News

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.

The bioengineer and psychiatrist will be honored for his seminal role in the field of optogenetics, which allows scientists to precisely manipulate nerve-cell activity in freely moving animals to study their behavior.

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.

Assistant professors Amin Arbabian, Michael Lepech, Marco Pavone, Manu Prakash and Sindy Tang awarded grants to help promising junior faculty pursue outstanding research while also improving education.

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

In addition to being scientifically important, Karl Deisseroth's research makes for some really cool-looking pictures.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.