A Cornell study of genome sequences in African-Americans, European-Americans and Chinese suggests that natural selection has caused as much as 10 percent of the human genome to change in some populations in the last 15,000 to 100,000 years, when people began migrating from Africa.
Brain
Just in time for the weekend, this study from Dutch researcher Ingmar Franken says that while alcohol does not make good things any better it can make bad things a lot less worse. Previously researchers thought that alcohol primarily affected the 'reward' system in the brain. Franken found that was not so.
In the case of pleasant experiences alcohol was found to have hardly any influence. The ‘rosy glasses’ that alcohol is said to cause is therefore just a temporary filter for the more 'sober' issues in life.
That title alone should get this article on the front page of technology papers everywhere, but the comparisons are valid.
Though people feel they have rich visual experiences, researchers have found that the average person is only aware of about four things at a time. This short term capability varies from person to person but an individual’s capacity for short-term memory is a strong predictor of IQ and scholastic achievement. People with high IQs can think about more things at once.
Scientists have made significant advances towards the development of a technique that could be used to confirm whether someone is infected with variant CJD.
Researchers have identified a new gene mutation linked to frontotemporal dementia, according to a study published in the July 10, 2007, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Women don't just like men with muscles — they go for them.
Men who are more muscular than average are much more likely to have short-term affairs and multiple sex partners than their scrawnier peers, according to new UCLA research published in the August issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
The disease that causes tremors, rigidity and slowed movements in a million Americans also targets another brain network that regulates cognitive thought and the ability to carry out everyday tasks.
A multi-institutional consortium including Duke University has created startlingly crisp 3-D microscopic views of tiny mouse brains -- unveiled layer by layer -- by extending the capabilities of conventional magnetic resonance imaging.
Scientists at Children’s National Medical Center have demonstrated conclusively that a specific protein is instrumental in myelination and remyelination, processes essential to the creation and repair of the brain’s white matter.
This groundbreaking discovery in mouse models points the way to developing treatments or interventions to enhance healthy brain development and/or brain disease repair in children and adults.
Anybody who’s tried to concentrate on work while suffering a headache knows that pain compellingly commands attention—which is how evolution helped ensure survival in a painful world. Now, researchers have pinpointed the brain region responsible for pain’s ability to affect cognitive processing. They have found that this pain-related brain region is distinct from the one involved in cognitive processing interference due to a distracting memory task.
A recent study in Journal of Neuroimaging suggests that cognitively normal adults exhibiting atrophy of their temporal lobe or damage to blood vessels in the brain are more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease. Older adults showing signs of both conditions were seven-times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s than their peers.
Researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) believe that blood may hold vital insights into what is happening in the brain of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).
In a study unparalleled in its scope, a team led by UNSW Professor Andrew Lloyd of the Centre for Infection and Inflammation Research, has studied the differences in gene expression patterns in the blood of people who either recover promptly after acute glandular fever or develop the prolonged illness called post-infective syndrome.
Salk Institute neurobiologists are beginning to tease apart the complex brain networks that enable humans and other higher mammals to fix our gaze on one object while independently directing attention to others - that pesky method mom used to always know you were doing something wrong when her back was turned.
Scientists' hunt for the cause of depression has implicated so many suspects and found so many treatments with different mechanisms that the condition remains an enigma. Now researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have identified one unifying principle that could explain how a range of causes and treatments for depression converge.
Refuting the popular stereotype that females talk more than men, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have found women and men both use an average of 16,000 words each day.
The psychology researchers have published their findings in “Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men"” in the July issue of Science.
For more than a decade, researchers have claimed that women use far more words each day than men. One set of numbers that is commonly tossed around is that women use 20,000 words per day compared to only 7,000 for men.