Brain

Malicious hacking online costs the private and corporate sectors up to $575 billion annually, according to internet security firm McAfee. While security agencies seek out "ethical" hackers to help combat such attacks, little is known about the personality traits that lead people to pursue and excel at hacking. A recent study published on Frontiers in Human Neuroscience now shows that a characteristic called systemizing provides insight into what makes and motivates a hacker.

In the face of stress, our body diverts metabolic resources to its emergency response. It has been thought that the sympathetic nervous system - the body's instinctive system for reacting to stress - directs this activity, but Weizmann Institute of Science research now shows that neurons in the brain have a surprising role to play. The findings, which recently appeared in Cell Metabolism, may, in the future aid in developing better drugs for such stress-related pathologies as eating disorders.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Incoming college students, especially students of color and first-generation college students, who anticipate challenges and recognize these as normal and temporary are more likely to remain enrolled full time and receive better grades, according to a study led by a psychology researcher at The University of Texas at Austin.

DURHAM, N.C. -- A long-term study of nearly 1,000 New Zealanders from birth to age 38 has found that people who smoked marijuana for up to 20 years have more gum disease, but otherwise do not show worse physical health than non-smokers.

The international research team assessed a dozen measures of physical health, including lung function, systemic inflammation and several measures of metabolic syndrome, including waist circumference, HDL cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure, glucose control and body mass index.

Babies born to mothers whose immune systems had to grapple with a viral assault -- even a mild one -- have increased risk of brain and central nervous system abnormalities, according to a new study.

Seoul, Korea, and Québec City, Canada, May 30, 2016 - Mice transplanted with cells grown from a patient suffering from Huntington's disease (HD) develop the clinical features and brain pathology of that patient, suggests a study published in the latest issue of Acta Neuropathologica by CHA University in Korea, in collaboration with researchers at Université Laval in Québec City, Canada.

New research by Steven Laviolette's research team at Western University is contributing to a better understanding of the ways opiate-class drugs modify brain circuits to drive the addiction cycle. Using rodent models of opiate addiction, Dr. Laviolette's research has shown that opiates affect pathways of associative memory formation in multiple ways, both at the level of anatomy (connections between neurons) and at the molecular levels (how molecules inside the brain affect these connections).