Would you kill one innocent person to save five?
Choose your answer wisely: your popularity may depend on it. New research from Oxford and Cornell Universities shows people gauge others' trustworthiness based on their moral judgments. The findings can help explain why snap judgements about morality tend to be based on a set of absolute moral rules (such as "don't kill innocent people"), even if we might make different decisions when given more time.
Northeastern's Alessandro Vespignani, Sternberg Family Distinguished University Professor of physics, computer science, and health sciences, has teamed up with an interdisciplinary group of scientists to develop an innovative method to map how tweets about large- scale social events spread.
Magnetic resonance imaging of the brain is increasingly used to predict neurodevelopmental outcomes in premature infants, but the existing systems of analyzing or "scoring" those MRIs rely heavily on expert opinion. A new study led by clinician-researchers at Nationwide Children's Hospital has explored a more objective system for scoring MRIs - and in the process found that an often unreported abnormality of the brain's gray matter can indicate future impairment.
Québec City, April 7, 2016 - The drop in body temperature associated with aging could aggravate the main manifestations of Alzheimer's, suggests a study published in the latest issue of Neurobiology of Aging by Université Laval researchers. Although the phenomenon was demonstrated using transgenic mice, researchers believe that the findings are convincing enough to warrant further investigation in humans.
Neuroscientists at UC Davis have come up with a way to observe brain activity during natural reading. It's the first time researchers have been able to study the brain while reading actual texts, instead of individual words, and it's already helping settle some ideas about just how we read.
The research has potential implications for understanding dyslexia and other reading deficits, Henderson said.
With obesity rates on the rise worldwide and excess sugar consumption considered a direct contributor, the search has been on for treatments to reverse the trend. Now a world-first study led by QUT may have the answer.
Neuroscientist Professor Selena Bartlett from QUT's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation said the study, which has just been published by international research journal PLOS ONE, shows drugs used to treat nicotine addiction could be used to treat sugar addiction in animals.
ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Patients with a low-grade type of brain tumor called glioma who received radiation therapy plus a chemotherapy regimen, including procarbazine, lomustine and vincristine (PCV), experienced a longer progression-free survival and overall survival than patients who received radiation therapy alone, according to the results of the clinical trial, Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG) 9802 published in the April 7 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Philadelphia, PA -- Although grade 2 glial brain tumors (gliomas) constitute only 5 to 10 percent of all brain tumors, progressive neurologic symptoms and premature death result for nearly all patients diagnosed with this type of brain tumor. The Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG), now conducting research as NRG Oncology, initiated the trial RTOG 9802 (A Phase III Study of Radiation With or Without PCV Chemotherapy in Unfavorable Low-Grade Glioma) in an effort to improve patient survival.
LA JOLLA--By adolescence, your brain already contains most of the neurons that you'll have for the rest of your life. But a few regions continue to grow new nerve cells--and require the services of cellular sentinels, specialized immune cells that keep the brain safe by getting rid of dead or dysfunctional cells.
Now, Salk scientists have uncovered the surprising extent to which both dying and dead neurons are cleared away, and have identified specific cellular switches that are key to this process. The work was detailed in Nature on April 6, 2016.
PORTLAND, Ore. - Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University's Vollum Institute have uncovered remarkably detailed 3-D views of one of the most important transporters in the brain - the serotonin transporter. Their study, published online today in the journal Nature, provides fresh insight into how citalopram and paroxetine, two of the most widely prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, interact with and inhibit serotonin transport.
In as little as a few months, antipsychotic medications can tame the delusions and hallucinations that characterize schizophrenia. But the medications do little to reverse the less familiar brain-based problems that accompany the illness.
Affecting memory, the speed at which the brain processes information, attention, problem-solving skills and emotional intelligence, these subtle but profound deficits can prove more crippling than schizophrenia's more dramatic and better-known symptoms.
Scientists at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at McGill University have made an important discovery about the human auditory system and how to study it, findings that could lead to better testing and diagnosis of hearing-related disorders.
The researchers detected frequency-following responses (FFR) coming from a part of the brain not previously known to emit them. FFRs are neural signals generated in the brain when people hear sounds.
Montreal, April 6, 2016 Montreal -- About one in 68 children in the United States has an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Their parents consistently report greater stress levels, caregiving burden and depression than parents of typically developing children.
Chronic caregiving stress has also been associated with poorer physical health -- more pain, more disruptions from physical-health problems and lower overall health-related quality of life.
In most analyses, injectable hydromorphone hydrochloride was not worse than diacetylmorphine hydrochloride (pharmaceutical heroin) to treat long-term severe opioid dependence and that could provide alternative treatment for patients where diacetylmorphine is unavailable because of political or regulatory reasons or for patients in whom it was unsuccessful, according to an article published online by JAMA Psychiatry.
Rewards act as external factors that influence and reinforce learning processes. Researchers from Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin have now been able to show that the brain can produce its own learning signals in cases where no such external feedback is available. A report on the mechanisms underlying these self-generated feedback signals has been published in the current volume of eLife*, and shows clear parallels between the neurobiological processes involved in learning based on external and self-generated feedback.