Hormonal treatments administered as part of the procedures for sex reassignment have well-known and well-documented effects on the secondary sexual characteristics of the adult body, shifting a recipient's physical appearance to that of the opposite sex.
New research published in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry indicates that these hormonal treatments also alter brain chemistry.
Temper tantrums and misbehavior, restlessness and inattention are the trappings of the typical toddler. But they may also be signs of developmental delays or disorders. Are infant sleep irregularities red flags for later developmental difficulties?
Women, and especially younger women, are much less likely than men to have good relief of chronic, non-cancer pain with long-term opioid use, with only one in five women reporting low levels of pain and high levels of function with chronic opioid therapy in a new study published in Journal of Women's Health.
More than 99% of the time, two words are enough for people with normal hearing to distinguish the voice of a close friend or relative amongst other voices, says the University of Montreal's Julien Plante-Hébert. His study, presented at the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, involved playing recordings to Canadian French speakers, who were asked to recognize on multiple trials which of the ten male voices they heard was familiar to them. "Merci beaucoup" turned out to be all they needed to hear.
Athens, Ga. - New research from the University of Georgia department of psychology gives researchers a unique glimpse at how humans develop an ability to use tools in childhood while nonhuman primates--such as capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees--remain only occasional tool users.
Dorothy Fragaszy, a psychology professor in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Primate Behavior Laboratory at UGA, created two studies to look at how nonhuman primates and human children differ in completing simple spatial reasoning tasks.
A unique study at Children's Hospital Los Angeles of newborns treated with hypothermia for hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) - a condition that occurs when the brain is deprived of an adequate oxygen supply - confirms its neuroprotective effects on the brain.
Therapeutic hypothermia or targeted cooling of the brain is the first therapy for neuroprotection in neonates with HIE. Without treatment, these babies often develop cerebral palsy or other severe complications. World-wide, nearly one million babies will die and another million will be left with disabilities.
New research suggests that upper limb amputees, who typically struggle to learn how to use a new prosthesis, would be more successful if fellow amputees taught them. Most usually learn by watching a non-amputee demonstrate the device during physical therapy and rehabilitation sessions. A Georgia Institute of Technology study that measured arm movements and analyzed brain patterns found that people do better when they learn from someone who looks like them.
Calcium is not just required for strong bones - it is an essential requirement for muscle and nerve cells to work normally. Latest research from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS, Bangalore), now shows that maintaining Calcium balance in cells is also needed for another purpose - it may be regulating the levels of an important signalling molecule called dopamine in the brain.
WASHINGTON - Low-income students who change schools frequently are at risk for lower math scores and have a harder time managing their behavior and attention in the classroom than similar students who stay in the same school, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
One in four young people have experienced chronic pain and a mental disorder. According to a new report in the Journal of Pain, the onset of pain is often preceded by mental disorders: an above-average rate of incidence of depression, anxiety disorders, and behavioral disorders occurs before the onset of headaches, back pain and neck pain. The report is based on the findings of researchers at the University of Basel and Ruhr-Universität Bochum, who analyzed data from around 6,500 teenagers from the USA.
For nearly nine years, researchers at Lund University have been working on developing implantable electrodes that can capture signals from single neurons in the brain over a long period of time - without causing brain tissue damage. They are now one big step closer to reaching this goal, and the results are published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.
Adding math talk to story time at home is a winning equation for children's math achievement, according to new research from the University of Chicago.
The study from psychologists Sian Beilock and Susan Levine shows a marked increase in math achievement among children whose families used Bedtime Math, an iPad app that delivers engaging math story problems for parents and children to solve together.
If you want to learn how something works, one strategy is to take it apart and put it back together again. For 10 years, a global initiative called the Blue Brain Project--hosted at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL)--has been attempting to do this digitally with a section of juvenile rat brain. The project presents a first draft of this reconstruction, which contains over 31,000 neurons, 55 layers of cells, and 207 different neuron subtypes, on October 8 in Cell.
The cognitive skills used to learn how to ride a bike may be the key to a more accurate understanding of developmental dyslexia. And, they may lead to improved interventions.
This news release is available in French.