Brain News and Research

RSS

The human brain is the center of the human nervous system and is a highly complex organ. Enclosed in the cranium, it has the same general structure as the brains of other mammals, but is over three times as large as the brain of a typical mammal with an equivalent body size.

NYU researchers lead groundbreaking effort to achieve whole eye transplants

Researchers from NYU Langone Health and NYU Grossman School of Medicine are part of a major undertaking that will bring together more than 40 scientists, doctors, and industry experts from around the country to make vision-restoring whole-eye transplants a reality.

17 Jan 2025

Intestinal bacterium found to reduce sugar intake in diabetic mice and humans

Excessive sugar consumption is linked to several non-communicable diseases, including obesity, cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, and type 2 diabetes.

17 Jan 2025

Early brain changes in Huntington’s disease detected two decades before symptoms

Subtle changes in the brain, detectable through advanced imaging, blood and spinal fluid analysis, happen approximately twenty years before a clinical motor diagnosis in people with Huntington's disease, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.

17 Jan 2025

Brain neurons that respond to sugar and fat offer new insights into obesity control

The study uncovers hippocampal neurons that differentially respond to sugars and fats, suggesting new avenues for combating obesity through targeted therapies.

17 Jan 2025

Immune cells orchestrate glucagon production during fasting

When we think about the immune system, we usually associate it with fighting infections. However, a study published in Science by the Champalimaud Foundation reveals a surprising new role.

17 Jan 2025

AI deciphers intracellular signals from extracellular recordings in heart cells

A team of researchers led by the University of California San Diego and Stanford University has developed a noninvasive method to monitor the electrical activity inside heart muscle cells from the outside, avoiding the need to physically penetrate the cells.

16 Jan 2025

Brain stimulation enables nuanced feeling in prosthetic hands

You can probably complete an amazing number of tasks with your hands without looking at them. But if you put on gloves that muffle your sense of touch, many of those simple tasks become frustrating. Take away proprioception - your ability to sense your body's relative position and movement - and you might even end up breaking an object or injuring yourself.

16 Jan 2025

Non-toxic bacterial therapy shows promise for targeting tumors

A University of Massachusetts Amherst-Ernest Pharmaceuticals team of scientists has made "exciting," patient-friendly advances in developing a non-toxic bacterial therapy, BacID, to deliver cancer-fighting drugs directly into tumors.

16 Jan 2025

NIMH awards $1.5 million grant for long COVID neurological research

The National Institute of Mental Health has awarded a significant grant of $1.5 million to Jianyang Du, PhD, of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, for a research study aimed at uncovering the cellular and molecular mechanisms that lead to neurological disorders caused by long COVID-19.

16 Jan 2025

Scientists discover new mechanism behind Huntington’s disease brain cell death

Scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Harvard Medical School, and McLean Hospital have discovered a surprising mechanism by which the inherited genetic mutation known to cause Huntington's disease leads to the death of brain cells.

16 Jan 2025

Immune system changes may predict antipsychotic resistance in schizophrenia Scientis...

Researchers from the National Healthcare Group (NHG)'s Institute of Mental Health (IMH) and Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) have made strides in understanding the connection between the immune system and resistance to antipsychotic medications in schizophrenia, using changes in immune cell populations to predict potential treatment resistance and initiate the most appropriate treatment sooner.

16 Jan 2025

Study reveals dangerous mutations in H5N1 bird flu

One of the earliest strains of bird flu isolated from a human in Texas shows a unique constellation of mutations that enable it to more easily replicate in human cells and cause more severe disease in mice compared to a strain found in dairy cattle, researchers from Texas Biomedical Research Institute (Texas Biomed) report in Emerging Microbes & Infections.

16 Jan 2025

Study identifies potential pathway to improve memory in neurodegenerative diseases

Research spanning more than 20 years has led the UPV/EHU's Neurochemistry and Neurodegeneration group under Dr. Rafael Rodríguez-Puertas to discover a promising avenue for the development of new therapies that improve memory in cases of cognitive impairment in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

16 Jan 2025

Novel method to fight cancer uses ultrasound-guided microbubbles

A new paper by a team of Concordia researchers from the departments of Biology and Physics proposes a novel method of fighting cancer tumours that uses ultrasound-guided microbubbles - a technology already widely used in medical imaging and drug delivery.

16 Jan 2025

New research identifies key subtype of bacterial vaginosis that increases chlamydia risk

Women who develop bacterial vaginosis (BV) often later acquire chlamydia, a common and potentially serious sexually transmitted bacterial infection.

16 Jan 2025

PFAS in US water linked to increased cancer risk

A study links PFAS contamination in drinking water to increased cancer risks, highlighting significant impacts on digestive, endocrine, and respiratory systems.

16 Jan 2025

A new AI tool for unlocking the secrets of spatial multi-omics in cancer

A new artificial intelligence-powered tool called MISO (Multi-modal Spatial Omics) can detect cell-level characteristics of cancer by looking at data from extremely small pieces of tissue-some as small as 400 square micrometers, equivalent to the width of five human hairs.

16 Jan 2025

Researchers develop a computational model of grid cell-mediated episodic encoding

Nearly 50 years ago, neuroscientists discovered cells within the brain's hippocampus that store memories of specific locations. These cells also play an important role in storing memories of events, known as episodic memories. While the mechanism of how place cells encode spatial memory has been well-characterized, it has remained a puzzle how they encode episodic memories.

16 Jan 2025

Unmasking the gender bias in Tourette syndrome diagnosis

Tourette syndrome is currently diagnosed about three times more frequently in males than in females. A new study finds that female individuals are less likely to be diagnosed with the syndrome, take longer to receive a diagnosis and are older when they are diagnosed than male individuals. The study is published in the January 15, 2025, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

16 Jan 2025

Xenon gas offers potential neuroprotective effects for Alzheimer's patients

Most treatments being pursued today to protect against Alzheimer's disease focus on amyloid plaques and tau tangles that accumulate in the brain, but new research from Mass General Brigham and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis points to a novel-and noble-approach: using Xenon gas.

16 Jan 2025