Neuroscience

Alpha Zero Teaches Itself Chess 4 Hours, Then Beats Dad

Peter Heine Nielsen, a Danish chess Grandmaster, summarized it quite well. "I always wondered, if some superior alien race came to Earth, how they would play chess. Now I know". The architecture that beat humans at the notoriously CPU-impervious ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Dec 7 2017 - 8:31am

Trepanation: Sometimes You Needed A Hole In The Head- And Incans Were Really Good At It

For thousands of years, trepanation--the act of scraping, cutting, or drilling an opening into the cranium--was practiced around the world, primarily to treat head trauma but also for headaches, seizures and mental illnesses. Sometimes it was even done to ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 10 2018 - 12:48pm

When Is It Sexual Harassment? When It's Written By A Man

An experimental study which sought to determine perceptions of sexual text (sext) messaging situations concluded that men and women were judged differently by the sext messages they sent, even when they were the same. When messages were unsolicited, men we ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 15 2018 - 8:16am

Dopamine Discovery May Bring Freedom From Irrational Fear

Fear is a healthy response, kept intact over eons of evolution, but sometimes it can be irrational. A new brain circuit discovery may help make sense of the madness. The study details the role of dopamine in ensuring that rats stop being afraid when there ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 10 2018 - 2:22pm

Why Pot Gives You The Munchies Identified In Animal Studies

It's no secret that marijuana usage leads to hunger, it even has a colloquial name- "the munchies." But understanding the neuroscience of that that could also help people who lose their appetites during illness.  ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 17 2018 - 11:01am

Your First Memory May Not Be Real

Neuroscientists believe that people's earliest memories date from around three to three-and-a-half years of age but many people report memories much earlier than that. It's likely just as fake as claims of repressed memories from the 1980s.  At ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 19 2018 - 11:00am

Brains Of Teenage Girls Who Engage In Cutting Are Similar To Those With Borderline Personality Disorder

A pilot study in Development and Psychopathology concluded that teenage girls who engage in self-harm like cutting often have brain features like adults with borderline personality disorder. Often is relative, since this was only 40 individuals. Cutting an ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 14 2018 - 12:20pm

Fruit Flies Have The Cognitive Ability To Learn Sexual Preferences- And Perhaps Transmit Them Culturally

Do Drosophila, commonly called fruit flies, have culture? Culture, lasting changes in a group that cannot be ascribed to genetic or ecological variation, is obviously a human quality, and it may be found in other vertebrates like some other primates and bi ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 30 2018 - 3:02am

Are MicroRNAs The Key To Autism?

Since microRNAs are key regulators of biological processes, a microRNA cluster that regulates synaptic strength and is involved in the control of social behavior in mammals may be a new path toward therapeutic strategies for the treatment of social deficit ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 14 2018 - 12:01am

Cilia: Why The Hair Inside Your Head Is More Important Than The Kind Outside

Cells along the brain's cavities are equipped with tiny hair-like protrusions called cilia but relative to their importance, we know little about them. Unless they are not doing their job. People with ciliary defects can develop neurological conditio ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 3 2019 - 3:47pm