More men than women develop Parkinson’s disease and new work presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies says that it is do to sex differences in how brain cells change. Parkinson’s disease affects about 9 million people and becomes increasingly prevalent with age.
In an article published online ahead of print on May 25, 2016 in Nature, investigators at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) report that, during sensory stimulation, increases in blood flow are not precisely "tuned" to local neural activity, challenging the long-held view that vascular and local neural responses are tightly coupled.
Many brain-imaging techniques that rely on changes in the flow and oxygenation of blood--including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)--assume that vascular changes reflect a proportional change in local neural activity.
During and after chemotherapy, many cancer patients describe feeling a mental fog, a condition that has been dubbed "chemo brain." Why this happens is unclear, but researchers have found a new clue to understanding this syndrome. A study in the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience reports that chemotherapy in rats affects their chemical messengers dopamine and serotonin, which are associated with cognition.
COLUMBIA, Mo. (May 25, 2016) - Approximately half of patients hospitalized with traumatic brain injuries are anemic, according to recent studies, but anemia's effects on the recovery of these patients is not clear. Now, researchers from the University of Missouri School of Medicine have found evidence that anemia can negatively influence the outcomes of patients with traumatic brain injuries.
When it comes to mating, male animals show off the flashiest of ornaments to convince females of their suitability. A peacock's ornate tail may be the best-known example of a mate-attracting ornament, but a new study finds that peacock tails have nothing on a tail of another kind. Sperm tails in fruit flies are the most extreme ornament ever described.
Montreal, May 25, 2016 -- Humans aren't much different from other animals. Just like Pavlov's dogs, we can become conditioned to associate environmental cues with rewards. Innocent enough when the sight of your sneakers makes you want to go for a run, but not necessarily so when the sight of the liquor store prompts you to want a drink.
Indeed, Pavlovian cues that predict alcohol can lead us toward addiction. And sometimes those cues can become desirable in and of themselves, as shown in a new study published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience by researchers from Concordia University in Montreal.
SAN FRANCISCO - May 25, 2016 - Researchers studying babies with a Zika virus-related birth defect say they have found previously unreported eye problems possibly linked to the virus that could result in severe visual impairment. In three Brazilian infants with microcephaly, the researchers observed retinal lesions, hemorrhaging and abnormal blood vessel development not noted before in relation to the virus. The findings are being published online today in Ophthalmology, journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
Black carbon aerosols--particles of carbon that rise into the atmosphere when biomass, agricultural waste, and fossil fuels are burned in an incomplete way--are important for understanding climate change, as they absorb sunlight, leading to higher atmospheric temperatures, and can also coat Arctic snow with a darker layer, reducing its reflectivity and leading to increased melting. Unfortunately, current simulation models, which combine global climate models with aerosol transport models, consistently underestimate the amount of these aerosols in the Arctic compared to actual measurements during the spring and winter seasons, making it difficult to accurately assess the impact of these substances on the climate.
There are better solutions to the "reproducibility crisis" in research, according to an editorial published today.
Should an academic institution refund its financial payment if the basic science or pre-clinical results prove to be irreproducible?
Such an "incentive-based approach" for improving data reproducibility was recently proposed by a senior executive at Merck, although the idea is said not to represent the company's position.
But in an editorial published by The BMJ today, Eric Topol, Director of Scripps Translational Science Institute in California, argues that there are better solutions to the "reproducibility crisis" in research.
A new analysis of global data related to wildfire, published by the Royal Society, reveals major misconceptions about wildfire and its social and economic impacts.
Prof. Stefan Doerr and Dr Cristina Santin from Swansea University's College of Science carried out detailed analysis of global and regional data on fire occurrence, severity and its impacts on society.
Their research, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, looked at charcoal records in sediments and isotope-ratio records in ice cores, to build up a picture of wildfire in the past.
Researchers from the University of Rochester suggest that children raised in poverty may have been mistakenly labeled as "maladapted" for what appears to be a lack of self-control. The new study finds that what looks like selfishness may actually be beneficial behavior that's based on a child's environmental context--that is to say, from being raised in a resource-poor environment.
SAN DIEGO -- In roughly one-third of pancreatic cancer patients, tumors have grown around the pancreas to encompass critical blood vessels. Conventional wisdom has long held that surgery to remove the tumors is rarely an option, and life expectancies are usually measured in months. Mayo Clinic, teaming oncologists, gastrointestinal and vascular surgeons and others, is finding that many of these patients actually are candidates for surgery. Mayo has been fine-tuning a protocol to treat them, and in two studies, found survival now stretching into years.
MULTIMEDIA ALERT: Video and audio are available for download on the Mayo Clinic News Network.
The findings were presented at the Pancreas Club and Society for Surgery of the Alimentary Tract annual meetings in San Diego.
The U.S. Memorial Day weekend ushers in the start of the summer grilling season but University of Missouri School of Medicine wants to throw some cold water on your flames - by warning the public about the dangers of cleaning with wire-bristle brushes.
Coupled with the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) declaring hot dogs as hazardous to your health as plutonium, grilling food just got a lot less fun - unless you have any critical thinking.
