Latest Brown University Stories
Creatures are not born hardwired to see. Instead, they depend on electrical activity in the retina to refine the complex circuits that process visual information. Two new studies from Brown University in different species using different techniques show how nascent animal brains use light to wire up or construct their central vision system.Any parent knows that newborns still have a lot of neurological work to do to attain fully acute vision. In a wide variety of nascent animals, genes...
Computer scientists at Brown University have created software to examine neural circuitry in the human brain. The 2-D neural maps combine visual clarity with a Web-based digital map interface, and users can view 2-D maps together with 3-D images. The program aims to better understand myelinated axons, which have been linked to pathologies such as autism. Results are published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Medical imaging systems allow neurologists to summon 3-D...
The end of the Norse colonies on Greenland have long been shrouded in mystery, and while archaeologists have been able to fill in some blanks, there is limited written evidence of the colony's demise in the 14th and early 15th century. But now, new research from Brown University suggests that Greenland's early Viking settlers lived in a region with a rapidly changing climate with temperatures plunging several degrees on average in a span of decades. Climate scientists have been able to...
A team of NASA-funded researchers has measured water from the moon that shows some parts of the lunar mantle have as much water as the Earth's upper mantle. The research, from Case Western Reserve University, Carnegie Institution for Science, and Brown University, shows 100 times more water than measured before. Scientists discovered water along with volatile elements in lunar magma trapped inside of crystals that are themselves trapped inside tiny volcanic glass beads. The team of...
When you suffer a heart attack, a part of your heart dies. Nerve cells in the heart's wall and a special class of cells that spontaneously expand and contract "“ keeping the heart beating in perfect synchronicity "“ are lost forever. Surgeons can't repair the affected area. It's as if when confronted with a road riddled with potholes, you abandon what's there and build a new road instead.Needless to say, this is a grossly inefficient way to treat arguably the single most important organ...
Analysis of dairy intake and heart attack risk found no statistically significant relation in thousands of Costa Rican adults. Dairy foods might not harm heart health, despite saturated fat content, because they contain other possibly protective nutrients, researchers say. Dairy products can be high in harmful saturated fat but not necessarily in risk to the heart. A newly published analysis of thousands of adults in Costa Rica found that their levels of dairy consumption had nothing to do...
More than 200 million years ago, mammals and reptiles lived in their own separate worlds on the supercontinent Pangaea, despite little geographical incentive to do so. Mammals lived in areas of twice-yearly seasonal rainfall; reptiles stayed in areas where rains came just once a year. Mammals lose more water when they excrete, and thus need water-rich environments to survive. Results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Aggregating nearly the entire landmass of...
In hundreds of interviews in five states with family members of persons who had advanced dementia, researchers found that their decision-making process for whether to insert a feeding tube often lacked necessary information for informed consent.Despite evidence that feeding tubes do not improve survival rates or quality of life for elderly patients with advanced dementia, their frequency of use varies widely across the states. A new survey of family members finds that discussions surrounding...
The thylacine had the head and body of a dog, but its striped coat resembled a cat and it carried its young in a pouch like a kangaroo. These enigmatic, iconic creatures of Australia and Tasmania have been given conflicting names such as the "marsupial wolf" and the "Tasmanian tiger."Researchers at Brown University may have discovered the answer as to what type of creature the extinct thylacine was. Bones of the thylacines, along with other dog-like and cat-like animals such as pumas,...
Call them the Jason Bournes of the bacteria world.Going "off the grid," like rogue secret agents, some bacteria avoid antibiotic treatments by essentially shutting down and hiding until it's safe to come out again, says Thomas Wood, professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University.This surreptitious and elaborate survival mechanism is explained in the online April edition of "Nature Chemical Biology," which details the research...
