Latest Nervous system Stories

Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Consciousness and perception have long been understood as being interlinked. But our perceptions may be related less to our sense of sight than was previously understood. A new study by researchers at the University of Virginia shows that vision may be less important to our ability to see than is the brain’s ability to process the individual points of light we encounter into more complex images. Their study of the fruit fly’s...

In a new study appearing this month in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers have unlocked the complex cellular mechanics that instruct specific brain cells to continue to divide. This discovery overcomes a significant technical hurdle to potential human stem cell therapies; ensuring that an abundant supply of cells is available to study and ultimately treat people with diseases. “One of the major factors that will determine the viability of stem cell therapies is access to a safe and...

A gene that is associated with regeneration of injured nerve cells has been identified by scientists at Penn State University and Duke University. The team, led by Melissa Rolls, an assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State, has found that a mutation in a single gene can entirely shut down the process by which axons -- the parts of the nerve cell that are responsible for sending signals to other cells -- regrow themselves after being cut or damaged. "We are...

A study in The Journal of Cell Biology shows how a transcription factor called STAT3 remains in the axon of nerve cells to help prevent neurodegeneration. The findings could pave the way for future drug therapies to slow nerve damage in patients with neurodegenerative diseases. In Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS) and other neurodegenerative diseases, nerve cells usually die in stages, with axons deteriorating first and the cells themselves perishing later. Axon degeneration may represent a...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new study from the University of Bristol, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), sheds light on the origin of sight in animals, including humans. The research team, led by Dr. David Pisani of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences, used computer modeling to provide a detailed picture of how and when opsins evolved. Opsins are conjugated protein enzymes. These enzymes are components of the visual...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Can't remember what you dreamt about last night? Never fear, because a team of Japanese researchers has reportedly discovered a way to determine what thoughts are going through a person's mind about while they sleep. Yukiyasu Kamitani, a member of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, and colleagues recruited three male volunteers and monitored them while they slept, using electroencephalography to record their...

Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The sense of touch is perhaps the most basic, most elementary of the senses. It’s how many living things learn, move and explore. Yet, according to W. Daniel Tracey, PhD, there’s still plenty left to be discovered when it comes to the sense of touch. “On a molecular level, touch is the most poorly understood of the senses,” said Dr. Tracey who is an associate professor of anesthesiology at Duke University Medical Center....

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A person’s aptitude for video games can be predicted by their brain waves, according to a new study published in the journal Psychophysiology. The researchers used electroencephalography (EEG) to observe the electrical activity in the brains of 39 study participants before they trained on the video game 'Space Fortress,' a game developed for cognitive research. None of the subjects were daily video game players. The...

A team of neuroscientists have proposed a new and potentially revolutionary way of determining the neuronal connectivity (the "connectome") of the whole brain of the mouse, in an essay published October 23 in the open access journal PLOS Biology. The team, led by Professor Anthony Zador, Ph.D. of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, aims to provide a comprehensive account of neural connectivity. At present the only method for obtaining this information with high precision relies on examining...

What happens in the brain when we see, hear, think and remember? To be able to answer questions like this, neuroscientists need information about how the millions of neurons in the brain are connected to each other. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg have taken a crucial step towards obtaining a complete circuit diagram of the brain of the mouse, a key model organism for the neurosciences. The research group working with Winfried Denk has developed a...