Latest Neuroanatomy Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A noise in the dark, a rustle in the undergrowth; these are sounds likely to make an animal or a person stop sharply and be still, anticipating a predator. Freezing is part of the natural fear response, a reaction to a stimulus in the environment and part of how the brain decides whether to be afraid of it. A new study released by a neuroscience group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) examines how fear responses are learned,...

Insect research yields insights for muscle control and nerve disorders in mammals, including humans Working with fruit flies, Johns Hopkins scientists have decoded the activity of protein signals that let certain nerve cells know when and where to branch so that they reach and connect to their correct muscle targets. The proteins’ mammalian counterparts are known to have signaling roles in immunity, nervous system and heart development, and tumor progression, suggesting broad...

Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Science is a magnificent thing and yet, there is still so much we don’t yet understand. For instance, scientists are still working to fully understand the part of our body that resides right in front of our face. More than 100 years ago, scientists discovered a mechanism that provides feedback from our nose to our brain. Though these scientists discovered this mechanism, they weren’t yet able to fully understand how it works to...

Cell Press [ Watch The Video ] Humans perceive numerous categories of objects and actions, but where are these categories represented spatially in the brain? Researchers reporting in the December 20 issue of the Cell Press journal Neuron present their study that undertook the remarkable task of determining how the brain maps over a thousand object and action categories when subjects watched natural movie clips. The results demonstrate that the brain efficiently represents the diversity...

Penn State Building a tunnel made up of both hard and soft materials to guide the reconnection of severed nerve endings may be the first step toward helping patients who have suffered extensive nerve trauma regain feeling and movement, according to a team of biomedical engineers. "Nerve injury in both central nervous system and peripheral nervous system is a major health problem," said Mohammad Reza Abidian, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, Penn State. "According to the...

Light instantly triggers or reverses depression-like states in rodents -- NIH-funded studies A specific pattern of neuronal firing in a brain reward circuit instantly rendered mice vulnerable to depression-like behavior induced by acute severe stress, a study supported by the National Institutes of Health has found. When researchers used a high-tech method to mimic the pattern, previously resilient mice instantly succumbed to a depression-like syndrome of social withdrawal and reduced...

MEQUON, Wis., Dec. 10, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- ENDECE Neural, LLC (www.endeceneural.com) announced today that the company will be presenting at the 2013 Biotech Showcase in San Francisco, California, January 8th. The ENDECE Neural presentation, to be given by Dr. James Yarger, CEO, will discuss the company's novel therapeutic for directly inducing remyelination of demyelinated axons to treat neurological diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Currently there are no drugs...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A team of University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) researchers has reportedly discovered the group of nerve cells responsible for communicating the sensation of gentle touch in fruit flies -- and possibly in humans and other organisms as well -- potentially shedding light on one of most mysterious senses in all of biology. In their research, which has been published online by the journal Nature, the UCSF researchers studied...

Where the nonspecific thalamus meets the prefrontal cortex Inside the brains of mice and men alike, a relatively big football-shaped region called the thalamus acts like a switchboard, providing the prefrontal cortex, the part that does abstract thinking and decision-making, with most of its information. The thalamus's responsibility even includes helping the prefrontal cortex to maintain consciousness and arousal. Essential as this "thalamocortical" partnership is, neuroscientists have...

MEQUON, Wis., Nov. 28, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- ENDECE Neural, LLC (www.EndeceNeural.com) announced today that Dr. Steven Nye, Vice President of Discovery, will be presenting at the 2013 Keystone Symposia on Multiple Sclerosis to be held in January, in Big Sky, Montana, USA. Dr. Nye's presentation, "Estrogen analogs dramatically up-regulate intracellular signaling pathways for remyelination (1)," will review the mechanism behind the novel ENDECE Neural compounds that induce...