Scientists hypothesize that during puberty, experiences influence brain development in ways that shape brain structure and even behavior in adulthood. One type of experience that often arises in the minds of pubescent teens and adolescents is sex. But a study published in the journal Hormones and Behavior suggests engaging in sexual activity too soon could be detrimental to the adult brain, and may lead to...
Read More
Each year, nearly ninety thousand children are born extremely premature in the United States – that is, before 28 weeks gestation. Most of them survive, but about half the survivors suffer from severe health problems throughout their childhood and into adulthood, including learning and behavioral disorders such as ADHD. “Treatment options are clearly urgently required to prevent the brain damage and associated memory deficits that follow...
Read More
When it comes to health, kidneys are critical. From regulating blood composition to maintaining calcium levels, the pair of bean-shaped organs perform several essential tasks. Needless to say, interruption to kidney function can be disastrous. Working with scientists in South Korea, researchers at the University of Virginia found a surprisingly simple treatment for renal ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI) in mice, which is a model of acute kidney...
Read More
A new optical clearing agent developed by scientists in Japan clears brain tissue samples with greater transparency and less time than other clearing agents, according to a paper published in Nature Neuroscience. “Combined with two-photon microscopy, SeeDB allowed us to image fixed mouse brains at the millimeter-scale level,” say the authors, who after clearing the brain tissue with SeeDB, captured images with a multiphoton Olympus microscope,...
Read More
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have found that formoterol ̶ an FDA-approved drug for treating asthma and similar respiratory disorders ̶ improves cognitive function in mice genetically altered to exhibit symptoms of Down syndrome including cognitive disability. Formoterol was chosen for the study because it activates β2 adrenergic receptors (β2ARs) on neurons, a task also carried out by norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter with a...
Read More
In spring, days grow long, and the white-footed mouse looks for a mate. For some mammals, day length prompts behaviors like breeding or camouflaging, and scientists say it's not just the arc of the sun that kicks off these seasonal events; substances in the brain also play a part. One important element is melatonin, a hormone that the mammalian brain secretes at night. According to a...
Read More
Drugs affect different people in different ways. Take cocaine for example. Not only does the drug have a stronger impact on the behavior of individuals with a particular genetic makeup, it also initiates more profound changes in their brains. Researchers at the University of Michigan are studying brain plasticity in cocaine-treated rats after a period of abstinence. They're studying how abstinence from the drug affects different...
Read More
Sensory stimuli are all around us. Street traffic zooms by. A neighbor waves “hello.” A co-worker taps away at his keyboard. Each sight, sound, and motion ignite action within our brains. But even without all these stimuli, the brain is always active. Known as “spontaneous activity,” the activity happening inside the brain in the absence of direct stimuli follows a pattern of up and down states...
Read More
Life's little pleasures often elude those suffering from depression, including rats, who show little interest in sugar water after experiencing stress. This behavior leads scientists to speculate that the illness might be characterized by a defect in the brain's neural reward circuit. Recent research focuses on a key element of this circuit – the nucleus accumbens (NAc), part of the brain region known as the ventral...
Read More
Scientists hypothesize that seizures occur because brain cells fire in places they're not supposed to. Dentate granule cells (DGCs), a type of neuron born throughout adulthood, sometimes migrate into a different region of the dentate gyrus, a part of the hippocampus. These abnormal newborn cells sprout axons called “mossy fibers” that form connections with neighboring DGCs in the inner molecular layer, causing synaptic changes that...
Read More