Experiments with mice have revealed the neuroscience of why dogs shake their wet fur.Credit: Nat NT/Getty When a dog shakes water off its fur, the action is not just a random flurry of movements — nor a deliberate effort to drench anyone standing nearby. This instinctive reflex is shared by many furry mammals including mice, […]
Cognitive tests would be used less often to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease under a proposal by some scientists.Credit: Burger/Phanie/Science Photo Library Controversy has erupted among researchers over an effort to adopt blood tests and brain scans for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease, rather than the cognitive screening that has been used for decades. Proponents of the change say […]
How does the brain store—and access—our memories? While our understanding of the brain has (thankfully) developed greatly from the days of removing cerebral tissue to see what would happen, a precise understanding of where our memories reside—and how our brain recalls past experience—remains elusive. A new paperpublished November 6 in Natureexamines the role played by […]
My mind has been challenged. View Entire Post ›
Blood tests could make detecting Alzheimer’s disease easier.Credit: Andrew Brookes/Getty In 2018, the people around Daryl Ditz started to see signs that something wasn’t quite right. “My work colleagues noticed I was kind of slipping with the computer stuff — messing up a little bit, putting files in the wrong place,” he says. “My wife […]
A healthy brain (fMRI image). Researchers are investigating the effects of stimulating regions of the brain linked to depression. Credit: Mark & Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute/Science Photo Library A remote clinical trial involving more than 150 people has shown that an experimental treatment for depression — which uses a swimming-cap-like device to gently […]
Representative microscopy image of aged skin with increased DNA-damage (depicted in green) within telomeres (in red), a biomarker associated with cellular senescence and aging. Mayo Clinic researchers have found that senescent cells — non-dividing “zombie” cells — accumulate in the skin as people age and may influence aging in other parts of the body. Their […]
A new grant will help fund community outreach efforts and new technology to modernize the Mayo Clinic Brain Bank and advance research in neurodegenerative diseases.
Researchers are cataloguing the effects of birth control on the brain. Credit: Isabel Pavia/Getty Chicago, Illinois Hold the morning coffee and meditation: for about 75 days over the span of a year, neuroscientist Carina Heller’s morning ritual included climbing into her university’s brain scanner at 7:30 a.m. and lying perfectly still for an hour and […]
When you think of what makes us human, would you say it’s our powers of prediction? I probably wouldn’t have, at least not until my conversation with Mark Miller, a philosopher of cognition and research fellow at both the University of Toronto and Monash University in Melbourne. He studies how new ideas about the mind […]
