A new study published Thursday in Cell Stem Cell is set to further stoke the debate over whether our brain can actually grow back neurons as we age. The research found that people, even into their golden years, are regenerating their stock of neurons right up until the point of death—seemingly contradicting the…
It may look like something befitting Halloween’s Michael Myers, but the device pictured above is actually a breakthrough in neuroscience—a portable, wearable brain scanner that can monitor neural activity while a person is moving.
A popular theory about how the human brain works—one that’s inspired both neuroscience research and sketchy health fads alike—is just plain wrong, suggests a new study published Thursday in Nature. The adult brain might not be able to naturally restock its supply of neurons after all.
Despite the cold, Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, Connecticut was full of visitors on New Year’s Eve. But one popular aquarium resident, an adult northern fur seal named Ziggy Star, was behind the scenes that day, recuperating in an off-exhibit habitat, complete with a private pool.
Recent scientific progress has allowed us to begin decoding the significance of many different patterns of activity in the brain. Researchers have begun to understand patterns associated with disorders such as depression, in hopes of correcting it. Other research has zeroed in on how language and speech is signaled in…
Reviving unresponsive patients has long been a dream of humanity, and an oft-talked about part of the human condition. Maybe you’ve cried along with the movie Awakenings, or had long conversations with relatives about what happens should you or they end up in the same position.
These days, it seems you’re nobody if you’re not working on a way to merge machines with the human brain. Earlier this year, both Facebook and perpetual moonshot-enthusiast Elon Musk announced plans for brain-computer interfaces that could allow us to read the thoughts of others and improve our capacity for learning.…
For decades, scientists have dreamed of how electricity might be used to change the human brain. By altering its firing patterns using currents, scientists hope to not only treat mental illness, but improve human cognition. Trouble is, so far the most successful of these enterprises have relied on implanting…
A 27-year-old man had been suffering frequent headaches and had been falling over frequently for around three years. But when he had a seizure, he headed to the emergency department. They took an MRI and found THIS.
An Italian neuroscientist who says he’s planning to perform the world’s first head transplant later this year has told a German magazine that he intends to thaw a cryogenically preserved brain and transplant it in a donor body within three years. It’s a preposterous claim given the current limitations of medical…
Spaceflight is not for the faint of heart—literally. The first results of NASA’s twin study, released just this week, revealed that space physically impacts astronauts on multiple levels, right down to shifts in gene expression. Now, a group of scientists at the University of Michigan have released research that…
Flash one light, and the mouse goes on the prowl, zombielike, stalking any prey in its path. Flash another, and it delivers a killing blow with its teeth. The mouse doesn’t hunt out of hunger—scientists are in control.
Neuroscienitsts have generally thought that babies are born with more tissue than their brains need, and that the body slowly dumps some of it as the brain develops. However, a new study shows that at least one part of the brain—the part that recognizes faces—appears to develop in the opposite direction, increasing in…
Stem cells are dope as hell, and combined with gene editing techniques like CRISPR, it seems like there’s almost nothing you can’t just whip up in a lab. Tiny, folded blobs of brain tissue, for example.
Thanks to a poor dinosaur who scientists believe fell into a noxious pond after it died, we may have the first known fossilized dinosaur brain on our hands.
IBM and the US government teamed up to develop a new supercomputer for use on national security missions. It makes decisions like a human brain, and uses less power than a hearing aid.
A few months ago I started getting headaches, and they were weird. If a bad hangover headache feels splitting, I’d describe these headaches as searing, as if someone had hit me over the head with a red hot rod of steel sending electric bolts of pain across my skull.
These are some of the 500 images recently shown to rhesus monkeys while their brains were being monitored. None are meant to correspond to any real-world physical object, but the experimental results revealed certain cells in the object area of the brain that let us recognize up and down, and to grasp that those…
Movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Inception suggest it may eventually be possible to erase, modify, or even implant memories into your brain. An upcoming episode of NOVA introduces viewers to this futuristic possibility and the scientists who are trying to make it happen.
