In folklore and movies, silver is often one of the best tools against terrifying monsters like vampires and werewolves. But a recent study seems to show that silver could help defeat some real-life horrors, too. Silver nanoparticles loaded with common anti-seizure drugs might be able to safely and effectively treat…
A Rochester, New York, resident might have caught one of the most frightening brain diseases around in one of the strangest ways possible—eating squirrel meat contaminated with zombie-like proteins.
The effects of Alzheimer’s disease on the brain often go unnoticed for years, even decades. But researchers at Stanford University and the University of Oxford believe they’ve found a way to visualize how the disease slowly spreads and erodes the brain—a tool they hope can help other scientists better study the…
Keeping your kid’s mind sharp might involve making sure they don’t spend all day on their smartphone or other screen devices, suggests yet more research published this week.
Scientists in the UK and Sweden believe they’ve come across an unprecedented advance in Alzheimer’s disease research: A method of developing new drugs that can target the roots of the fatal disease in a way that previous attempts couldn’t. But while the latest published work is genuinely intriguing, outside experts…
The ability to remember every moment of your life sounds like an amazing proposition, but for the very few people who actually have this ability, it comes at a cost.
When humans take the drug MDMA, versions of which are known as molly or ecstasy, they commonly feel very happy, extraverted, and particularly interested in physical touch. A group of scientists recently wondered whether this drug might have a similar effect on other species—specifically, octopuses, which are seemingly…
A devastating viral disease could actually help treat and prevent brain cancer in the future, suggests yet more research, published Tuesday in MBio. Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch and elsewhere successfully used a modified version of the Zika virus to selectively kill off certain stem cells that…
An incurable affliction that gradually destroys a person’s ability to walk, speak, and eventually breathe can also deteriorate the mind, new research suggests. People with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are more likely to have other mental and behavioral health problems than people without the condition, the…
We’re up for a big week in the news, folks. There’s a lot going to happen, from Apple’s big September 12th announcement event to the notably less fun Hurricane Florence, which is currently projected to barrel into the East Coast at a minimum Category 3 status or possibly even worse before the weekend. As the president…
A recent research review suggests that white noise, the soothing, fuzzy soundtrack so many of us rely on to sleep or block out distractions, could actually be dangerous. It argues that exposure to the random, unstructured sounds that make up white noise can alter the brain’s neural connections that help us perceive…
Here at Gizmodo, we’ve just wrapped up Feud Week: A series on personality and business clashes in the tech world, scientific disputes, and whether or not to shoot Bigfoot. (I say let the big guy do his thing, unless it turns out it’s kidnapping people with mind-waves to make more Bigfoots.) Some have said that a Nice…
By the time you’re finished reading this sentence, your brain will have rapidly assessed your surroundings 14 times to see if you should focus on something else. At least, that’s what new research suggests.
Given their current popularity, you might assume that probiotics—capsules containing a mix of “good” bacteria that are said to rebalance our gut’s bacterial content—would be perfectly harmless. But a team of gastroenterologists from Augusta University in Georgia is challenging that assumption. Their recent study is…
A new case study from Pittsburgh highlights the resilience of the human brain. It details a boy who, despite losing one-third of the right hemisphere of his brain when he was six, is now a mostly ordinary 10-year-old. Though he can’t see past the left side of his face, his brain has compensated for the loss in some…
There is no singular cause of mental illness. Any number of things—our genes, environment, and even social mores—play a role in determining whether someone’s mental health will deteriorate to the point of being diagnosable as a disease. But researchers from Johns Hopkins have stumbled onto a possible trigger for manic…
For decades, the idea that a bacteria or virus could help cause Alzheimer’s disease was dismissed as a fringe theory. But not so much anymore. On Wednesday, a team of researchers from Harvard Medical School reported in the journal Neuron the latest bit of evidence suggesting herpesviruses can spark the cascade of…
People living with opioid addiction are increasingly using the inhalation method to get high, warns a new review published Monday in JAMA Neurology. The technique known as “chasing the dragon,” which involves heating up heroin and inhaling its fumes through a pipe, may be safer in some ways than injection, but it…
An excavation of a million people’s genes has provided some interesting clues to how several common psychiatric disorders might arise, including major depression and schizophrenia. And it’s also highlighted connections between some mental illnesses and other health problems, including heart disease.
A fringe theory about the origins of Alzheimer’s disease—that latent viral infections can sometimes trigger its emergence—has gotten perhaps its most significant bit of support yet. A complex new study published Thursday in Neuron has found evidence that certain viruses are not only more common in the brains of people…
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