brain

From sniffing out diabetes, cancers and positive COVID-19 cases to being disgustingly interested in poop, we all know dogs have a mighty powerful sense of smell. Yet researchers were surprised to see the sheer extent of the smell wiring within dog brains.  Veterinary neuroimaging researcher Erica Andrews of Cornell University and colleagues have just mapped domestic dogs' (Canis familiaris) olfactory brain pathways using diffusion MRI scans. This technique uses differences in the flow of molecules, such as water, to…

The arms race between the human immune system and gonorrhea might have had the useful side effect of promoting healthy brain tissue later in life.This tiny boost to cognitive health in our twilight years might have played a small role in ensuring grandmas were sharp-minded enough for evolution to keep them around.  While it's fiendishly difficult – and may be impossible – to figure out what evolutionary factors are responsible for living beyond ages where we no longer reproduce, researchers at the University of…

When bees are sick, their reflexes suffer. Presented with a drop of liquid, the infirm insects don’t extend their proboscises to inspect it as quickly as they do when they’re not ill. Similarly, sick rats take longer to navigate an underwater maze than healthy ones, songbirds don’t learn as many tunes, and crows are less inclined to solve puzzles when they’re under the weather.It’s a trend that holds true throughout the animal kingdom: Across taxa, wild animals seem to lose cognitive capacity when suffering from…

It might surprise you to know that even during the depths of sleep, your brain cycles through brief bouts of wakefulness.  These 'micro-arousals', as they are known, are too short to be remembered the next morning, but together they could help your brain consolidate your memories from the day before.  Among sleeping mice, researchers publishing in the journal Nature Neuroscience have counted as many as a hundred micro-arousals occurring a night.Far from interrupting a rodent's rest, these occasional spurts of brain…

Differentiated cortical neurons expressing the axonal marker Tau (green) and the dendritic marker MAP-2 (red). Credit: Dr. Robert Williams, University of BathScientists are starting to understand the precise workings of a type of gene that, unlike other genes, does not code for proteins – the building blocks of life.New research shows the mechanism by which genes coding for a subset of long non-coding <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div…

Framework launched last year with the promise of building laptops that you could upgrade yourself with little more than a screwdriver and some patience. Now, 12 months after making its debut, the company is shipping out its first round of upgrade kits to keep those machines up to date. It’s a good start, as the outfit makes good on its pledges to make a modular, repairable machine and to bring existing users along with any future tweaks to the system. After almost breezily swapping out a first-generation mainboard for its…

NEW DELHI: Less than one in four in India are aware of the symptoms of a brain stroke, according to the findings of a nationwide survey conducted by a pharma company Boehringer Ingelheim,…

For the first time, magnetic resonance imaging reveals in vivo brain inflammation. The picture above is an artist’s concept of scientists studying a brain scan. Using diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance, researchers captured pictures of the activation of microglia and astrocytes, two kinds of cells involved in neuroinflammation.The labs of Dr. Silvia de Santis and Dr. Santiago Canals from the Institute of Neurosciences UMH-CSIC (Alicante, Spain) have used diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging to image brain…

Image: Tor Nightfire/Macmillan/MCDThere’s something about mushrooms and fungi that’s inherently creepy. They can grow just about anywhere, feed on anything, and wiggle their weird little mycelia into the cracks, corners, and crannies of any house, home, or body. It makes for very good horror. I’m excited to show you.So, for some of these book the presence of fungi might not be apparently obvious (some of these entries could border on spoiler territory), but I need you to trust me that all of these books slide neatly into…

As familiar to everyone as the COVID-causing coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has become over the past two years, feverish research is still trying to parse a lingering puzzle. How, in fact, does the pandemic virus that has so changed the world cross over into the brain after entering the respiratory system? An answer is important because neurological complaints are some of the most common in the constellation of symptoms called long COVID. The mystery centers around the fact that brain cells don’t display the receptors, or docking…