News tips from the Journal of Neuroscience
...short" (500 ms) and "long" (2 s) time reproduction tasks in which the subjects pressed a button after the p...d immediately after a tone. Both time reproduction tasks produced activation in the cerebellum and basal ganglia structures. When the time reproduction tasks...Brain, behavior may have changed as social insect colonies evolved
...ial interactions were more important than foraging tasks in explaining brain development." In the new study, O'Donnell and colleagues from the University of Texas studied the brain development of the primitively social wasp Mischocyttarus mastigophorus in the tropical cloud forest near Monteverde, Costa ...Story tips from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, November 2006
...y of functions, could lead to their application in tasks ranging from degrading or sequestering pollutants to producing fuels such as ethanol or hydrogen. [Contact: Larisa Brass, (865) 574-4163; brasslm@ornl.gov ] ELECTRICITY -- Power to spare . . . With thousands of substation power transformers a...Honey bee genome holds clues to social behavior
... to humans." Adult worker bees perform a number of tasks in the hive when they are young, such as caring for eggs and larvae, and then shift to foraging for nectar and pollen as they age. However, if the hive has a shortage of foragers, some of the young nurse bees will switch jobs and become foragers. The...UGA scientists unravel 'molecular inch-worm' structure of walking-pneumonia bacterium
...e, called a "terminal organelle," performs several tasks for this pervasive bacterium and even acts as a "molecular inch-worm," helping the microorganism move. "Mycoplasmas are among the simplest known prokaryotes--only a fraction the size of other health-related bacteria such as E. coli," said microbiolo...Dartmouth researchers find a neural signature of bilingualism
...nd Spanish from around birth). Language processing tasks were given to monolingual people speaking their on...ity while performing identical language processing tasks in "monolingual mode" (that is, in Spanish, and in English) or in "bilingual mode" (that is, when si...Molecular 'signature' protects cells from viruses
...store information, being responsible for important tasks in 'assembling' the proteins. Importance for therapy The fact that RNAs without a 'signature' stimulate an immune reaction and initiate cell suicide opens up completely new perspectives for the therapy of virus infections and cancer cases: for ex...Copper circuits help brain function -- could tweaking the circuits make us smarter?
...tigate whether these mice have problems performing tasks they had once learned....Evolutionary software to be released free of charge
...ch can speed up research by revealing unproductive tasks in advance or by exposing new paths through the introduction of distant but related data."...MIT provides first evidence for learning mechanism
... The problems were threefold. Many learning tasks require more than one repetition of an event, and slight differences in animals' rates of learning obscured the time-sensitive markers of LTP. Second, the synaptic changes that occur in hippocampus-based learning are few and far between, making them...Spineless tales provide strong backbone to human brain research
...low people, such as athletes, to repeat and adjust tasks they perform repeatedly. Cephalopods, which also include octopuses and squids, have 100 million nerve cells compared to the 10,000 in insects and the some one trillion in humans. "The idea is to look at simpler brains to allow us to generalize bro...Life and death in the hippocampus: what young neurons need to survive
...e-aged "exercised" rats perform better on learning tasks such as maze swimming, indicating that new neurons are more than just a backup supply but actually enhance learning. "Remarkably, new neurons are born in the hippocampus, a structure whose function is to acquire new information," says Gage. "That ...UW-Madison research part of international mercury conference
...methylmercury in utero were able to learn specific tasks - for example, pushing a lever when a light was tu.... However, the rats encountered problems when the tasks changed even slightly. Paletz describes the problems as "behavioral rigidity." The rats struggled ...Apes -- not monkeys -- ace IQ tests
...med better than other primates in these laboratory tasks is reassuring," said Carel van Schaik, Ph.D., a study co-author and director of the Anthropological Institute and Museum at the University of Zurich. "After all, in absolute terms, their brains are the largest and they show the most sophisticated beh...News tips from the Journal of Neuroscience
...t al. used evoked potential mapping to examine the tasks performed by each of these areas. Subjects perform...imagined that the figure was their reflection. The tasks differed subtly in that the OBT task required a disembodied-self location, whereas the MIR task reta...Penn researchers find role for microRNAs in angiogenesis
...e discovered that, within a tumor cell, one of the tasks of MYC is to turn loose a particular set of microRNAs, which then becomes responsible for promoting the growth of new blood vessels that nourish the tumor." MicroRNAs are, as the name implies, short strands of RNA. During the last few years, microRN...Top researcher-educators receive Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers
...system for human language, which could be used for tasks such as getting information from a medical database over the telephone or commanding a team of robots. Janet M. Wang of the University of Arizona is carrying out research on innovative computer-aided methodologies for the design of very large scale...European airborne campaign simulates Sentinel imagery over land
...ground over the past few months. One of the key tasks will be to take the airborne data and use it simulate the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery. This will allow ESA to assess the suitability of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 sensor and mission characteristics for land applications and will be useful for th...Study confirms males/females use different parts of brain in language & visuospatial tasks
... way men and women perform verbal and visuospatial tasks have been well documented in scientific literature...uted to many factors, including variability in the tasks used in studies and failure to match study participants on performance equivalency. But a new study......eption, daylight vision, and visual discrimination tasks like reading, while rods provide peripheral vision and vision in low light. Central to rod and cone visual signaling is the phosphodiesterase (PDE) protein. This enzyme is activated by light and is directly responsible for the nerve impulse that si...