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In the new study, the team from Harvard randomly assigned 60 elderly people to drink two cups of flavanol-rich or flavanol-poor cocoa every day for a month. There weren't any overall differences between the high- and low-flavanol groups in terms of cognitive abilities, so the researchers looked a little deeper. They found that people who had compromised blood flow to the brain and white matter damage at the beginning of the study did show a difference after drinking the cocoa for a month: Blood flow in their brains improved by about 8%, and the time it took them to complete...

Researchers manipulate mouse neurons to create a false memory; the work could lead to a better understanding of how memories form. Remember this: The red neurons are the brain cells in the hippocampus of a mouse carrying a new memory of a particular place. Scientists have created a false memory in mice by manipulating neurons that bear the memory of a place. The work further demonstrates just how unreliable memory can be. It also lays new ground for understanding the cell behavior and circuitry that controls memory, and could one day help researchers discover new ways to treat mental illnesses...

8 Things We Simply Don't Understand About the Human Brain Despite all the recent advances in the cognitive and neurosciences, there’s still much about the human brain that we do not know. Here are 8 of the most baffling problems currently facing science. 1. What is consciousness? Without question, conscious awareness is the most astounding — and most perplexing — aspect of the human brain. It’s what makes us the unique, self-reflective creatures that we are. Consciousness allows us to experience and react to our environment in an apparently self-directed way. We’re not just zombies; we have our own private...

Scientists have found the brain's 'misery molecule' believed to be responsible for all of our feelings of stress and anxiety. Researchers believe that the protein - named CRF1 - could also be linked to depression...

Online advertising giant Google's new wearable accessories are merely a stepping stone to its ultimate ambition - a microchip which can be embedded in users' brains. The company, which uses its search, email and other services to funnel personalised advertising to users, is currently trialling prototypes of its Glass device, which is worn like a pair of glasses. But Google is staking its future on a new service which will use the information it holds on registered users to automatically predict their search needs and present them with the data they want. The ultimate ambition is to literally get inside...

Pennsylvania scientists have discovered the cause of the chronic disorder known as tinnitus, and have also found a way to treat it. Their goal is a preventive strategy for individuals whose work situations could cause them to be exposed to very loud noise. University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers found that an epilepsy drug known as retigabine prevents tinnitus in animal models, according to ScienceDaily. They published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Strictly speaking, tinnitus isn't a condition, but a symptom of some type of disorder, like hearing loss related to age, a...

The daredevil teen awoke from his sodium-induced coma after three days.A young man who drank a quart of soy sauce went into a coma and nearly died from an excess of salt in his body, according to a recent case report. The 19-year-old, who drank the soy sauce after being dared by friends, is the first person known to have deliberately overdosed on such a high amount of salt and survived with no lasting neurological problems, according to the doctors in Virginia who reported his case. The case report was published online June 4 in the Journal of Emergency Medicine....

Inside a Mouse's Brain Lies a Chemical Key to the Fountain of Youth By Greg Thomas Source image via Wikipedia If a scientist came to you with a plan to tweak a gland in the center of your brain so that you may live to be 140 years old, you'd probably back out of the room slowly and go to file a police report, because that's creepy. But new research shows that it's not altogether impossible. A new report from researchers at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in the Bronx shows that scientists can tinker with the minds of...

Two pioneering researchers of brain disease among athletes in violent sports recommended Saturday that investigators conduct special autopsy tests on amateur boxer Tamerlan Tsarnaev to determine whether the Boston Marathon bombing suspect could have been affected by boxing-related brain damage.

The taste of beer, without any effect from alcohol itself, can trigger dopamine release in the brain that is associated with drinking and other drugs of abuse, researchers have claimed. Using positron emission tomography (PET), the researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine tested 49 men with two scans, one in which they tasted beer, and the second in which they tasted Gatorade. The researchers were looking for evidence of increased levels of dopamine, a brain neurotransmitter that has long been associated with alcohol and other drugs of abuse. The scans showed significantly more dopamine activity following the taste of...

New York - Scientists have for the first time linked the brains of a human and a rat, enabling the man to use just his thoughts to wiggle the rodent's tail. This is the first case of a brain-to-brain interface between species, and the first example of a noninvasive brain-to-brain interface, researchers claimed. Earlier this year, scientists had linked together the brains of two rats.This first known instance of a brain-to-brain interface apparently helped the rodents share data to accomplish certain tasks, even across intercontinental distances, LiveScience reported. In the latest experiment, researchers from Harvard Medical School employed noninvasive techniques...

Yesterday was filled with big doin’s around here. MO did a movie review while, down the hall, BO addressed the importance of having a brain. Lady M, as part of her continuing series of culturally sensitive movie reviews, held a film workshop on the movie “42.” “42” is a biopic about Jackie Robinson, the baseball player who broke the Major League’s color barrier in 1947 (he also was a successful business man after his baseball career butt he didn’t do that on his own). Jackie’s wife, Rachael Robinson, was in attendance along with the film’s stars Harrison Ford, and other...

Reader Scott wrote in to ask, “Does alcohol kill brain cells?”“Oh, Lisa, you and your stories. ‘Bart is a vampire.’ ‘Beer kills brain cells.’ Now let’s go back to that…building…thingy, where our beds and TV…is.” - Homer SimpsonWatch someone after they’ve had a few drinks, and you’ll find evidence that alcohol does something to their brain. They stumble, slur their words, lose control of their emotions, and forget things. Some people have tried to explain this behavior as the aftermath of cell death caused by alcohol. Often, it’s packaged as a neat factoid like “Three beers kill 10,000 brain cells.”Now, ethyl...

President Obama on Tuesday outlined a government-sponsored initiative to map the human brain, casting the proposal as a way to discover new cures for neurological disease and strengthen the economy. “Ideas are what power our economy,” Obama said in announcing the proposal from the White House East Room. “When we invest in the best ideas before anyone else does, our businesses and our workers can make the best products and deliver the best services before anyone else does.” The project would use about $100 million in federal money over the next fiscal year

WASHINGTON — The gun lobby isn’t the only group throwing its weight around trying to thwart President Obama’s plans to combat gun violence. Even a modest proposal to study how violent video games might be affecting young minds has quietly run aground, the victim, sources say, of opposition by the burgeoning video game industry — a $67 billion colossus with increasing clout in Washington.

The flip of a single molecular switch helps create the mature neuronal connections that allow the brain to bridge the gap between adolescent impressionability and adult stability. Now Yale School of Medicine researchers have reversed the process, recreating a youthful brain that facilitated both learning and healing in the adult mouse. Scientists have long known that the young and old brains are very different. Adolescent brains are more malleable or plastic, which allows them to learn languages more quickly than adults and speeds recovery from brain injuries. The comparative rigidity of the adult brain results in part from the function...

Steubenville Convicted Rapist Will Appeal Because His 'Brain Isn't Fully Developed' Alexander Abad-Santos, The Atlantic WireMarch 19,2013Since his defense strategy, claiming that a 16-year-old rape victim wasn't "so" drunk, has failed, the lawyer for one of the two Steubenville football players convicted of rape plans to appeal a guilty verdict, and is now claiming that the 16-year-old rapist's brain wasn't "developed" enough and his client should not have to be on a sex offenders list for life. Walter Madison, the attorney for Ma'lik Richmond, went on Piers Morgan Tonight on Tuesday, explaining why he would appeal Sunday's verdict by 37-year...

Obama has consistently created history, and he did so once again. Brain Activity Map (BAM) is a project that aims to map each neuronal activity and connection in the human brain. The project ever since Obama compared it to the Human Genome Project at his State of union address is widely believed to have garnered funding by the US federal government. The ballpark figure that the Obama administration will allocate to this ambitious project is thought to cross over into a few billion dollars. BAM was first proposed in September 2011 by the Kavli Foundation while they sought to bring...

Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel whose last claim to fame was his expulsion of some 10,000 Jews from their homes in Gush Katif and northern Samaria, is still in a coma, as he has been since 2005. But recent medical treatments show that there is activity in Sharon's brain – specifically when it comes to recognizing photos of family members. Sharon was recently examined by experts at Ben Gurion University and Soroka Hospital, where he underwent an MRI scan, Voice of Israel public radio reported. .....

Blinking Causes Brain To Go Off-Line 03 Jan 2013 New research from Japan suggests that blinking does more than stop our eyes drying out: it is an active process that causes the brain to go off-line, into a more reflective mode, before giving renewed attention. Tamami Nakano of Osaka University and colleagues write about their findings in the 24 December online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, PNAS. In earlier work, where they had invited volunteers to watch Mr Bean videos, Nakano and colleagues discovered that people's eyes blink when they need to pay less attention,...