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Grasshopper mice of the southwestern US deserts (Onychomys torridus) have evolved to take advantage of a normally well-protected food source:

“The grasshopper mouse has found a way, very cleverly, to disconnect the pain pathway

results suggested that rather than blocking the binding of the venom altogether, the grasshopper mouse had evolved a strategy to block the transmission of pain when the venom was bound. Sure enough, when the team pre-treated the mice with venom, and then administered a painful formalin stimulus, the mice were protected from the pain.

researchers have perfected a technique for growing miniature balls of cortical tissue—the key working tissue in the human brain—in a dish

As off-the-wall insane as this sounds, it isn’t just some mad science experiment. These tiny, 3D structures function much like the outer mantle, or cortex, of the brain of the person from which they were derived.

“While the technology is still maturing, there is great potential for using these assays to more accurately develop, test safety and effectiveness of new treatments before they are used in individuals with a mental illness,”

Amnesia remains a controversial subject in the field of neuroscience, with some researchers arguing that it occurs when cells are damaged and memory cannot be stored, while others believe that the memories are simply blocked and cannot be recalled.

The study, published in the US journal Science, indicated that memories do in fact remain, but are simply unable to be recollected.

The study allowed scientists to separate memory storage mechanisms from those allowing an organism to form and recover the memory, said MIT researcher Tomas Ryan, who co-authored the study.

Special K for breakfast. Liverwurst and cheese for lunch. And I remember the song ‘You've Got Personality’ was playing as on the radio as I pulled up for work,” said Healy, one of 50 confirmed people in the United States with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, an uncanny ability to remember dates and events.

New research released this week has found that even people with phenomenal memory are susceptible to having “false memories,” suggesting that “memory distortions are basic and widespread in humans, and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune,” according to the authors of the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Professor Elizabeth Loftus, who has spent decades researching how memories can become contaminated with people remembering—sometimes quite vividly and confidently—events that never happened. Loftus has found that memories can be planted in someone’s mind if they are exposed to misinformation after an event, or if they are asked suggestive questions about the past

In an Austrian laboratory, a team of scientists has grown three-dimensional models of embryonic human brain

“Even the most complex organ—the human brain—can start to form without any micro-manipulation.”

Knoblich cautioned that the organoids are not “brains-in-a-jar.” “We’re talking about the very first steps of embryonic brain development, like in the first nine weeks of pregnancy,” he said. “They’re nowhere near an adult human brain and they don’t form anything that resembles a neuronal network.”

some strains of both viruses are just one mutation away from getting a better grip on the cells in our upper airways. If wild viruses accrue those mutations, they may find it far easier to spread from infected to uninfected people, increasing the risk of a pandemic.

“These viruses are rapidly evolving and our stockpiles of vaccine are largely based on outdated strains,” he said. “We hope that our discoveries will help us to stay ahead of the curve by ensuring that vaccines are stockpiled against strains that are closest to adapting to humans.”

rather than focusing on these previously identified mutations, the team took a new approach. They modeled the way HA interacts with different glycans, and identified four structural features that bestow the protein with a preference for human receptors over bird ones.

a painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested. The analysis was done by research psychologists, many of whom volunteered their time to double-check what they considered important work. Their conclusions, reported Thursday in the journal Science, have confirmed the worst fears of scientists who have long worried that the field needed a strong correction.

The vetted studies were considered part of the core knowledge by which scientists understand the dynamics of personality, relationships, learning and memory. Therapists and educators rely on such findings to help guide decisions, and the fact that so many of the studies were called into question could sow doubt in the scientific underpinnings of their work.

The new analysis, called the Reproducibility Project, found no evidence of fraud or that any original study was definitively false. Rather, it concluded that the evidence for most published findings was not nearly as strong as originally claimed.

Children as young as age 3 will intervene on behalf of a victim, reacting as if victimized themselves, scientists have found.

In one experiment, when one puppet took toys or cookies from another puppet, children responded by pulling a string that locked the objects in an inaccessible cave. When puppets took objects directly from the children themselves, they responded in the same way.“The children treated these two violations equally,”

“Their sense of justice is victim-focused rather than perpetrator focused,” Dr. Jensen said. “The take-home message is that preschool children are sensitive to harm to others, and given a choice would rather restore things to help the victim than punish the perpetrator.”

Geerat Vermeij, a biologist at the University of California-Davis who has been blind since the age of 3, has identified many new species of mollusks based on tiny variations in the contours of their shells. He uses a sort of spatial or tactile giftedness that is beyond what any sighted person is likely to have.

The writer Ved Mehta, also blind since early childhood, navigates in large part by using “facial vision” — the ability to sense objects by the way they reflect sounds, or subtly shift the air currents that reach his face.

Ben Underwood, a remarkable boy who lost his sight at 3 and died at 16 in 2009, developed an effective, dolphin-like strategy of emitting regular clicks with his mouth and reading the resulting echoes from nearby objects. He was so skilled at this that he could ride a bike and play sports and even video games.

In recent years, a focus on brain structures and regions has given way to an emphasis on neurological networks: how cells and regions interact, with consciousness shaped not by any given set of brain regions, but by their interplay.

Understanding the networks, however, is no easy task

In mathematical terms, said Petri, normal brains have a well-ordered correlation state. There's not much cross-linking between networks. That changes after the psilocybin dose. Suddenly the networks are cross-linking like crazy, but not in random ways. New types of order emerge.

Replication, the ability of another lab to reproduce a finding, is the gold standard of science, reassurance that you have discovered something true. But that is getting harder all the time.

With the most accessible truths already discovered, what remains are often subtle effects, some so delicate that they can be conjured up only under ideal circumstances, using highly specialized techniques.

Taking into account the human tendency to see what we want to see, unconscious bias is inevitable.

to murder police on Monday. The chant went "we won't stop, we can't stop, 'til killer cops, are in cell blocks," according to C-SPAN footage. But WBFF cut the audio short and told viewers that the words were in fact "we won't stop, we can't stop, so kill a cop."

Jones called out the station several times for misrepresenting her words. "The interesting part that really gets to me is, where you guys edited it and stopped — like, how could that be a mistake?" she said. "Once you play that whole thing, you would know that's not something that's being said," she added. The interviewer apologized several times, and though Jones told the station she was grateful to come on, she also said she now fears for her reputation and her safety. Near the end of the interview she began to cry. "At the end of the day, people's lives are on the line," she said. "Now, even though we're doing this, I still don't feel safe because I still feel like the message is out there." "What if a crazed-out cop or a crazed-out supporter thinks I'm trying to get cops killed?" she later said, wiping tears from her face.

Thousands of genetic “dimmer” switches, regions of DNA known as regulatory elements, were turned up high during human evolution in the developing cerebral cortex, according to new research from the Yale School of Medicine.

these switches show increased activity in humans, where they may drive the expression of genes in the cerebral cortex, the region of the brain that is involved in conscious thought and language. This difference may explain why the structure and function of that part of the brain is so unique in humans compared to other mammals.

Noonan and his colleagues pinpointed several biological processes potentially guided by these regulatory elements that are crucial to human brain development.

The mouse brain above has undergone a process called CLARITY

Through a series of chemical reactions, CLARITY stabilizes organs taken from an animal or human and makes them transparent to the naked eye.

allows scientists to look into organs in a whole new way.

Erasing the anguish associated with a breakup or a traumatic event may soon no longer be confined to the realm of science fiction, or the central idea of the film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” following an apparent breakthrough by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Neuroscientists at MIT have honed in on the pathway of brain cells that appear to control the way our memories become linked to emotions — and have been able to “reverse” the emotion in mice linked to a specific memory, turning bad memories into good and vice versa

"Recalling a memory is not like playing a tape recorder," said Susumu Tonegawa, an MIT neuroscientist and a lead author of the study. "It's a creative process."

is there such a thing as a “teenage brain”, and does it help to explain the high rates of recklessness among teenagers?

the brain blooms with neural connections until a child reaches the age of 11 or 12, and then it selectively prunes away the underused ones, or “grey matter”, throughout adolescence. As the brain grows more streamlined, it becomes better at processing information.

The remaining connections are then made more efficient by a process called myelination, which essentially insulates neuronal axons with a sheath of fatty cell material, or “white matter”. The process of replacing grey matter with white matter does not reach the prefrontal cortex until people are in their early 20s. Studies show a relationship between increased myelination and an improved ability to make decisions and control impulses.

Our Brains Remember the Good Stuff

The human brain is attracted to things that were once pleasing even if they no longer are

There was no reward, and color was irrelevant.