News by Subject Medicine & Health

In a noisy room with many speakers, hearing aids can suppress background noise, but they have difficulties isolating one voice - that of the person you're talking to at a party, for instance. Researchers at KU Leuven, Belgium, have now addressed that issue with a technique that uses brainwaves to determine within one second whom you're listening to.

Does the sight of maggots squirming in rotten food make you look away in disgust? The phrase 'makes my stomach turn' takes on a new meaning today as researchers at the University of Cambridge reveal that changes in the rhythm of our stomachs prompt us to look away from disgusting images.

The brains of healthy adults recovered faster from a mild vascular challenge and performed better on complex tests if the participants consumed cocoa flavanols beforehand, researchers report in the journal Scientific Reports. In the study, 14 of 18 participants saw these improvements after ingesting the flavanols.

According to a study led by Marcelo Bertalmío, a researcher at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies, published in the journal of the group Nature, Scientific Reports, which proposes a paradigm shift for both vision science and for artificial intelligence.

Understanding how the clear, watery substance flows through the brain could yield new insights into health and disease.

A national research team led by The Jackson Laboratory and the University of Maine discovered that Dlgap2, a gene that helps facilitate communication between neurons in the nervous system, is associated with the degree of memory loss in mice and risk for Alzheimer's dementia in humans. When studying post-mortem human brain tissue, the researchers also discovered low levels of Dlgap2 in people experiencing "poorer cognitive health" and "faster cognitive decline" prior to death.

Researchers identified the BICRA gene as a new disease gene involved in a neurodevelopmental disorder and found evidence that BICRA functions in neural development in humans and flies.

Rice University biochemists have proposed that degenerative diseases as varied as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and muscle atrophy occur in two distinct phases marked by protein signaling changes that could result in patients responding differently to the same treatment.

Neuroscience researchers at UConn Health are finding genetic properties of Schwann cells in the cornea that may unlock a better understanding of their role in healing, sensory function, preserving vision, and even nerve regeneration.