Brain cells in some parts of the cerebral cortex of people with autism have too many connections, while other parts do not have enough, say researchers from the University of Washington, USA, at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. T...

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered the major disease protein for two neurodegenerative disorders: a type of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also called Lo...

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $12.7 million to the Burnham Institute for Medical Research for a collaborative research program including Salk Institute for Biological Studies (Salk), The Scripps Research Institute (Sc...

Neuroscientists at Duke University Medical Center working with genetically engineered mice have found that the brain chemical dopamine plays a critical role in regulating sleep and brain activity associated with dreaming. When dopamine lev...

Keeping track of one set of keys is difficult enough, but imagine having to remember the locations of thousands of sets of keys. Do you use landmarks to remember where you put them? Do you have a mental map of their locations? Scientists a...

Peregrine Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: PPHM), a biopharmaceutical company with a portfolio of innovative, clinical stage products for the treatment of cancer and hepatitis C virus infection, today announced that it has received regulator...

Plasminogen activators (PAs) are perhaps best known in the clinical world as intravascular clot busters. However, these fibrinolytic agents are also expressed in neurons and glia and have been implicated in axon outgrowth, regeneration, an...

In Oliver Sack's book "Awakenings," survivors of the 1917-1928 epidemic of encephalitis lethargica temporarily "awaken" from their catatonic state after receiving the then- drug L-dopa. Although not quite as poetic, Dzirasa et al. tell...

Each winter, some animals deal with the cold and with limited food supplies by hibernating. This week, von der Ohe et al. look at the remarkable brain plasticity that accompanies this annual ritual in goldenmantled ground squirrels. Hibern...

The secretory function of neurons and neuroendocrine cells share many characteristics, as exemplified by work this week by Dudanova et al. The authors previously showed that a-neurexins are required for the efficient synaptic release of ne...