Insects may have tiny brains the size of a pinhead, but the latest research from the University of Adelaide shows just how clever they really are.

For the first time, researchers from the University's Discipline of Physiology have worked out how insects judge the speed of moving objects.

Husbands or wives who care for spouses with dementia are six times more likely to develop the memory-impairing condition than those whose spouses don’t have it, according to results of a 12-year study led by Johns Hopkins, Utah State University, and Duke University. The increased risk that the researchers saw among caregivers was on par with the power of a gene variant known to increase susceptibility to Alzheimer’s disease, they report in the May Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

Scientists working to understand more about the brains ability to learn and change in relation to the age of the cells have reported a new finding that they were able to prompt a new period of plasticity in the brain of juvenile mice. Their study involved the transplant a specific type of immature neuron from embryonic mice to the visual cortex of juvenile mice. The visual cortex has a period of very high plasticity during the earliest stages of development. During the period of plasticity, cells in this region react strongly to visual cues and respond with rapid synaptic transmissions produce the neural circuitry that is crucial for proper visual function.

By combining a research technique that dates back 136 years with modern molecular genetics, a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist has been able to see how a mammal's brain shrewdly revisits and reuses the same molecular cues to control the complex design of its circuits.

Details of the observation in lab mice, published Dec. 24 in Nature, reveal that semaphorin, a protein found in the developing nervous system that guides filament-like processes, called axons, from nerve cells to their appropriate targets during embryonic life, apparently assumes an entirely different role later on, once axons reach their targets. In postnatal development and adulthood, semaphorins appear to be regulating the creation of synapses -- those connections that chemically link nerve cells.

LA JOLLA, CA-Like a spotlight that illuminates an otherwise dark scene, attention brings to mind specific details of our environment while shutting others out. A new study by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies shows that the superior colliculus, a brain structure that primarily had been known for its role in the control of eye and head movements, is crucial for moving the mind's spotlight.

The title of the paper is "Distributed Fading Memory for Stimulus Properties in the Primary Visual Cortex" and it is the collaboration of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science, Graz University of Technology in Austria. These teams were able to collect data using multielectrode recordings from the primary visual cortex of cats. Then using a 3 visual stimulus's (letters of the alphabet), they recorded brain activity of stimulus-related information in the spiking activity of large ensembles of around 100 neurons.

From the Salk Institute

LA JOLLA, CA-When you eat may be just as vital to your health as what you eat, found researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Their experiments in mice revealed that the daily waxing and waning of thousands of genes in the liver-the body's metabolic clearinghouse-is mostly controlled by food intake and not by the body's circadian clock as conventional wisdom had it.

UC Irvine neuroscientists have discovered that individuals with a gene variant - which limits the availability of the protein, brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) - perform more than 20 percent worse on driving tests than those people without the variant. About 30% of Americans will have the gene variant.

Scientists recently discovered that a cyanobacteria, collected off the coast of Papua New Guinea, produces a compound with a structure that has never before been seen in biomedicine.

Caltech scientists have isolated two groups of neurons in fruit fly brains that are capable of sensing and manipulating the fly's fat stores - making these flies a potential useful model for the study of obesity in humans.

The findings are published in the August 13 issue of the journal Neuron.