Human beings can configure their faces in thousands and thousands of ways to convey emotion, but only 35 expressions actually get the job done across cultures, a new study has found.

Scientists have discovered that defective astrocytes are linked to the buildup of a toxic protein that is one the hallmarks of Parkinson's disease. The studied astrocytes, derived from Parkinson's disease patients with a genetic mutation that affects cell clean-up functions, caused more accumulation of the toxin, α -synuclein, than those derived from healthy individuals.

With a little help from HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” neurobiologists have uncovered a key component of how the human brain marks time. Using high-powered functional MRI on college students watching the popular TV show, they were able to capture the processes by which the brain stores information related to when events happen, or what is known as temporal memory.

Psychiatrists diagnose people with mental illnesses by spending time with them, looking for the particular behavior symptoms of each. By deciphering the circuitry of the medial frontal cortex – an area beneath the top of the head — those diagnoses could become much more efficient and precise by allowing physicians to diagnose based on how neurons respond to a simple series of behavior tests.