News

Spontaneous recovery from spinal cord injury is almost unheard of in humans and other mammals, but many vertebrates fare better. The eel-like lamprey, for instance, can fully regenerate its spinal cord even after it’s been severed. In a new study scientists report that lampreys recover and regenerate just as impressively after a second complete spinal cord injury at the same location.

Researchers have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) to seriously accelerate the development of new technologies from wearable electronics to flexible solar panels. ARTIST, which stands for Artificial Intelligence for Spectroscopy, instantly determines how a molecule will react to light—essential knowledge for creating the designer materials needed for tomorrow’s technology.

Tunneling nanotubes are tiny tunnels that link two (or more cells) and allow the transport of a wide variety of cargoes between them, including ions, viruses, and entire organelles. This study shows that they are actually made up of multiple, smaller, individual tunneling nanotubes.

Obesity − as research in the past decade has shown − is first and foremost a brain disease. Researchers at Helmholtz Zentrum München, partners in the German Center for Diabetes Research, have now discovered a molecular switch that controls the function of satiety neurons and therefore body weight. The findings were published in the journal ‘Nature Metabolism’.

The pharmaceutical company Roche has announced they have ended their phase III clinical trial of the potential Alzheimer’s drug, crenezumab, which was designed to treat people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.The decision to stop the trials early was based on results that suggested crenezumab was unlikely to improve people’s memory and thinking skills over a longer time period.

Columbia-led discovery in mice aids efforts to map the circuitry of the brain’s learning center; stands to inform studies of psychiatric disorders in which this circuitry goes awry.

A study which followed 34,500 Danes for up to 20 years showed that the risk of being treated for depression at a psychiatric hospital was more than two and a half times higher for people with a high polygenic risk score.

Larger dogs have better short-term memory and self-control than smaller breeds, according to research led by the UA's Arizona Canine Cognition Center.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) lift the fog of depression for many people. But for around a third of people with major depressive disorder, SSRIs don’t make much of a difference. Now, researchers from the Salk Institute have pinned down a possible reason why—the neurons in at least some of these patients’ brains may become hyperactive in the presence of the drugs.

Ageing can cause damage to support cells in the white matter, which in turn may lead to damage in the grey matter of the hippocampus, finds a new study by Cardiff University.