Are we born to fear punishment or crave rewards? Or do those capacities evolve with experience? Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor Bo Li and his lab found that mice have pre-programmed circuits that process “positive” and “negative” stimuli. These neurons are found in the mouse’s amygdala, a section of the brain that deals with learning rewards […]

International research led by Luke Grant, Inne Vanderkelen and Prof Wim Thiery of the VUB research group BCLIMATE shows that global changes in lake temperature and ice cover are not due to natural climate variability and can only be explained by massive greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution. The influence of human-induced climate change […]

Everyone knows the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. However, when you’re walking along city streets, a straight line may not be possible. How do you decide which way to go? A new MIT study suggests that our brains are actually not optimized to calculate the so-called “shortest path” when navigating on […]

Keep moving as you get older, says evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman, comparing tribal ‘healthspans’ with outcomes of sedentary Americans Our sedentary tendencies may be robbing us of a key benefit of physical activity: the myriad repair mechanisms that heal the minor dings and tears of hunter-gatherer and farming lifestyles, a deficit that may be particularly […]

Matthew Douglas Adams wants to taste 5,000-year-old beer — or at least one made like they did then. Thanks to his recent excavation of a brewery in the ancient Egyptian city of Abydos, the senior research scholar at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts may get his wish, and soon. But the excavation revealed […]

Researchers from the Rosalind Franklin Institute hit the headlines last month when they announced that a unique type of antibody produced by llamas could provide a new treatment against Covid-19 as a simple nasal spray. The institute, which focuses on tackling the most pressing health challenges, now has a new £43 million home within the […]

Marsh plants, which are ubiquitous along the world’s shorelines, can play a major role in mitigating the damage to coastlines as sea levels rise and storm surges increase. Now, a new MIT study provides greater detail about how these protective benefits work under real-world conditions shaped by waves and currents. The study combined laboratory experiments […]

Stressful experiences are usually remembered more easily than neutral experiences. Researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have analysed the reasons why this is the case. They put people in stressful situations during simulated job interviews and then recorded their memory of objects from these interviews. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, they analysed brain activity while the […]

Mark Bear, Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, recalls the “eureka moment” 20 years ago when he realized that a severe developmental brain disorder — fragile X syndrome — might be treated with drugs that inhibit a neurotransmitter receptor called mGluR5. The idea, that mGluR5 stimulates excessive protein synthesis in fragile X neurons that disrupts […]

The growing popularity of 3D printing for manufacturing all sorts of items, from customized medical devices to affordable homes, has created more demand for new 3D printing materials designed for very specific uses. To cut down on the time it takes to discover these new materials, researchers at MIT have developed a data-driven process that […]