Laura Sanders
Does cannabis cause brain damage?
Just as vodka packs more of a punch than beer, a high-potency toke of cannabis — the name for the ...
Is it possible to read minds with brain scans?
Like Dumbledore’s wand, a scan can pull long strings of stories straight out of a person’s brain — but only ...
When does life begin? Here are five critical points in a pregnancy — and the misconceptions surrounding them
Like most aspects of biology, early human development involves many complex processes. Despite the rhetoric around these issues, clear lines ...
How a fascination with telepathy pseudoscience laid the groundwork for modern brain research
A brush with death led Hans Berger to invent a machine that could eavesdrop on the brain. In 1893, when ...
The twilight zone of sleep: That’s a sweet spot for human creativity
People who recently drifted off into a light sleep later had problem-solving power, scientists report December 8 in Science Advances ...
Dogs don’t seem to care much about human faces, counterintuitive study finds
Dogs’ brains aren’t especially impressed by faces, either those of other dogs, or of people, a new study suggests. People’s brains ...
Redrawing the line between life and brain death
Brain death has been a recognized concept in medicine for decades. But there’s a lot of variation in how people ...
‘The Idea of the Brain’: Book explores the struggle to understand the human brain
Neuroscientists love a good metaphor. Through the years, plumbing, telegraph wires and computers have all been enlisted to help explain ...
Experiments on living brain tissue unearth ‘ethical quandaries’
Live bits of brain look like any other piece of meat — pinkish, solid chunks of neural tissue. But unlike ...
This robotic face will wince if you hit it. How does it process pain?
Sensors embedded in soft, artificial skin that can detect both a gentle touch and a painful thump have been hooked ...
Dementia’s ‘biological weak spot’: A single mutation helped this woman evade Alzheimer’s for decades
A cruel twist of genetic fate brought Alzheimer’s disease to a sprawling Colombian family. But thanks to a second twist, ...
Does the pill cause depression? Why its too soon to be worried
“Does the pill cause depression?” the news headline asked. Prompted by a recent study that described a link between taking birth ...
Single dose of ketamine could weaken the desire to drink beer
A single dose of ketamine may cut down problematic drinking. Taken in the right context, the hallucinogenic drug may be able ...
Measles wreaks havoc on body’s immune system, making it susceptible to other infections, study shows
Measles wages war on cells of the immune system. Now two tallies of the carnage, described in the Nov. 1 Science and Science ...
Potential problem with lab-grown mini-brains: They’re ‘stressed-out and confused’
Brain cells grown into clumps in flasks are totally stressed-out and confused. Cells in these clumps have ambiguous identities and ...
Alzheimer’s disease and drowsiness: Link could help us determine where the disease first attacks the brain
Alzheimer’s disease destroys command centers in the brain that keep people awake. That finding could explain why the disease often ...
What makes us human? These pieces of donated brain tissue may offer answers
Half an hour earlier, this piece of neural tissue was tucked inside a 41-year-old woman’s head, on her left side, ...
‘Immune amnesia’: Why measles makes you more vulnerable to infections that cause pneumonia, ear infections, diarrhea
The most iconic thing about measles is the rash — red, livid splotches that make infection painfully visible. But that ...
Viewpoint: Esketamine promises to boost depression treatments—but we don’t know enough about long-term effects
With great fanfare, a new antidepressant entered the U.S. market in March [2019], the first fundamentally new medicine for depression ...
Brain implants could soon join fight against severe depression
With powerful computational methods, scientists have recently zeroed in on some key features of depressed brains. Those hallmarks include certain ...
Does gum disease causes Alzheimer’s? We are a long way from an answer, researcher says
Do you floss regularly? A study published January 23 in Science Advances — and the news stories that it inspired — might ...
Peering into the brain: New technology allows unprecedented access to brain cells
By mixing and matching powerful advances in microscopy and cell biology, researchers have imaged intricate details of individual nerve cells ...
Can loneliness and isolation damage the brain?
Mice yanked out of their community and held in solitary isolation show signs of brain damage. After a month of ...
Good news for young pot-muddled brains. Study shows impairment is reversible
Taking a monthlong break from pot helps clear away young people’s memory fog, a small study suggests. The results show ...
Mystery of the mind: How autism got its start in the developing brain
Here are some of the key points [neuroscientist Kevin] Pelphrey made on how autism may get its start in the ...
Stressed out? It could alter your sperm
Sperm from stressed-out dads can carry that stress from one generation to another. “But one question that really hasn’t been ...
Brain ‘flexibility’ could help explain why people learn differently
As a person learns, connections between brain regions can change. Some neural partners connect, then split apart […]; others form ...
Depression gene search disappoints
A massive effort to uncover genes involved in depression has largely failed. By combing through the DNA of 34,549 volunteers, ...