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25 stories tagged ‘Neuroscience’
Hub lab writing the book on face-reading
Pity the Boston car salesman who negotiated across the table from Charles A. Nelson III, a Harvard neuroscience professor who runs the nation’s top laboratory studying how people learn to decode facial expressions…
Medical grants a boon for Mass.
Massachusetts biomedical researchers are seeing a windfall from federal stimulus money, with the state receiving more in grants from the National Institutes of Health than all others but California.
Jack H. Mendelson, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry (Neuroscience) at Harvard Medical School and Co-Director of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research Center at McLean Hospital died on August 15, 2007, after a brief illness; he was 77 years old. Jack devoted his research career to clinical, behavioral, and biological studies of alcoholism and drug abuse.
The Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) has named Harvard Professor of Ophthalmology Leo T. Chylack Jr., and Gordon and Llura Gund Professor of Neurosciences John E. Dowling as 2009 fellows. Chylack and Dowling will receive their fellowships in May at the annual ARVO meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Neural wiring hints at nervous system gene limits
Genetics may play a surprisingly small role in determining the precise wiring of the mammalian nervous system, according to painstaking mapping of every neuron projecting to a small muscle mice use to move their ears. These first-ever mammalian “connectomes,” or complete neural circuit diagrams, reveal that neural wiring can vary widely even in paired tissues on the left and right sides of the same animal.
Art and science: Healing in harmony
What do Julie Andrews and Mozart have in common? And what links Hillary Clinton, Che Guevara, and Cameron Diaz? The former have absolute or perfect pitch; the latter are tone-deaf. How our brains differ to create these disparities was one of the subjects of “Crossing the Corpus Callosum,” a first-of-its-kind symposium held Jan. 10 at the Merck Research Laboratories-Boston.
Isolating creativity in the brain
How — exactly — does improvisation happen? What’s involved when a musician sits down at the piano and plays flurries of notes in a free fall, without a score, without knowing much about what will happen moment to moment? Is it possible to find the sources of a creative process?
Neural mapping paints a haphazard picture of odor receptors
Despite the striking aromatic differences between coffee, peppermint, and pine, a new mapping of the nose’s neural circuitry suggests a haphazard patchwork where the receptors for such disparate scents are as likely as not to be neighbors.
Anesthetic causes changes in mouse brains
For the first time researchers have shown that a commonly used anesthetic can produce changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease in the brains of living mammals, confirming previous laboratory studies. In their Annals of Neurology report, which has received early online release, a team of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators shows how administration of the gas isoflurane can lead to generation of the toxic amyloid-beta (A-beta) protein in the brains of mice.
Dowling recipient of Paul Kayser Award
John E. Dowling, Gordon and Llura Gund Professor of Neurosciences of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology as well as professor of Ophthalmology in Neuroscience, recently received the Paul Kayser International Award in Retina Research from the International Society for Eye Research (ISER). He received the award at the 2008 Biennial Congress held in Beijing, in addition to presenting a plenary lecture and participating in a symposium on retinal mechanisms.
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