Science, Brain | featured news

Scientists have found a way to read people's dreams using brain scans, a new study suggests.

President Obama on Tuesday will announce a broad new research initiative, starting with $100 million in 2014, to invent and refine new technologies to understand the human brain, senior administration officials said Monday.

Researchers at Brown University have succeeded in creating the first wireless, implantable, rechargeable, long-term brain-computer interface. The wireless BCIs have been implanted in pigs and monkeys for over 13 months without issue, and human subjects are next.

Two rats — one in North Carolina, the other in Brazil — worked together on a task by communicating telepathically, thanks to implants in their brain. Electrical signals from a "leader" rat’s brain were collected, encoded and then zapped into the "follower" rat’s cortex in the form of an electrical signal. The follower rat then pressed one of two levers based on a light visible only to the leader rat. The Duke University experiment is the first time two animals have collaborated through such an artificial link, and shows that the mammal brain can be trained to act on electrical signals from another animal.

It has the makings of a science fiction movie: Zap someone's brain with mild jolts of electricity to try to stave off the creeping memory loss of Alzheimer's disease....

Einstein's brain had extraordinary folding patterns in several regions, which may help explain his genius, newly uncovered photographs suggest. The photographs, published Nov. 16 in the journal Brain, reveal that the brilliant physicist had extra folding in his brain's gray matter, the site of conscious thinking. In particular, the frontal lobes, regions tied to abstract thought and planning, had unusually elaborate folding, analysis suggests.

Scientists have identified a new gene variant that seems to strongly raise the risk for Alzheimer's disease, giving a fresh target for research into treatments for the mind-robbing disorder.

More than a decade of research hinting that magnesium supplements might boost your brain power is finally being put to the test in a small clinical trial. The research, led by biopharmaceutical company Magceutics of Hayward, California, began testing the ability of its product Magtein to boost magnesium ion (Mg2+) levels in the brain earlier this month. The trial will track whether the ions can decrease anxiety and improve sleep quality, as well as following changes in the memory and cognitive ability of participants. But critics caution that the trial in just 50 people is too small to draw definitive conclusions.

The most common and aggressive brain tumor grows by turning normal brain cells into stem cells, which can continuously replicate and regrow a tumor with only a handful of cells left behind, new research finds.

Look for a fundamental shift in how scientists hunt ways to ward off the devastation of Alzheimer's disease - by testing possible therapies in people who don't yet show many symptoms, before too much of the brain is destroyed....