Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

New type of pluripotent cell discovered in adult breast tissue: Human body carries personalized 'patch kit'

(Medical Xpress)—UC San Francisco researchers have found that certain rare cells extracted from adult breast tissue can be instructed to become different types of cells – a discovery that could have important ...

Medical research created Mar 05, 2013 | popularity 5 / 5 (2) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Motion perception revisited: High Phi effect challenges established motion perception assumptions

(Medical Xpress)—Optical illusions abound in human visual perception, as demonstrated by the following well-known examples. Although many are static illusions, motion illusions also occur. Recently, scientists ...

Neuroscience created Apr 23, 2013 | popularity 3 / 5 (2) | comments 2 | with audio podcast feature

Structural dynamics underlying memory in aging brains

(Medical Xpress)—When the brains of those who have succumbed to age-related neurodegeneration are analyzed post-mortem, they typically show significant atrophy on all scales. Not only is the cortex thinner ...

Neuroscience created Apr 17, 2013 | popularity 5 / 5 (2) | comments 0 | with audio podcast report

Anything you can do I can do better: Neuromolecular foundations of the superiority illusion (Update)

(Medical Xpress)—The existential psychologist Rollo May wrote that "depression is the inability to construct a future"1 while Lionel Tiger stated that "optimism has been central to the process of human e ...

Neuroscience created Apr 02, 2013 | popularity 4.5 / 5 (11) | comments 5 | with audio podcast feature

The visual system as economist: Neural resource allocation in visual adaptation

(Medical Xpress)—It has long been held that in a new environment, visual adaptation should improve visual performance. However, evidence has contradicted this expectation: Adaptation sometimes not only ...

Neuroscience created Mar 30, 2013 | popularity 5 / 5 (2) | comments 9 | with audio podcast feature

Separate lives: Neuronal and organismal lifespans decoupled

(Medical Xpress)—Replicative aging (also known as replicative senescence) causes mammalian cells to undergo a process of growth arrest dependent on telomeres (the shortening of repeated sequences at the ends o ...

Neuroscience created Mar 27, 2013 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (8) | comments 0 | with audio podcast feature

Sizing things up: The evolutionary neurobiology of scale invariance

(Medical Xpress)—Visual perception is far more complex and powerful than our experience suggests. Moreover, in attempting to both understand vision and implement it in a computational device, the fact that ...

Neuroscience created Feb 28, 2013 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (10) | comments 14 | with audio podcast feature

Step by step: Feature detection and combination in perceptual learning and object identification

(Medical Xpress)—The ease and immediacy with which we recognize familiar objects escapes our notice. However, a novel, ambiguous, or highly complex object requires practice to achieve such perceptual facility. ...

Neuroscience created Jan 11, 2013 | popularity 3.7 / 5 (6) | comments 3 | with audio podcast feature

Face the facts: Neural integration transforms unconscious face detection into conscious face perception

(Medical Xpress)—The apparent ease and immediacy of human perception is deceptive, requiring highly complex neural operations to determine the category of objects in a visual scene. Nevertheless, the human ...

Neuroscience created Dec 31, 2012 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (9) | comments 0 | with audio podcast feature

New immune system discovered

(Medical Xpress)—A research team, led by Jeremy Barr, a biology post-doctoral fellow, unveils a new immune system that protects humans and animals from infection.

Immunology created 12 hours ago | popularity 4.6 / 5 (14) | comments 5 | with audio podcast

The compound in the Mediterranean diet that makes cancer cells 'mortal'

New research suggests that a compound abundant in the Mediterranean diet takes away cancer cells' "superpower" to escape death. By altering a very specific step in gene regulation, this compound essentially re-educates cancer ...

Cancer created 15 hours ago | popularity 4.8 / 5 (13) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

Do salamanders hold the solution to regeneration?

Salamanders' immune systems are key to their remarkable ability to regrow limbs, and could also underpin their ability to regenerate spinal cords, brain tissue and even parts of their hearts, scientists have ...

Medical research created 16 hours ago | popularity 4.9 / 5 (7) | comments 2 | with audio podcast

Scientists identify molecular trigger for Alzheimer's disease

Researchers have pinpointed a catalytic trigger for the onset of Alzheimer's disease – when the fundamental structure of a protein molecule changes to cause a chain reaction that leads to the death of neurons ...

Alzheimer's disease & dementia created 16 hours ago | popularity 5 / 5 (3) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Gut microbe battles obesity

(Medical Xpress)—Akkermansia muciniphila is one of the many microbes that live in our intestines. This bacterium, which feeds on the intestine's mucus lining, comprises between 3 and 5 percent of the gut microbes of hea ...

Medical research created May 14, 2013 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (11) | comments 0 | with audio podcast report

Body clocks of depressed people altered at cell level, researchers show

Every cell in our bodies runs on a 24-hour clock, tuned to the night-day, light-dark cycles that have ruled us since the dawn of humanity. The brain acts as timekeeper, keeping the cellular clock in sync ...

Medical research created May 13, 2013 | popularity 4 / 5 (19) | comments 4 | with audio podcast