http://medicalxpress.com/ en-us Medical Xpress internet news portal provides the latest news on Health and Medicine. When animals are on the hunt for food they likely use many senses, and scientists have wondered how the different senses work together. New research from the laboratory of CSHL neuroscientist and Assistant Professor Adam Kepecs shows that when rats actively use the senses of smell (sniffing) and touch (through their whiskers) those two processes are locked in synchronicity. The team's paper, published today in the Journal of Neuroscience, shows that sniffing and "whisking" movements are synchronized even when they are running at different frequencies. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-05-rats-high-speed-multisensory-snapshots.html Neuroscience Tue, 07 May 2013 17:00:01 EST news287141132 With their whiskers rats can detect the texture of objects in the same way as humans do using their fingertips. A study, in which some scientists of SISSA have taken part, shows that it is possible to understand what specific object has been touched by a rat by observing the activation of brain neurons. A further step towards understanding how the brain, also in humans, represents the outside world. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-04-decoding.html Neuroscience Tue, 23 Apr 2013 08:02:40 EST news285922953 Already known the world over for its baths, coffee and sweet Turkish delights, Turkey is on the road to adding another item to its roster of specialities: the moustache. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-01-istanbul-tourists-moustache.html Other Wed, 30 Jan 2013 04:24:59 EST news278742291 All parents know the infant milestones: turning over, learning to crawl, standing, and taking that first unassisted step. Achieving each accomplishment presumably requires the formation of new connections among subsets of the billions of nerve cells in the infant's brain. But how, when and where those connections form has been a mystery. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-01-brain-circuit-voluntary-movements.html Neuroscience Wed, 23 Jan 2013 12:00:05 EST news278160799 Blocking a single tiny blood vessel in the brain can harm neural tissue and even alter behavior, a new study from the University of California, San Diego has shown. But these consequences can be mitigated by a drug already in use, suggesting treatment that could slow the progress of dementia associated with cumulative damage to miniscule blood vessels that feed brain cells. The team reports their results in the December 16 advance online edition of Nature Neuroscience. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-12-smallest-brain-tissue-impair-cognitive.html Neuroscience Sun, 16 Dec 2012 13:00:01 EST news274883979 A Weizmann Institute experiment in which volunteers learned to sense objects' locations using just "rat whiskers" may help improve aids for the blind. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-scientists-humans-rat-whiskers.html Neuroscience Mon, 05 Nov 2012 10:43:52 EST news271334619 The whiskers of newborn rats twitch as they sleep, and that could open the door to new understandings about the intimate connections between brain and body. The discovery reinforces the notion that such involuntary movements are a vital contributor to the development of sensorimotor systems, say researchers who report their findings along with video of those whisker twitches on October 18 in Current Biology. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-10-twitching-whiskers-babes-naptime-behavior.html Neuroscience Thu, 18 Oct 2012 12:00:05 EST news269779425 What happens at the level of individual neurons while we learn? This question intrigued the neuroscientist Daniel Huber, who recently arrived at the Department of Basic Neuroscience at the University of Geneva. During his stay in the United States, he and his team tried to unravel the network mechanisms underlying learning and memory at the level of the cerebral cortex. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-neurons.html Neuroscience Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:29:48 EST news254577648 Protruding from the surface of cells in the body like whiskers are sugar chains, a biological structure often bound to lipids and proteins embedded in the cell membrane. Recent studies have shown that sugar chains exhibit a broad range of functions, including signal transduction between cells and across the cell membrane, as well as functional regulation of immunity and hormones. “From among the diverse functions of sugar chains, we focus on their association with disease,” says Naoyuki Taniguchi, group director of the Systems Glycobiology Research Group at the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute and a world-renowned researcher in sugar chains. “The ultimate goal of our research is to clarify the mechanisms of the onset of disease in terms of sugar chains, and to diagnose and treat disease using those mechanisms.” Taniguchi’s research is probing the frontiers of sugar chain science for the diagnosis and treatment of disease. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-06-exposing-potential-sugar-chains-diagnosis.html Medical research Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:35:50 EST news227781339