Neuroscience

Treating gut pain via a Nobel prize-winning receptor

Targeting a receptor responsible for our sense of touch and temperature, which researchers have now found to be present in our colon, could provide a new avenue for treating chronic pain associated with gastrointestinal disorders ...

Surgery

Silencing gut pain without pain killers

Surgically removing specific populations of sensory nerves that communicate between internal organs, such as the bladder and gut, and the brain, can silence pain responses, without impacting other functions in the body, new ...

Medical research

Rock-a-bye fly: Why vibrations lead to sleepiness

It is common practice to rock babies to sleep. Children and grownups also get drowsy during long car rides. There is something about gentle mechanical stimuli that makes humans of all ages sleepy. Sleep in fruit flies is ...

Medical research

Stem cell study suggests paths to restore hearing

It turns out that to hear a person yapping, you need a protein called Yap. Working as part of what is known as the Yap/Tead complex, this important protein sends signals to the hearing organ to attain the correct size during ...

Neuroscience

Sensory perception is not a one-way street

When we interact with the world, such as when we reach out to touch an object, the brain actively changes incoming sensory signals based on anticipation. This so-called 'sensory gating' has now been investigated by neuroscientists ...

Neuroscience

Calculating whiskers send precise information to the brain

As our sensory organs register objects and structures in the outside world, they are continually engaged in two-way communication with the brain. In research recently published in Nature Neuroscience, Weizmann Institute scientists ...

Neuroscience

Deciphering the olfactory receptor code

In animals, numerous behaviors are governed by the olfactory perception of their surrounding world. Whether originating in the nose of a mammal or the antennas of an insect, perception results from the combined activation ...

Neuroscience

When neurons have less to say, they speak up

The brain is an extremely adaptable organ – but it is also quite conservative. That's in short, what scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried and their colleagues from the Friedrich Miescher ...

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