Human-frog hybrids might reveal the neurological secrets of autism. By fusing cells from the preserved brains of deceased autistic patients with the eggs of a carnivorous African frog called Xenopus, scientists have started investigating the way the brain cells of people with autism behave. The frog eggs work a little like human neurons and the ...

Neuropsin, a protein that plays a role in learning and memory, is expressed only in the central nervous systems of humans and originated less than 5 million years ago, Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers have found. ...

Johns Hopkins scientists have discovered to their surprise that nerves in the mammalian brain's white matter do more than just ferry information between different brain regions, but in fact process information the way gray matter cells do....

Since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Now science suggests that our emotions are what make thought possible....

IBM researchers have designed and implemented a massively parallel simulation of a mouse cortex, using a 4096-processor Blue Gene/L supercomputer. They represented 8 million ne...

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles and The Hospital for Sick Children have found that the pace at which a brain cell activates a key protein, CREB (a transcription factor that typically increases the production of other proteins...

MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School researchers have developed a tool that could help researchers ''see'' how cerebral folds deve...

The validity of a leading theory -- that electrical signals generate spiked patterns that encode different types of cognitive information -- has just been called into question by Weizmann Institute of Science researchers. Their ...

The brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules, similar to the neural machinery for learning language, according to Harvard evolutionary biologis Marc Hauser. Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others...

DARPA has killed the BICA (Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures) project to reverse-engineer the human brain. The brain effort linked experts from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, robotics and artificial intelligence, who wanted to rep...