Exercise may enhance plasticity of the adult brain — the ability of our neurons to change with experience — which is essential for learning, memory, and brain repair, Italian researchers report in an open-access paper in the Cell Press journal Current Biology.

Their research, which focused on the the visual cortex, may offer hope for people with traumatic brain injury or eye conditions such as amblyopia,… read more

New open-source software that can help track the embryonic development and movement of neuronal cells throughout the body of a worm is now available to scientists. The software is described in a paper published in the open access journal, eLife on December 3rd by a research team*.

One significant challenge is determining the formation of complex neuronal structures made up of billions of cells in the human brain. As… read more

It’s a nagging question: why do some of our memories fade away, while others last forever? Now scientists at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have identified a possible biochemical mechanism: a specific synaptic protein called Orb2 can either block or maintain neural synapses (connections between neurons), which create and maintain long-term memories.

So for a memory to persist, the synaptic connections must be kept strong. But how? The… read more

Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory  (CSHL) have resolved a decades-long debate about how the brain is modified when an animal learns.

Using newly developed tools for manipulating specific populations of neurons, the researchers have for the first time observed direct evidence of synaptic plasticity — changes in the strength of synapse connections between neurons — in the fruit fly brain while flies are learning.

Due… read more