Word: neuronal
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...When the team scratched the leg without first creating an artificial itch, the STT neurons fired - the normal STT-neuron response - but scratching did nothing to calm them. That demonstrates that STT nerves react differently to the sensation of a scratch when it happens in response to an existing itch. The researchers then injected a pain-producing chemical into the monkeys' legs, which also spurred the firing of STT neurons. Again scratching did nothing to calm them, suggesting that the nerve-dampening effect of scratching applies uniquely to itching, not pain...
...turn inspired researchers to think about directing these cellular blank slates to eventually replace cells that had been damaged or were depleted by disease. The key lay in finding just the right recipe of growth factors and nutrients to induce a stem cell to become a heart cell, a neuron, an insulin-making cell or something else. It would take decades, the researchers all knew, but new therapies were sure to come...
...also need a sense of touch, and it's their whiskers that do most of that work for them. What researchers never knew was precisely how elaborate that tactile system is, nor exactly how it operates. But in research that will be published in the Feb. 28 issue of Neuron, investigators at MIT have come up with an imaginative tool for finding out: high-speed video technology that works at 3,200 frames per second - approximately 100 times faster than home video. "There were hypotheses before," says Christopher Moore, member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research...
...site involving five brown bunnies that need to be placed in their correct bunny-shaped holes. To my amazement, Lily shooed my hands away from the track pad and started slowly nudging bunnies toward burrows. When the fifth bunny hit home--and an unseen Tinky Winky shouted, "Yaaaaaay!"--every neuron in my daughter's brain seemed to fire at once. Her skull practically glowed. She climbed off the chair and did a dance. Then she climbed back up onto the chair and said, "Daddy...
...learning and memory. Without enough FMRP, protein production spins out of control, like a runaway train. The brain develops an abnormally dense number of connections, resulting in a variety of physical, mental and behavioral problems. "Fragile X is a disorder of excess," explains Mark Bear, lead author of the Neuron paper. "There are too many synapses, accelerated body growth, excessive protein synthesis, and excessive excitability, which leads to epilepsy...