Doctors have used drugs to induce general anesthesia in patients undergoing surgery since a medical doctor became a legitimate profession in the mid-1800s.  But little has been known about how…

In President Obama's most recent State of the Union address, he mentioned neuroscience three times. One was a stated commitment to ensure top-quality mental healthcare for returning soldiers. One was…

A group of progenitor cells in the inner ear that can become the sensory hair cells and adjacent supporting cells that enable hearing have been identified, a potential breakthrough for people…

A new paper in the Journal of Pediatrics says low-birth-weight babies with a particular brain abnormality are at greater risk for autism, and it could provide a signpost for early detection of the…

In "The Descent of Man" (1871), while contemplating how humans learned to speak, Charles Darwin speculated that language might have had its origins in singing, which "might have given rise to words…

Researchers have successfully modeled using both familial and sporadic patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), and revealed stress phenotypes and differential drug responsiveness…

Imagine that you’re a young rat. You’re in the woods, doing rat things among the dead foliage. Suddenly, off to your left, you hear a sound that you've never heard before. It’s loud, it’s…

By recording the automatic brain wave responses of 100 school-aged children to speech sounds, researchers found that the very best readers encoded the sound most consistently while the poorest…

Can you read minds? No, you cannot, but with some fluorescent protein and a tiny microscope implanted in a rodent's head, Stanford scientists have come close. Their technique can observe hundreds of…

Macular teleangiectasia (MacTel) is a progressive idiopathic form of retinal degeneration that occurs in adulthood, and is caused by a number of factors including diabetic retinopathy, hypertension,…