A round-up of recent discoveries in behavior research
Researchers studying differences in how individuals respond to stress are finding that genes are malleable and environments can be deterministic.
In an essay entitled "Nurture, Nature, and the Stress That is Life," neurobiologists Darlene Francis and Daniela Kaufer envision a future where science moves past the nature vs. nurture debate in considering differences in human behavioral responses to stress.
What does a normally aging brain look like? Are diseases of aging such as Alzheimer’s inevitable?
Looking for a more realistic way to study memory, we turned to place cells—a network of cells that record a rat’s memory of an environment. Each place cell would fire only when the rat was in one particular location in space, creating a map as the
Long-term potentiation (LTP), discovered in the 1970s, was later shown to be the molecular basis of memory. Since many diseases of aging affect memory, could memory formation and storage be altered by the same mechanisms in normal aging and diseased
Early on, researchers had learned that the hippocampus was the structure in the brain where long-term memories were created and stored, but it was not known whether the different cell types within this structure might be more or less susceptible to t
Stretching muscle cells as they grow helps promote the expression of growth factors.
In matriarchal societies where women receive equal education, there is no difference in spatial abilities between men and women.