language

Researchers make surprise discovery that some neurons can transmit three signals at once

...inated by noise, which in humans can affect normal language development, would cause glutamate to still be released. Finding such an association would be intriguing, but for now this remains just an hypothesis that will require much study, Dr. Gillespie said. The third author of the study is Gunsoo Kim, Ph.D...

Brain May Be Less Plastic Than Hoped

...ted side of their body and go on to develop normal language skills. But in adults, the case for brain plasticity has been less clear. A series of studies in the 1980s and 1990s seemed to show that, in adult animals, neurons “filled in?blank spots in the motor and visual cortex after these areas fell silent f...

A new way to share models of biological systems

...gy Markup Language (SBML), an open-source computer language developed by the SBML Team, is now widely accepted and is supported by over 75 different software systems worldwide. This allows computational systems biologists to write models using the tool of their choice, and then to share them so that others ca...

Researchers develop promising new gene network analysis method

...sed to crunch everything from sports statistics to language production. The other was a correlation method based on network theory, which has been used to explain complex systems such as power grids and neural networks. After applying both statistical methods to the experimental data, the team found that the...

Bees, Brains and Addiction

...entists in La Jolla have conveyed in non-technical language to students, teachers and other non-scientists in ...armaceuticals. The program includes a monthly lay language lecture by a local neuroscientist on a topic of broad public interest, televised broadcasts of that ...

Say what? Bacterial conversation stoppers

...rent species can talk to each other using a common language ?and also that some species can manipulate the con...e linguistic versatility of AI-2. But this common language does not guarantee the correct message gets through, the researchers discovered. In earlier work, Xa...

Monkeys understand numbers across senses

...fferent sensory modalities, and this tells us that language is not necessary to represent number abstractly," ...rd 'three' to sounds or visual images, we're using language to link these different sets from different modalities. And the question has been whether an animal ...

Brain networks change according to cognitive task

...med. In this study, the subjects were assigned two language tasks. In both, subjects were asked to read indivi...es showed that the IFG is active in many different language tasks and suggested that the IFG was involved not only in the integration process but also in contro...

Number Of Babies Born Prematurely Nears Historic Half Million Mark In U.S.

... Dimes Web site at marchofdimes.com or its Spanish language Web site at nacersano.org. ...

Scientists crack 40-year-old DNA puzzle and point to 'hot soup' at the origin of life

A new theory that explains why the language of our genes is more complex than it needs to be a...baffled scientists since they first deciphered the language of DNA almost 40 years ago. In 1968, Marshall Nirenberg, Har Gobind Khorana and Robert Holley recei...

Mining biotech's data mother lode

...are tools together is a rules-based Java scripting language called Prova, also developed by the BioGrid team. ... need to develop a community to keep a programming language alive," says Dr Schroeder. ...

Sooner is better with cochlear implants, Stanford scientist shows

... the time of the study, they could perceive spoken language and communicate verbally. All of the children could read lips, but until they received hearing input from their implants they could not make the connection between lip movement and sound. The only kids who fully merged the visual and auditory effect...

'Uniquely human' component of language found in gregarious birds

...ugh linguists have argued that certain patterns of language organization are the exclusive province of humans -- perhaps the only uniquely human component of language -- researchers from the University of Chicago and the University of California San Diego have discov...

Skin disease common among Hispanic farmworkers in North Carolina, research shows

...ispanic, with a majority being from Mexico. Due to language barriers ?44 percent indicate they speak no English ?they have limited access to health education or safety warnings. In the study involving skin exams of 59 workers, all five female workers had skin disease, while 78 percent of the 54 men did. The...

There's something fishy about human brain evolution

Forget the textbook story about tool use and language sparking the dramatic evolutionary growth of the h...iologists usually point to things like the rise of language and tool making to explain the massive expansion of early hominid brains. But this is a Catch-22. So...

Warbling whales speak a language all their own

...songs are not like human language, but elements of language are seen in their songs," said Ryuji Suzuki, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) predoctoral fellow in neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and first author of the paper. With limited sight and sense of smell in water, marine ...

'Word-vision' brain area confirmed

...cognition and naming, face processing, and general language abilities," reported the researchers. "Such selectivity may be difficult to observe in patients with more customary lesions resulting from strokes or tumors, which often affect a larger extent of cortex and white matter. The small size of the present...

Zebra finches remember songs dad sang

... the mechanism that allows kids to learn any human language if they start early enough," Vicario says. "These findings are exciting," Kuhl says of the research reported in the paper. "They provide neurobiological evidence that helps explain human infants' acquisition of speech." Vicario, Phan and Pytte wor...

Understanding the actions of others requires the frontal cortex

... understanding language. However, because of these language impairments, it has been difficult for researchers...with stroke patients and understand more about how language and actions interact in the normal brain. ...

Life, the remake

...sis, plant seeds, mineralized bones and even human language are just such good ideas that they would reappear,... be unique, including the genetic code, sex, human language and feathers, and another 55 that turn up repeatedly. Most of the unique innovations -- with the exc...

With cochlear implants, earlier use leads to better speech

...s a cochlear implant, the better his or her spoken language skills at age 3 and a half. The research was condu...They don't know how to have a conversation in sign language or teach it to their children. Many of these parents would like their children to learn spoken langu...

In a technical tour de force, Salk scientists take a global view of the epigenome

...r view of heredity has largely been written in the language of DNA, but recent discoveries in a field known as epigenetics - the study of heritable changes in gene function that occur without changing the letters of the DNA alphabet - show that how a cell "reads" those letters is critical. Methylation is c...

Polynesia explorers created worldwide web of scientific knowledge

...an ever-greater variety of forms of sex, politics, language and every other human institution," in short, "a greatly enlarged inventory of human possibilities." When missionaries arrived, they shook things up even more. Most of the era's proselytizers came out of the ecumenical London Missionary Society, f...

Carnegie Mellon researchers discover key deficiencies in brains of people with autism

...hinking in Pictures" that "Words are like a second language to me. ?When someone speaks to me, his words are i...ictures." To test this relationship between the language and visuospatial systems of the brain, the team used fMRI scans to view the patterns of activation i...

Brain-computer link lets paralyzed patients convert thoughts into actions

...electrical signals -- known as neural spiking, the language of the brain -- from nearby neurons and transmit t...chatter between neurons in the motor cortex into a language the computer could understand and use to control other devices. Hatsopoulos and other students in th...

Learning the language of DNA

...en time. "Essentially, we need to understand the language that cells use to read DNA in order to know how pr...l research community." Part of understanding the language of cells lies in identifying promoters - the DNA regions at the start of genes that regulate their a...

Scientists use gene signatures to match cancer and other diseases with potentially effective drugs

...seases with potential treatments using a universal language based on cells' distinctive gene activity profiles, or "signatures." A set of three articles being published in the September 29 issue of Science and in the September 28 advance online edition of Cancer Cell unveils the first steps toward what res...

Genetic 'roadmap' charts links between drugs and human disease

...ed the effects of drugs and diseases in the common language of "genomic signatures," meaning the full complement of genes that the drugs turn on and off. To create a first-generation Connectivity Map, the scientists measured the genomic signatures of more than 160 drugs and other biologically active compou...

When nerve cells can't make contact

...toms of this developmental malfunction are delayed language development or no language development at all, disturbed social behaviour and repetitive behaviour patterns. In many patients, ...

Very low birth weight linked to reduced quality of life in pre-school children

...ased study, which was carried out using a Mandarin language version of a quality of life instrument developed in the Netherlands. The 118 very low birth weight children were less than 1500g (three pounds and five ounces) and were cared for in the neonatal intensive care units of four hospitals in northern T...

Reading Shakespeare has dramatic effect on human brain

...iversity of Liverpool has found that Shakespearean language excites positive brain activity, adding further drama to the bard's plays and poetry. Shakespeare uses a linguistic technique known as functional shift that involves, for example using a noun to serve as a verb. Researchers found that this techniqu...

Mirrors in the mind: New studies elucidate how the brain reflects onto itself the actions of others

...o skills such as empathy, socialized behavior, and language acquisition. The new findings contribute to our ...rstanding of how conceptually related instances of language and action, and sound and action, are linked in the brain, and how the brain distinguishes actions p...

Slow brain waves play key role in coordinating complex activity

...ordinate activity. "If you are reading something, language areas oscillate in theta frequency allowing high-gamma-related neural activity in individual neurons to transmit information," said Knight. "When you stop reading and begin to type, theta rhythms oscillate in motor structures, allowing you to plan an...

Computer scientists unravel 'language of surgery'

...e project. "We can think of that structure as ‘the language of surgery.' To develop mathematical models for th...h as suturing, a key first step in deciphering the language of surgery. The lead author, Johns Hopkins graduate student Henry C. Lin, received the conference aw...

Mysterious 'neural noise' actually primes brain for peak performance

...the human cortex," says Pouget. "The way you learn language must be essentially the same as the way a doctor reasons out a diagnosis, and right now our lab is pushing hard to find out exactly how that noise makes all these different aspects of being human possible." Pouget's work still has its skeptics, but...

Older fathers more likely to have autistic children

... journals. Autism is characterized by social and language abnormalities and repetitive patterns of behavior, according to background information in the article. Autism and related conditions, known collectively as autism spectrum disorders, have become increasingly common, affecting 50 in every 10,000 chil...

New fMRI technology making brain tumor surgery safer

...e,?Dr. McPherson said. “And to accurately identify language areas in some cases we had to keep the patient awake. We also were forced to make a larger opening of the skull and expose more areas.? The need for electrical stimulation also can lengthen a surgical procedure by 30 to 60 minutes. While neurosu...

Ape gestures offer clues to the evolution of human communication

...zations, further supporting the evolution of human language began with gestures as the gestural origin hypothesis of language suggests. This study appears in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Scie...

Severe mental retardation gene mutation identified

... Some patients require total care and may not have language ability. The condition runs in families and only affects the male offspring. So far only a few of these genes have been identified. Working through a large, international collaboration, the researchers collected genetic samples from 250 famili...

Researchers discover genetic cause for word-finding disease

.... "Here is a disease that specifically attacks the language part of the brain on the left side. What makes it so specific? How does the disease target the language areas?" "This finding will help us explore not just what causes the disease but the uniquely iden...

Mummy's amazing American maize

...s arrived in the 15th century ?everything from the language to the whole way of life," explained Professor Terry Brown, who headed the research in the Faculty of Life Sciences. "Maize is the staple food crop of the region but prior to colonisation it also had a ritual significance ?the indigenous people we...

Vasectomy may put men at risk for type of dementia

...ne of her male patients connected the onset of his language problem at age 43 to the period after his vasectom...er's. Whether a patient will get the behavioral or language problems depends on where the disease causes the most destruction in the brain. In FTD, most of the...

Insomnia drug can improve brain function

...otor tests such as finger tapping and walking, and language tests such as spontaneous speech, word repetition, and object naming. They also conducted brain imaging studies to assess brain metabolism and cognitive activation using PET scans. All of these were conducted with both zolpidem and a placebo in a ran...

Research finds music training 'tunes' human auditory system

...igher order brain structure associated with music, language and other complex processing. These findings are in line with previous studies by Wong and his group suggesting that musical experience can improve one’s ability to learn tone languages in adulthood and level of musical experience plays a role in...

Uniform language for describing genes of pathogenic and beneficial microbes

... the presence of beneficial microbes. The unified language under development in this effort is called The Gen...um has been working since 2000 to develop a common language of terms that can be used to describe how individual genes function in diverse organisms. The PAMGO ...

Left-right wiring determined by neural communication in the embryonic worm

... to pick up a pencil or throw a baseball, to where language is generated in the brain, to the orientation of our internal organs, humans are a glut of asymmetries. Worms aren't so different: The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans has nerves on its left and right sides that perform different functions. Like hand...

A frown or a smile? Children with autism can't discern

...p what’s going on ?they miss the nuances, the body language and facial expressions and sometimes miss the big picture and instead focus on minor, less socially relevant details,?Davies said. “That, in turn, affects interpersonal bonds.? ...

Eavesdropping comes naturally to young song sparrows

...rt because it has a number of parallels with human language learning, and Beecher thinks eavesdropping also co...ween a parent and an infant, but infants may learn language in part by eavesdropping on conversations between their parents or a sibling, Beecher said. "Do...

Putting feelings into words produces therapeutic effects in the brain

...however, Lieberman said. “We typically think of language processing in the left side of the brain; however, this effect was occurring only in this one region, on the right side of the brain,” he said. “It’s rare to see only one region of the brain responsive to a high-level process like labeling emotions.”...

New findings challenge established views on human genome

...earchers still must learn how to read the manual’s language so they can identify every part and understand how the parts work together to contribute to health and disease. In recent years, researchers have made major strides in using DNA sequence data to identify genes, which are traditionally defined as ...