Learning

Learning to fight an adversary that won't stay down

New biomolecular technologies have largely failed to deliver the hoped-for knockout punch breakthrough against the defences of disease-causing bacteria, says a leading Canadian specialist in antibiotic resistance. Techniques such as genomic sequencing and high throughput screening were expected to make the development of new antibiotic compounds easier and more productive. But in most cas...

Bird Brains Show How Trial and Error May Contribute to Learning

The adult male zebra finch knows only one scratchy tune learned in its youth, which it performs repeatedly and intensely when females are listening. But occasionally, the finch might improvise, experimenting with a slower, more sultry variation or emphasizing different notes. Neurobiologists studying the finch now say the improvisation arises from a component of a crucial learning circuit...

Structure-building cell signals also may influence learning and memory

A Burnham Institute study has found that one of the cell's largest families of signaling molecules, called ephrins, which are known to regulate the development of nerve cells, also controls nerve cells' ability to engulf critical chemicals and proteins for learning and memory. These findings, the first to link these molecular semaphores to this important nerve cell function, appear in the May iss...

Building a protein name dictionary from full text: a machine learning term extraction approach

The majority of information in the biological literature resides in full text articles, instead of abstracts. Yet, abstracts remain the focus of many publicly available literature data mining tools. Most literature mining tools rely on pre-existing lexicons of biological names, often extracted from curated gene or protein databases. This is a limitation, because such databases have low coverage o...

Mice brains shrink during winter, impairing some learning and memory

The brains of one species of mouse actually shrink during the winter, causing the mice to have more difficulty with some types of learning, a new study found. This is one of the first studies to show...

More animals join the learning circle

Killer whales and chimpanzees both pass on "traditions" to other members of their group, according to two separate studies of feeding behaviour. The findings add to evidence that cultural learning is widespread among animals. One study involved killerwhales at Marineland in Niagara Falls in Ontario, Canada. An inventive male devised a brand new way to catch birds, and passed the strategy...

Learning how SARS spikes its quarry

Researchers have determined the first detailed molecular images of a piece of the spike-shaped protein that the SARS virus uses to grab host cells and initiate the first stages of infection. The structure, which shows how the spike protein grasps its receptor, may help scientists learn new details about how the virus infects cells. The information could also be helpful in identifying potential we...

Learning to love bacteria: Stanford scientist highlights bugs' benefits

Bacteria are bad. Mothers and doctors, not to mention the cleaning product industry, repeatedly warn of their dangers. But a Stanford University School of Medicine microbiologist is raising the intriguing idea that persistent bacterial and viral infections have benefits. Stanley Falkow, PhD, the Robert W. and Vivian K. Cahill Professor in Cancer Research, is publishing his thoughts on this...

Learning and memory stimulated by gut hormone

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have found evidence that a hormone produced in the stomach directly stimulates the higher brain functions of spatial learning and memory development, and further suggests that we may learn best on an empty stomach. Published in the February 19 online issue of Nature Neuroscience by investigators at Yale and other institutes, the study showed that the...

Losing sleep undoes the rejuvenating effects new learning has on the brain

As the pace of life quickens and it becomes harder to balance home and work, many people meet their obligations by getting less sleep. But sleep deprivation impairs spatial learning -- including remembering how to get to a new destination. And now scientists are beginning to understand how that happens: Learning spatial tasks increases the production of new cells in an area of the brain in...

Learning the language of DNA

An international consortium of scientists, including a team from The University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), is a step closer to the next generation of treatments to combat disease, after publishing a comprehensive analysis of the human and mouse transcriptomes. A senior member of the consortium and IMB researcher Professor David Hume said transcriptome descri...

Pheromone from mother's milk may rapidly promote learning in newborn mammals

By studying the ability of newborn rabbit pups to learn the significance of new odors, researchers have found that a mammary pheromone secreted in mother's milk may act as a chemical booster that facilitates the ability of pups to quickly associate environmental odors with the opportunity to nurse. The findings, which deepen our understanding of pheromone function and how learning occurs...

Learning during sleep?

If I can't remember this morning where I put my car keys last night, it's due to my memory failing me again. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg have been investigating how memories might be consolidated. Their new study offers the hitherto strongest proof that new information is transferred between the hippocampus, the short term memory area, and the cerebra...

Researchers identify neurons that assign value during learning

By using an experimental trick to activate certain sets of neurons and effectively substitute activation of these cells for positive or negative experiences, researchers have been able to identify neurons in the fruit fly Drosophila that are responsible for assigning value to stimuli during so-called associative learning. The findings, which advance our understanding of how, at the cellular level...

Drug treatment improves learning in mice with Down syndrome symptoms, Stanford/Packard study shows

A once-a-day, short-term treatment with a drug compound substantially improved learning and memory in mice with Down syndrome symptoms, say researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. What’s more, the gains lasted for months after the treatment was discontinued. The researchers are now considering a clinical trial to test whether the compound...

Experience affects new neuron survival in adult brain; study sheds light on learning, memory

Experience in the early development of new neurons in specific brain regions affects their survival and activity in the adult brain, new research shows. How these new neurons store information about these experiences may explain how they can affect learning and memory in adults. A team of researchers headed by Fred Gage, PhD, of the Salk Institute, found that experience enhances the surv...

Using brain scans, researchers find evidence for a two-stage model of human perceptual learning

Using advanced brain imaging techniques, researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center have watched how humans use both lower and higher brain processes to learn novel tasks, an advance they say may help speed up the teaching of new skills as well as offer strategies to retrain people with perceptual deficits due to autism. , the research team...

Mechanism of nicotine's learning effects explored

While nicotine is highly addictive, researchers have also shown the drug to enhance learning and memory—a property that has launched efforts to develop nicotine-like drugs to treat cognitive deficits in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, schizophrenia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. A key problem in designing such drugs has been that little was known about the detailed me...

'Smart' mice teach scientists about learning process, brain disorders

, reveal a new mechanism of learni...