Mind & Brain

Numbers: The Majority of Minors Have Faced Mental Illness

04.17.2012

Juicers, Trippers, and Crocodiles: The Dangerous World of Underground Chemistry

Steroids, narcotics, and psychedelics are flowing freely from underground labs around the world. 04.16.2012

Science's Long—and Successful—Search for Where Memory Lives

They called it a 
myth as fantastical 
as the unicorn, 
but scientists have 
now found the engram, 
the physical trace 
of memory in the brain.
 (Article preview; full text for subscribers only.) 04.13.2012

Beauty & Brains: The Best of the Art of Neuroscience

Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, first captured the elegant beauty of branching neurons in his simple ink drawings 100 years ago. These entries for the 2012 Art of Neuroscience competition in the Netherlands use modern imaging techniques to show how far our view into the brain has come. 04.10.2012

Vital Signs: Boys and Brains and Genes

A hyperactive five-year-old is having trouble fitting in at school. Does he have ADHD, or could his 
behavior be a clue to a deeper, genetic problem? 04.04.2012

The Brain: The Connections May Be the Key

Once we model the connectome—the million 
billion points of contact between neurons in 
the brain—we’ll glimpse the anatomy of the mind. 03.20.2012

The Brain: The Troublesome Bloom of Autism

As the autistic brain grows in the womb, it bursts with an overabundance of neurons. That finding could lead to much earlier diagnosis and treatment.
 03.05.2012

Impatient Futurist: Good News, Spock—We're Getting Closer to a Universal Translator

The rapid advancement of Google-style, statistical translation may help realize this long-time dream. 02.27.2012

Of Mice and Men and Medicines

Drugs that alleviate symptoms of psychological illness in mice often wind up producing human treatments. There is just one small problem: Their mental breakdowns look nothing like ours. 02.24.2012

The Brain: Our Strange, Important, Subconscious Light Detectors

Sightless cells hidden within the eye may set our circadian rhythms, trigger migraines, and explain the seasonal ebb and flow of our moods. 02.15.2012

How Did LEGO Become More About Limits Than Possibilities?

Hard data support old-school fans' objections to the newer, more specialized collections. 02.03.2012

Big Idea: Seeing Crime Before It Happens

Can remote sensors give us Minority Report-like powers to detect people who will soon break the law? 01.23.2012

Impatient Futurist: Science Finds a Better Way to Teach Science

After doing some much-needed research, cognitive scienctists are suggesting a new way to boost students’ lagging scores: Get rid of the hallowed (and stultifying) classroom lecture. 01.17.2012

#98: Brain
 Signal For 
Awareness

Minimally conscious and vegetative patients show different patterns of neural activity. 01.05.2012

#78: Napping Neurons Explain Sleep-Deprived Blunders


Tiny clumps of neurons doze off, even while the brain as a whole is awake. 01.05.2012

#76: Environment Gets More Blame for Autism


A new study suggests that environment accounts for more than half of autism risk, while genes are responsible for about 40 percent. 01.05.2012