Health & Behavior

Research

The Latest

The Mechanism of Short-Term Memory

Insel’s quote appeared in a National Institutes of Health (NIH) press release that described a newly published study of monkeys in the journal Science, where researchers for the first time found that in-sync large-scale brain waves affecting various regions of the brain hold memories of objects just viewed. “This study provides more evidence that large-scale electrical oscillations across distant brain regions may carry information for visual memories,” added Insel.

Splice Variants Reveal Connections Among Autism Genes

A team of researchers from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and the Center for Cancer Systems Biology (CCSB) at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has uncovered a new aspect of autism, revealing that proteins involved in autism interact with many more partners than previously known. These interactions had not been detected earlier because they involve alternatively spliced forms of autism genes found in the brain.

ARCS Foundation Names V.S. Ramachandran ‘Scientist of the Year’

V.S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UC San Diego, was recently honored as the 2014 Scientist of the Year by the San Diego chapter of the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) Foundation. The award was presented April 4 at the organization’s annual Scientist of the Year dinner.

For Good and Ill, Immune Response to Cancer Cuts Both Ways

The difference between an immune response that kills cancer cells and one that conversely stimulates tumor growth can be as narrow as a “double-edged sword,” report researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine in the April 7, 2014 online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Engineering a New Biomaterial Therapy for Treating Heart Attacks

University of California, San Diego bioengineer Karen Christman's new injectable hydrogel, which is designed to repair damaged cardiac tissue following a heart attack, has been licensed to San Diego-based startup Ventrix, Inc, which is planning the first human clinical trials of the technology. Christman is a co-founder of Ventrix.

Cancer and the Goldilocks Effect

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have found that too little or too much of an enzyme called SRPK1 promotes cancer by disrupting a regulatory event critical for many fundamental cellular processes, including proliferation.