What color is H? Is 4 brighter than 9?

Those questions don't make sense to many people but for people with grapheme-color synesthesia, they have real answers.

Patients may soon be able to get a bionic pick-me-up without undergoing the pain and lengthy recovery of surgery - an exoskeleton to support people who, through age or injury, are limited in their movement.

A new study has found that engaging in a physical exercise regimen helps healthy aging adults improve their memory, brain health and physical fitness - a significant finding considering that, among adults 50 and older, "staying mentally sharp" outranks social security and physical health as their top concern.

What do bullies and sex have in common?
  The same part of the brain reacts to both. 

In a recent study, researchers found that different types of fear are processed by different groups of neurons in mice, even if the animals act out those fears in the same way - which could have implications for addressing phobias and panic attacks in humans.

"We found that there seems to be a circuit for handling fear of predators – which has been described anatomically as a kind of defense circuit – but fear of members of the same species uses the reproductive circuit instead," says Bianca Silva of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Monterotondo, Italy, who carried out the work, "and fear of pain goes through yet another part of the brain."

Due to Budget constraints, registered nurses in European countries are often confronted with difficult decisions: They have to decide which care activities they can offer to their patients and which to omit. 

What usually gets cut is patient comfort or talk with patients or educating patients and relatives.

An analysis by the Institute of Nursing Sciences at the University of Basel shows that all European countries are affected and revealed a correlation between omitted nursing care and increased patient mortality.

Gastric bypass surgery has become one of the most commonly performed procedures in the treatment of obesity. In most patients, it quickly produces substantial body weight loss and improved glucose tolerance. However, the metabolic improvements vary considerably from patient to patient.

A hormone test may be able to predict the extent of metabolic improvement caused by the gastric bypass. These are the results of a study on a rodent model conducted by Prof. Dr. Matthias Tschöp and his colleagues from the Institute of Diabetes and Obesity (IDO), Helmholtz Diabetes Center at Helmholtz Zentrum München together with a team of researchers led by Dr. Kirk Habegger at the Metabolic Disease Institute of the University of Cincinnati.