The concept of permanent neurological injury is so 20th century.

Instead, there has been gradual recognition of the brain's potential for long-term regeneration and reorganization and so rehabilitations strategies are undergoing radical changes. The potential for five new translational interventions was examined in an recent Neurology Clinical Practice article.

A single dose of the hormone oxytocin, delivered via nasal spray, has been shown to enhance brain activity while processing social information in children with autism spectrum disorders.

 Results showed that oxytocin facilitated social attunement, a process that makes the brain regions involved in social behavior and social cognition activate more for social stimuli (such as faces) and activate less for non-social stimuli (such as cars). 

Australian astronomers have derived a catchy way to prevent catastrophic, multi-billion dollar space junk collisions -  by listening in to the radio signals generated by stations like the popular youth network Triple J. 

The project spearheaded by Curtin University in Western Australia uses the newly operational Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), one of three precursor telescopes for the $2 billion Square Kilometre Array project, to detect radio waves reflecting off thousands of objects orbiting the earth. The study has already tracked radio waves from FM transmitters located near Perth and Geraldton bouncing off the International Space Station as it passed over Western Australia, approximately 500 kilometres above the Earth's surface.   

A new paper in Free Radical Biology and Medicine
suggests that a diet low in vitamin D causes damage to the brain.

In addition to being essential for maintaining bone health, the new evidence found that vitamin D serves important roles in other organs and tissue, including the brain. The study showed that middle-aged rats that were fed a diet low in vitamin D for several months developed free radical damage to the brain, and many different brain proteins were damaged as identified by redox proteomics.

These rats also showed a significant decrease in cognitive performance on tests of learning and memory.

A new paper from the University of South Carolina says that mothers in the U.S. are far less physically active than they were in previous decades and now spend more time engaged in sedentary activities like watching television than in cooking, cleaning and exercising combined. 

The "new genetics" promises to fix the faulty genes of future generations by introducing new, functioning genes using "designer sperm", according to a report appearing in The FASEB Journal.

In a mouse model, introducing new genetic material via a viral vector into the sperm of mice leads to the presence and activity of those genes in the resulting embryos. This new genetic material is actually inherited, present and functioning through three generations of the mice tested. This discovery—if successful in humans—could lead to a new frontier in genetic medicine in which diseases and disorders are effectively cured, and new human attributes, such as organ regeneration, may be possible.