A group of investigators from San Diego State University's Brain Development Imaging Laboratory say they can see the effects of autism on the brain. They conclude that connectivity between the thalamus, a deep brain structure crucial for sensory and motor functions, and the cerebral cortex, the brain's outer layer, is impaired in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

The largest investigation to-date has found a dramatic increase in the number of hospitalizations for children with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) during the past decade in the United States. But does that mean there are actually more cases?

A National Renewable Energy Lab researcher at the IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference in Tampa announced a 31.1% conversion efficiency for a two-junction solar cell under one sun of illumination.

A new paper published in
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review and based on a small experiment found that people who are blindfolded employ the same strategy to intercept a running ball carrier as people who can see, which suggests that multiple areas of the brain cooperate to accomplish the task.  Or they do what they learned when they could see.

Either way, chasing down a moving object is not only a matter of sight or of sound, but of mind.

Attention, activist groups: Open-minded people don't change their view when you control what they learn and they only get one side of the issue, according to a new paper, so framing can only take you so far.

The results of a new paper in the Journal of Communication suggest that climate change deniers may be less effective in swaying public opinion than many scientists and advocates fear, and may even hurt their own cause among those who are most open-minded, according to the authors. 

Dopamine, the neurotransmitter celebrity chemical du jour in brain stories, gets invoked a lot because it can make a lot of correlations possible - and that means fun for journalists who either want to highlight the ridiculous or scare you. 

Like guns? Dopamine. Are you a Democrat? Dopamine. But aside from its 'pleasure chemical' designation, dopamine has lots of roles in the brain. So if a man takes antipsychotic medication, he may lactate as a side effect, because those medications focus on dopamine. And if there is an addiction story, dopamine is invoked.