When you think of a neuron, imagine a tree.

A healthy brain cell indeed looks like a tree with a full canopy. There's a trunk, which is the cell's nucleus; there's a root system, embodied in a single axon; and there are the branches, called dendrites.

Neurons in your brain pass signals from one to another like they're playing an elaborate, lightning-quick game of telephone, using axons as the transmitters and dendrites as the receivers. Those signals originate in the brain and are passed throughout the body, culminating in simple actions, such as wiggling a toe, to more complex instructions, such as following through on a thought.

All light sources work by absorbing energy - for example, from an electric current - and emit energy as light. But the energy can also be lost as heat and it is therefore important that the light sources emit the light as quickly as possible, before the energy is lost as heat. Superfast light sources can be used, for example, in laser lights, LED lights and in single-photon light sources for quantum technology. New research results from the Niels Bohr Institute show that light sources can be made much faster by using a principle that was predicted theoretically in 1954. The results are published in the scientific journal, Physical Review Letters.

Turin, Italy: Young women with early breast cancer face a difficult choice about whether to opt for a mastectomy or breast conserving therapy (BCT). This is because there is little evidence as to whether the greater risk of a return of the disease at the site of the original tumour after BCT is linked to a greater risk of the cancer spreading to other parts of the body, leading to higher death rates.

BALTIMORE, MD - Mirroring national estimates, a new study that will be presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies 2016 Meeting found the percentage of children enrolled in the U.S. Military Healthcare System diagnosed with and treated for mental health disorders increased significantly during the past 15 years.

Tablet and laptop users beware. Using digital platforms such as tablets and laptops for reading may make you more inclined to focus on concrete details rather than interpreting information more abstractly, according to a new study published in the proceedings of ACM CHI '16, the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, to be held May 7-12, 2016. The findings serve as another wake-up call to how digital media may be affecting our likelihood of using abstract thought.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Although the coastal regions of the Greenland Ice Sheet are experiencing rapid melting, a significant portion of the interior of that ice sheet has remained stable - but a new study suggests that stability may not continue.

Researchers found that very little of the snow and ice on the vast interior of the ice sheet is lost to the atmosphere through evaporation because of a strong thermal "lid" that essentially traps the moisture and returns it to the surface where it refreezes.

However, there are signs that this lid is becoming leaky as global temperatures increase. The researchers say there may be a threshold at which warming becomes sufficient to turn on a switch that will destabilize the snow surface.