Related topics: brain · nerve cells · brain cells · cells · stem cells

Hunting for human obesity genes in fat fruit flies

Fruit flies provide an effective platform for screening new obesity genes, and fat flies implicate a neuronal signaling pathway in weight gain, according to a new study publishing November 4th in the open-access journal PLOS ...

How you mix cells changes the brain

Brain organoids are models of the brain made from growing stem cells like iPS cells into three-dimensional structures. They are used to study all sorts of brain-related phenomenon, including neural networks and disease development. ...

Bat study reveals secrets of the social brain

Whether chatting with friends at a dinner party or managing a high-stakes meeting at work, communicating with others in a group requires a complex set of mental tasks. Our brains must track who is speaking and what is being ...

Key protein linked to appetite and obesity in mice

Researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have identified a protein that plays a key role in how the brain regulates appetite and metabolism. Loss of the protein, XRN1, from ...

Zebrafish predict the future to avoid virtual danger

Scientists from the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS) and collaborators in Japan have discovered particular neurons in the brain that monitor whether predictions made by fish actually come true. By making use of a new ...

Lonely flies, like many humans, eat more and sleep less

COVID-19 lockdowns scrambled sleep schedules and stretched waistlines. One culprit may be social isolation itself. Scientists have found that lone fruit flies quarantined in test tubes sleep too little and eat too much after ...

Mosquito larvae are surprisingly complex

Mosquito larvae are surprisingly complex, with a sophisticated sense of smell that enables them to find food, avoid predators and thus become healthy adult mosquitoes with greater ability to transmit disease to humans.

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