February 2015

[Source: MIT Technology Review, February 19, 2015] A new method for growing human brain cells could unlock the mysteries of dementia, mental illness, and other neurological disorders. As Madeline Lancaster lifts a clear plastic dish into the light, roughly a dozen clumps of tissue the size of small baroque pearls bob in a peach-­colored liquid. […]

[Source: ScienceBlog, February 11, 2015] A new paper published in Nature Neuroscience this week out of Mark Bear’s lab at MIT suggests that a previously identified synaptic deficit in fragile-X syndrome, a neurological disorder commonly associated with autism-related symptoms, may not be specific to fragile-X, but may actually be a more common deficit amongst autism-related disorders. In […]