Brain-imaging studies reveal that voting decisions are more associated with the brain's response to negative aspects of a politician's appearance than to positive ones, says a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Scripps College, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa.

University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine researchers have discovered how the expression of the Sonic hedgehog gene is regulated during brain development and how mutations that alter this process cause brain malformations. The results appear online this month in Nature Genetics.

Construction of the brain's border fence is supervised by Wnt/b-catenin signaling, report Liebner et al. in The Journal of Cell Biology.

Are genes destiny? Alternatively, are we simply the products of our environment? There is a growing sense that neither of these two possibilities fully captures the essence of the risk for psychiatric disorders.

That familiar pull between the promise of victory and the dread of defeat – whether in money, love or sport – is rooted in the brain's architecture, according to a new imaging study.

Scientists have used a technique originally developed for economic study to become the first to overcome a significant challenge in brain research: determining the flow of information from one part of the brain to another.

Why do some people have the ability to remain calm and relaxed even in the most stressful situations? New experiments in mice by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers are providing insight into how the brain changes when the animals learn to feel safe and secure in situations that would normally make them anxious.

If the current financial climate has taught us anything, it's that a system where over-borrowing goes unchecked eventually ends in disaster. It turns out this rule applies as much to our bodies as it does to economics. Instead of cash, our body deals in energy borrowed from muscle and given to the brain.

When an object moves fast, we follow it with our eyes: our brain correspondingly calculates the speed of the object and adapts our eye movement to it. This in itself is an enormous achievement, yet our brain can do even more than that. In the real world, a car will typically accelerate or brake faster than, say, a pedestrian.

Thought processes made visible: An international team of scientists headed by Mazahir Hasan of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg has succeeded in optically detecting individual action potentials in the brains of living animals.

A new study shows that people who take the commonly used blood thinning drug warfarin may have larger amounts of bleeding in the brain and increased risk of death if they suffer a hemorrhagic stroke. The study is published in the September 30, 2008, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

According to the AANS, Chiari malformation can be difficult to diagnose because the symptoms mimic several other conditions, and as a result, patients are often told that there is no physical problem. Chiari malformation is indeed a physical condition and getting a proper diagnosis is the first step on the path to finding treatment that may provide hope and relief.