A new technique that marries a fast-moving laser beam with a special microscope that look at tissues in different optical planes will enable scientists to get a three-dimensional view of neurons or nerve cells as they interact, said Baylor College of Medicine scientists in a report that appears today in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The nerve cells in a fly’s brain dedicated to analysing visual motion have been characterised in unprecedented detail by scientists.

A human hormone known to stimulate the growth of cells throughout the body has a new role - helping to set up the proper nerve connections in the odor center of the brain, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Most cells in the human brain are not nerve cells, but supporting cells (glial cells). They serve as a framework for nerve cells and play an important role in the wound reaction that occurs with injuries to the brain.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have demonstrated that living human nerve cells can be engineered into a network that could one day be used for transplants to repair damaged to the nervous system. They report their findings in the February issue of the Journal of Neurosurgery.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered that introns, or junk DNA to some, associated with RNA are an important molecular guide to making nerve-cell electrical channels.

Do your ears ring after a loud concert" Nerves that sense touch in your face and neck may be behind the racket in your brain, University of Michigan researchers say.

Muscles usually contract when a neurotransmitter molecule is released from nerve cells onto muscle cells. But University of Utah scientists discovered that bare subatomic protons can act like larger, more complex neurotransmitters, making gut muscles contract in tiny round worms so the worms can poop.

If you ever had a set of Micronauts – toy robots with removable body parts – you probably had fun swapping their heads, imagining how it would affect their behavior. Scientists supported by the National Institutes of Health have been performing similar experiments on ion channels – pores in our nerve cells – to sort out the channels' key functional parts.

Scientists believe they have found an explanation for a puzzling and serious complication of West Nile virus infection.

The proper number of synapses or communication between nerve cells, determined early in life, is crucial to having a healthy brain that can learn and retain information.

Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have for the first time measured the electrical activity of nerve cells and correlated it to changes in blood flow in response to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a noninvasive method to stimulate neurons in the brain.