Sentences with phrase «studies brain evolution»

Dartmouth neuroscientist Richard Granger, who studies brain evolution, thinks it may not take much.

They can also live on their own, and this ability to switch between a social and a solitary lifestyle makes them valuable models for studying brain evolution.

«More broadly, our framework allows for new experiments in silico to study brain evolution, life history, and brain senescence.»

Not exact matches

In a study published on Nov. 16, scientists discovered that human brains exhibit more plasticity, propensity to be modeled by the environment, than chimpanzee brains and that this may have accounted for part of human evolution.

Understanding how and why we evolved such large brains is one of the most puzzling issues in the study of human evolution.

«This connection between an innate call and the activity of a brain area important to learned vocalisations suggests that during the evolution of songbirds, the role of the song area in the brain changed from being a simple vocalisation system for innate calls to a specialised neural network for learned songs,» concludes Manfred Gahr, coordinator of the study.

Further studies of casts of the inner braincase, which show impressions from surface features of the brain, may help clarify N. alesi's position in ape evolution, Nengo says.

If our results are confirmed in future studies, it would be a unique demonstration of convergent evolution of intelligence, involving the same neurotransmitter receptors despite the widely different brain structures of birds and mammals.»

Describing himself as a «neuro - ethologist,» Brockmann hopes that the comparative studies on three species native to India — A. cerana, A. dorsata, and A. florea — will help him understand the evolution of dance communication and identify the changes in the brain that accompanied the changes in behavior.

We know from comparative studies in primates that this part of the brain became highly specialized during hominin evolution.

A new study suggests that the debilitating disease schizophrenia may be a byproduct of the genetic changes that fueled the evolution of the expansive human brain.

The study couldn't determine if those different brain responses meant fathers are somehow hard wired through genetics or evolution to treat sons differently than they treat daughters or if the fathers were conforming to societal norms relating to gender.

According to Fotini Koutroumpa, lead author of the study and researcher at the UvA's Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED), the results point to future research on the tiny but complex moth brain, which will shed light on how the diverse pheromone systems of the thousands of moth species has changed throughout evolution.

However, all regions of the human brain have molecular signatures very similar to those of our primate relatives, yet some regions contain distinctly human patterns of gene activity that mark the brain's evolution and may contribute to our cognitive abilities, a new Yale - led study has found.

The newly created Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group has selected four initial researchers — Jennifer Doudna of the University of California (UC), Berkeley, Ethan Bier of UC San Diego, James Collins of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and Bassem Hassan of the Brain and Spine Institute in Paris — to receive $ 1.5 million each to study topics ranging from novel techniques for gene editing, how shapes and forms arise over the course of evolution, and how synthetic biology can create microbes that trap and kill dangerous bacteria.

«Considered in total, this study provides important early archaeological evidence for meat eating, hunting and scavenging behaviors - cornerstone adaptations that likely facilitated brain expansion in human evolution, movement of hominins out of Africa and into Eurasia, as well as important shifts in our social behavior, anatomy and physiology,» Ferraro said.

This greater ability to fashion our brains in response to our environment, the study maintains, could provide a link between biological evolution and cultural evolution.

«That is probably how, in the course of evolution, we humans developed larger brains,» says Wieland Huttner, summing up the study.

A new study from the George Washington University's Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology (CASHP) found that whereas brain size evolved at different rates for different species, especially during the evolution of Homo, the genus that includes humans, chewing teeth tended to evolve at more similar rstudy from the George Washington University's Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology (CASHP) found that whereas brain size evolved at different rates for different species, especially during the evolution of Homo, the genus that includes humans, chewing teeth tended to evolve at more similar rStudy of Human Paleobiology (CASHP) found that whereas brain size evolved at different rates for different species, especially during the evolution of Homo, the genus that includes humans, chewing teeth tended to evolve at more similar rates.

A decade ago, the lead author on the new study, Masato Yoshizawa, wanted to understand brain evolution by investigating the effects of natural selection on behavior.

«The findings of the study indicate that simple causal relationships between the evolution of brain size, tool use and tooth size are unlikely to hold true when considering the complex scenarios of hominin evolution and the extended time periods during which evolutionary change has occurred,» said Aida Gómez - Robles, lead author of the paper and a postdoctoral scientist at GW's CASHP.

Also in this issue, we take a trip to Harvard's brain bank where thousands of specimens are waiting to be studied, and we take on a burning question of human evolution: If our brains our shrinking, are we more efficient, or just not as bright?

Such dramatic effects on brain size and function are unlikely in human carriers of BRCA1 mutations, the authors of the study note, but they propose the findings could shed light on the gene's role in brain evolution.

«Comparing human, chimpanzee and bonobo cells can give us clues to understand biological processes, such as infection, diseases, brain evolution, adaptation or genetic diversity,» says senior research associate Iñigo Narvaiza, who led the study with senior staff scientist Carol Marchetto at the Salk Institute in La Jolla.

«The significance of this study is that we're going to see more comparative studies of macromolecular concentrations — such as differences in proteins and lipids — which reveal things that can't be read out directly» from the genome, says Todd Preuss, a neuroscientist at Emory University who specializes in the evolution of the human brain and who was not involved in the study.

Now, by studying the lamprey, Caltech researchers have discovered an unexpected mechanism for the evolution of the neurons of the peripheral nervous system — nerves outside of the brain and spinal cord.

She studies the process of cancer initiation and progression along with cancer stem cells, the evolution of drug resistance and the dynamics of metastasis formation focusing on lung, brain, breast and pancreatic cancers.

Although the original impetus of the work was to study human brain disease and development, says Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator Christopher Walsh, the results also shed light on how the human brain expanded during the course of evolution.

«We found that genes expressed in the human brain have in fact slowed down in their evolution, contrary to some earlier reports,» says study author Chung - I Wu, professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago.

Future studies of brain function and evolution will increasingly take advantage of the approaches of systems biology, Wu suggested.

More recently, his lab started studying the genetic basis of human brain evolution as well as the signaling pathways underlying synaptic loss during early stages of Alzheimer's Disease progression.

Rather, brain size is more accurately predicted by primates» diet, according to their new study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

To enhance the utility of chimpanzees as a reference species for comparative studies to better understand the structure, function, and evolution of the human brain

This highly specific tool use has implications for cognition and brain evolution among cetaceans and could even be considered a case of problem solving, a phenomenon difficult to document in the wild, but well established in studies of captive bottlenose dolphins [48].

Chimpanzees are among the closest living relatives of humans, making them a key species to study in order to understand the evolution of the human brain.

His research team is interested in identifying genes that direct the development of the cerebral cortex, both because of their importance in human diseases and because studying those genes will help in learning about the normal development and evolution of the brain.

His laboratory has extensive expertise in the pathology of neuropsychiatric disorders and has established an international reputation in quantitative approaches to neuroanatomy and studies of brain evolution.

A veterinary behaviorist has also demonstrated their academic skills in graduate school classes such as ethology, evolution of social behavior, developmental biology, neurobiology of behavior, learning theory, animal cognition, psychopharmacology (study of medications that affect the brain and emotions), and statistical analysis.

Larry Young, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University who studies the neurological basis of complex social behaviors, thinks human evolution has harnessed an ancient neural circuit that originally evolved to strengthen the mother - infant bond during breastfeeding, and now uses this brain circuitry to strengthen the bond between couples as well.