Can a protein found in a mosquito lead to a better understanding of the workings of our own brains? Professor Ofer Yizhar and his team in the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Neurobiology Department took a light-sensitive protein derived from mosquitos and used it to...
A new study of lab-grown neurons by the Weizmann Institute of Research reveals a new regulatory mechanism for keeping the On-Off switches in our brain in balance Our brain has On and Off switches for all its activities, and maintaining a balance between the two is...
Being constantly hungry, no matter how much you eat – that's the daily struggle of people with genetic defects in the brain's appetite controls, and it often ends in severe obesity. In a study recently published in Science researchers at the Weizmann Institute of...
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have observed slow spontaneous fluctuations in the brain’s visual centres preceding visual hallucinations in blind people. Some people lose their eyesight, but continue to ‘see’. This vivid visual hallucination is named...
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 5 Communication with others – verbal and nonverbal – is part of what makes us human. These abilities are encoded in the...
Nicola Tesla thought up his alternating current induction motor while walking, Margaret Atwood comes up with ideas while bird-watching, and Archimedes was famously inspired to formulate the laws of buoyancy while sitting in his bath. Researchers at the Weizmann...
A new study in mice at the Weizmann Institute of Science show that the mother’s natural anti-viral proteins disrupted the development of neural circuits in the foetus. Findings emerging from the study – recently published in Nature – showed that when a pregnant woman...
A new Weizmann Institute of Science study of mice in a semi-natural setting shows how the hormone oxytocin can amplify aggression as well as friendliness. During the pandemic lockdown, as couples have been forced to spend days and weeks in one another’s company, some...
If an unconscious person responds to smell through a slight change in their nasal airflow pattern – they are likely to regain consciousness. This is the conclusion of a new study conducted by Weizmann Institute scientists and colleagues at the Loewenstein...
A diligent student might stay in the classroom during recess to go over the recently learned material instead of playing in the schoolyard. However, new research at the Weizmann Institute of Science suggests that the neurons in a part of the brain called the amygdala...
Is a pair of brain structures called the olfactory bulbs, which are said to encode our sense of smell, really essential? Weizmann Institute of Science researchers has shown that some humans can smell without olfactory bulbs. Their finding around 0.6% of women and up...
Our brains are so primed to recognise faces to tell people apart we rarely stop to think about it. But what happens in the brain when it engages in such recognition is still far from understood. In a new study reported in Nature Communications, researchers at the...
Weizmann Institute Scientists have uncovered a neuronal mechanism central to human free recall with the findings recently published in Science. Extra-terrestrial scientists landing in a football stadium would be struck by the sight of the crowd suddenly standing up...
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have shown in mice that intestinal microbes, collectively termed the gut microbiome, may affect the course of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which damages motor neurons in the...
The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain. Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the...
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have identified a genetic ‘switch’ that is only active when nerves are injured – recently reported in Molecular Cell. Genes that encode proteins are usually active in so many tissues and in so many different situations...
The Weizmann Institute of Science’s Professor Rony Paz suggests our brains are like modern washing machines – evolved to have the latest sophisticated programming, but more vulnerable to breakdown and prone to develop costly disorders. He and a group of researchers...
According to some estimates, up to one in three people around the world may experience severe anxiety in their lifetime. In a study recently published in Cell Reports, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have revealed a previously unknown mechanism...
Being born with a 'tabula rasa' – a clean slate – for the brain is something of a curse. Our brains are already wrinkled like walnuts by the time we are born, but babies born without these wrinkles – smooth brain syndrome – suffer from severe developmental...
Autism typically involves the inability to read social cues, often associated with visual difficulty in interpreting facial expression. New research from the Weizmann Institute of Science, reported this week in Nature Neuroscience, suggests that the sense of smell may...
A newly discovered immune cell type by Weizmann scientists may lead to a future treatment for Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's disease is a neurodegenerative disease manifested by various neuronal pathological processes and a significant decline in brain function....
We usually think of the immune system as the body’s police force, vigilantly patrolling for invading pathogens and toxins to destroy—but a new study published in Nature Communications from Professor Orly Reiner’s laboratory in the Weizmann Institute's Department of...
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In addition to the classic stress response in our bodies – an acute reaction that gradually abates when the threat passes – our bodies appear to have a separate mechanism that deals only with chronic stress. New Weizmann Institute of Science findings, recently...