Edinburgh, UK. New research into the brain puts us one step closer to understanding it's evolutionary origins and basic design principles. The findings suggest that size alone does not dictate brain power. The evolution of sophisticated molecular processing of nerve impulses allowed the development of animals with increasingly complex behaviors.

The study shows that two waves of increased sophistication in the structure of nerve junctions could have been the force that allowed complex brains - including our own - to evolve. The big building blocks evolved before big brains.

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Evolutionary expansion and anatomical specialization of synapse proteome complexity. Richard D Emes, Andrew J Pocklington, Christopher N G Anderson, Alex Bayes, Mark O Collins, Catherine A Vickers, Mike D R Croning, Bilal R Malik, Jyoti S Choudhary, J Douglas Armstrong & Seth G N Grant. Nature Neuroscience 11, 799 - 806 (2008). doi: 10.1038 / nn.2135.

Current thinking suggests that the protein components of nerve connections - called synapses - are similar in most animals from humble worms to humans and that it is increase in the number of synapses in larger an

Stockholm, Sweden. Research into the origins and activation of sexual orientation have become more rigorous with the advent of neuro-based tools and quantitative measurements. Such efforts surpass social studies that depend on everyday observation but ignore the underlying neurobiological mechanisms that underlie the observed behavior.

There are no known causal connections between Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS) and sexual orientation, but many social studies are based on an unproven association between the two. Quantitative research into sexual orientation has many benefits. There is potential relevance for people born with HBS since the isolation of causative factors for sexual orientation could eliminate unwarranted associations and support more focused attention to the HBS condition.

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PET and MRI show differences in cerebral asymmetry and functional connectivity between homo- and heterosexual subjects. Ivanka Savic and Per Lindström. PNAS doi: 10.1073 / pnas.0801566105). [ Supporting Information PDF ]

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A new study from from Sweden's Karolinska Institute (Stockholm Brain Institute) explores the biological basis for sexual orientatio

Vancouver, BC, CAN. Entering the world, we reach out to our environment, with a brain map of essential pathways for exploration. But what really goes on between our brains, eyes and appendages? And how do we process the information necessary to connect with our most immediate environment, ourselves?

“It is still a mystery, really,” says Pai, computer science professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC). "No one has ever completely mapped out the processes at the level of specific neurons, muscles and tendons.”

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Musculotendon Simulation for Hand Animation. Shinjiro Sueda, Andrew Kaufman and Dinesh K. Pai. Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2008: ACM Transaction on Graphics. [ Download PDF ]

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Prof. Dinesh Pai researches the core principles which enable humans and robots to use sensory information as they move and interact with their environment. Such sensorimotor computation forms the bridge between abstract information processing in the human brain and the concrete reality of the physical world.

The human brain uses exteroceptive sensors (such as vision and touch) to perceive the state of its external environment. The brain uses pro