Cleveland, OH, USA. Heath A. Demaree, professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University, finds important clues to behavior in what psychologists call hot and cold psychology.

"People differ with regard to how well they can control their emotions, and one factor that predicts it is non-emotional in nature — it is a cold cognitive construct," says Demaree.

Bethesda, MD, USA. Two closely related proteins guide axon projections from nerve cells, alternately attracting and repelling them as they navigate miniscule and frenetic niches in the nervous system to make precise connections.

Because signaling that affects the growth and steering of neuronal processes is critical for repairing and regenerating damaged or diseased nerve cells, this research suggests that a more refined understanding of how semaphorin proteins work could contribute to treatmen

La Jolla, CA, USA. A gene called SOX2 acts as a stem cell gatekeeper — only cells expressing it have the potential to become neurons.

Research into this process has already informed scientific understanding of human development and birth anomalies, and could lead to improved therapies for neurocristopathies, the class of pathologies in the tissues containing cells derived from embryonic neural crest cells.

Cambridge, UK. A new study found for the first time that previously diagnosed female-to-male transsexual people have a higher than average number of autistic traits, as measured by the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) scores taken from interviews with the study participants.

The claim has important implications for the clinical management of men born transsexual with, as the authors characterize it, gender incongruence that persists into adulthood, and for the extreme male brain theory of autism.

New York, NY, USA. The molecular machines embedded in the cell membranes of neurons that modulate neuronal signaling, the transfer of signals between cells and recycle neurotransmitters, have been described with unprecedented detail.

Analyzing molecular machines that manage neuronal signaling leads to improved understanding of brain development and function, as well as variations from genomic anomalies, disease, drug addiction, and other maladies.