Stay up to date on the latest science with Brush Up Summaries. Nerve cells, or neurons, are the basic functional units of the nervous system. Multiple interconnected neurons form a neural circuit and ...

In the brain, highly specific connections called synapses link nerve cells and transmit electrical signals in a targeted manner. Despite decades of research, how synapses form during brain development ...

The idea that the nervous system passes messages from one nerve cell to another only through synapses — the points where the cells link up end to end — is changing. Two studies show how messages can ...

The human sense of touch is a complex system that integrates diverse sensations such as pain, temperature, and pleasant ...

Certain nerve cells in the brain become active whenever they are confronted with different images or the name of a specific person or the identity of an object. They are highly selective and do not ...

The typical job of the proteasome, the garbage disposal of the cell, is to grind down proteins into smaller bits and recycle some of those bits and parts. That's still the case, for the most part, but ...

Researches at Linköping University have created an artificial nerve cell from a single organic electrochemical transistor, while still reproducing as many as 17 neural properties. An artificial neuron ...

University of Wollongong (UOW) scientists have developed a breakthrough therapy that clears toxic proteins from nerve cells—a ...