Volume 12 Issue 7, July 2011

Conscious perception of auditory stimuli requires top-down, feedback connectivity from frontal to temporal cortices, which is absent in the vegetative state and present in the minimally conscious state.

Two papers show that theta oscillations are required for grid cell function.

Variation in BAD–BAX signalling alters the level of caspase 3 activity and determines the function of this protease.

High-resolution X-ray computed tomography sheds new light on the early evolution of mammalian brains.

Transcriptome analysis reveals a common molecular pathway in autism.

Learning-related structural plasticity contributes to memory encoding and recall by increasing feedforward inhibition.

Neuronal activity seems to regulate the brain area-specific distribution of amyloid-β pathology in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease.

The number of individual types of molecules that are involved in synaptic transmission is small enough for the stochastic (random) properties of molecular events to be non-negligible. Triller and colleagues discuss the implications of stochastic reactive and diffusive molecular behaviours for synaptic transmission.

Macrophages and microglia are major contributors to the inflammatory response that follows spinal cord trauma. Modulating the activation of these cells to harness their beneficial protective and reparative properties could be key for treating spinal cord injuries.

Alcohol-related violence is a widespread societal problem. Heinz and colleagues review animal and human studies that have provided insights into the links between acute and chronic alcohol intake and aggression, and into the genetic and environmental factors that contribute to individual variability in alcohol-induced aggression.

Both theoretical and experimental approaches have demonstrated that noise can improve information processing, but there is substantial scope for new biologically appropriate computational hypotheses and noise sources to be investigated. McDonnell and Ward propose a unifying framework for reconciling theory with experiment.