For more than a century, the story of the brain has been told as a tale of neurons, with every thought and memory traced to their electrical chatter. That narrative is now being rewritten as evidence ...

New experiments reveal how astrocytes tune neuronal activity to modulate our mental and emotional states. The results suggest ...

Resting brain stem cells hardly differ from normal astrocytes, which support the nerve cells in the brain. How can almost identical cells perform such different functions? The key lies in the ...

Fatty diets and obesity affect the structure and function of astrocytes, the star-shaped brain cells located in the striatum, a brain region involved in the perception of pleasure generated by food ...

Recent work has revealed some of the many crucial functions of astrocytes, brain cells that were once thought to play primarily supportive roles for neurons. Astrocytes do handle debris around neurons ...

A new study shows that the activation of the brain's immune defense cells—astrocytes—in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease could be tracked early with a brain PET scanner and is linked to changes ...

Researchers at Instituto Cajal (CSIC), the Autonomous University of Madrid and Institute de Salud Carlos III recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding the contributions of astrocytes, ...

A project led by Johns Hopkins University has successfully imaged astrocytes, the brain's most abundant cells, in their natural state. The star-shaped astrocytes are known to be responsible for ...

“If we go back to the early 1900s, this is when the idea was first proposed that memories are physically stored in some location within the brain,” says Michael R. Williamson, a researcher at the ...