Anxiety boosts sense of smell

Anxious people have a heightened sense of smell when it comes to sniffing out a threat, according to a new study by Elizabeth Krusemark and Wen Li from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US. Their work¹ is published online in Springer’s journal Chemosensory Perception. The study is part of a special issue² of this journal on neuroimaging the chemical senses.

Paul Allen donates additional $300 million to brain research facility

(Medical Xpress) — Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has added an additional $300 million to the $200 million he’s already given to the brain research facility in Seattle he started back in 2003, the Allen Institute for Brain Science. This new grant is to go towards a new initiative for the Institute, outlined by Christof Koch, chief scientist at the Institute and Harvard neuroscientist R. Clay Reid, (who will be joining the Institute) in a recent comment brief in the science journal Nature. The new funding will go towards studying the visual cortex in the brain, starting with mice, and eventually moving to humans.