The increasing prevalence of opioid use disorder (OUD) represents an important global public health crisis, often referred to as the ‘opioid epidemic’. Opioids are known for their potent ...

Physical pain is essential for survival, as it allows animals to detect when they are injured or unwell, seek shelter and ...

The brain of humans and other animals is known to contribute to the protection of the body from infections. Past studies have unveiled the existence of the so-called conditioned immune response (CIR), ...

In the split second that is needed to view a stop sign and react to it, our brain navigates a complex process that transitions seamlessly from perception to action control. This ability to halt or ...

Because unpleasant withdrawal symptoms fuel nicotine addiction’s high relapse rate, targeting their underlying mechanisms with treatments may promote continued abstinence from the drug. In a new ...

Stanford Medicine investigators have replicated, in a lab dish, one of the most prominent human nervous pathways for sensing pain. This nerve circuit transmits sensations from the body’s skin to the ...

Itch represents an important somatosensory defensive mechanism. Both mechanical and chemical pruritic stimuli evoke the sensation of itch, and the molecular mechanisms for its peripheral signal ...

Scientists from Duke-NUS Medical School and the Mechanobiology Institute (MBI) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have discovered a novel pathway to wake up dormant neural stem cells, ...

When engineers build AI language models like GPT-5 from training data, at least two major processing features emerge: memorization (reciting exact text they’ve seen before, like famous quotes or ...