Several weeks after making history with the world’s first live-tweeted open heart surgery, Houston’s Memorial Hermann hospital is dusting off its social media chops again. (CNN)

Quick: What’s the fattiest system in your body that has two halves and weighs between 2 and 4 pounds? It’s your brain — you know, that thing that remembers stuff. (CNN)

The dream of true cybernetics — merging man with machine — just got a bit closer. Scientists at Northwestern University built a device that can send signals from the brain directly to paralyzed muscles, causing them to move by thought. This technology could help patients who have suffered spinal cord injuries regain the use of their limbs. (Discovery News)

By tacking drugs onto molecules targeting rogue brain cells, researchers have alleviated symptoms in newborn rabbits that are similar to those of cerebral palsy in children. Cerebral palsy refers to a group of incurable disorders characterized by impairments in movement, posture and sensory abilities. (Nature News)

The first time Edi Guyton tried to commit suicide, she was 19 years old, wracked with depression and unable to deal with the social and academic pressure of college. (CNN)

Doctors are warning that pressure to be young, beautiful, slim and clever, is driving a generation into buying illicit drugs online in the belief they are not ‘good enough’. (Telegraph)

Cases of dementia — and the heavy social and financial burdens associated with them — are set to soar in the coming decades as life expectancy and medical care improve in poorer countries, the World Health Organization says. (The Washington Post)

The human brain has the remarkable ability to send signals that can move a computer cursor, a wheelchair, or even a prosthetic limb.  “Could you think the word ‘pinch’ and make a little robot pinch with its fingers?” says Thomas Daniel, professor of biology at the University of Washington. “The answer is yes.” (US News & World Report)

The blobs appeared 20 years ago. Two teams, one led by Seiji Ogawa at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the other by Kenneth Kwong at Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown, slid a handful of volunteers into giant magnets. (Nature News)

By unlocking the mysteries of the mind, neuroscientists have opened the door to revolutionary technology — technology the American military hopes to harness. From keeping troops more alert during exhausting missions to engineering intelligent drones, some experts argue brain research has changed the battlefield. (ABC News)

Scientists have discovered how electroconvulsive or electric shock therapy - a controversial but effective treatment - acts on the brains of severely depressed people and say the finding could help improve diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. (Reuters)

From technologies which allow the brain to directly control computers to using electricity to enhance brain function, the way technology can “intervene” in the brain is being reviewed. (BBC News)

Secel Montgomery Sr. stabbed a woman in the stomach, chest and throat so fiercely that he lost count of the wounds he inflicted. In the nearly 25 years he has been serving a life sentence, he has gotten into fights, threatened a prison official and been caught with marijuana. (NY Times)

Elderly nursing home residents who take certain antipsychotic drugs for dementia have an increased risk of death, a new study found. (ABC News)

It wasn’t quite the lynching that Henry Markram had expected. But the barrage of skeptical comments from his fellow neuroscientists–”It’s crap,” said one–definitely made the day feel like a tribunal. (Scientific American)

A colour-blind artist has become the world’s first government-recognized cyborg with a head-mounted device that translates colour to sound. (Daily Mail)

People learned better when a key part of their brains got mild zaps of electricity, a finding that may someday help Alzheimer’s patients keep more of their memories. (Washington Post)

Scientists in the US have successfully made human brain cells in the lab that are an exact replica of genetically caused Parkinson’s disease. (BBC News)

The February edition of Neurosurgery reports that animal experiments in brain-injured rats have shown that stem cells injected via the carotid artery travel directly to the brain, greatly enhancing functional recovery. (Medical News Today)

The Obama administration is increasing spending on Alzheimer’s research — planning to surpass half a billion dollars next year — as part of a quest to find effective treatments for the brain-destroying disease by 2025. (Washington Post)

Directed energy weapons that use wave beams to cause pain, and electrical brain stimulation that boosts a soldier’s combat ability - it may sound like science fiction warfare, but experts say advances in neuroscience mean it’s on the horizon. (Reuters)