New Delhi: For a long time, astrocytes, the star-shaped cells in the nervous system, were considered the “wallflowers” of neuroscience, with their role relegated to only supporting and protecting ...

When the stomach is full, how does the brain know to stop eating? Scientists long assumed the answer lies mainly with neurons, the brain's primary signaling cells. But a new study published in the ...

New experiments reveal how astrocytes tune neuronal activity to modulate our mental and emotional states. The results suggest that neuron-only brain models, such as connectomes, leave out a crucial ...

Brain cells named for stars are finally getting their time to shine. Three distinct studies, published May 15 in Science, show that astrocytes, once thought of as support cells, powerfully shape how ...

Astrocytes, the predominant glial population in the human central nervous system, play crucial roles in neuroprotection, immunity, and homeostasis. However, when exposed to certain neuroinflammatory ...

“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 ...

Picture a star-shaped cell in the brain, stretching its spindly arms out to cradle the neurons around it. That's an astrocyte, and for a long time, scientists thought its job was caretaking the brain, ...

Astrocytes — named for their star-like shape — are a type of brain cell as abundant as neurons in the central nervous system, but little is known about their role in brain health and disease. Many ...