The Society for Neuroscience named BCS and Picower Professor Mark Bear as a co-recipient of the 2013 Julius Axelrod Prize, for his research advancing understanding of how the brain changes with experience by altering the strength of connections among neurons. The prize honors scientists with distinguished achievements in the broad field of neuropharmacology or a related area and exemplary efforts in mentoring young scientists.

Alzheimer's disease, the appalling and baffling degenerative brain illness that plagues many elderly people, may be caused by several distinct mechanisms driven by various genetic and lifestyle factors, says Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience. To fully understand such conditions, she says, we must study the aging brain as a system rather than focusing on one or two types of ailing cells. Her work has led to a surprising approach to treat Alzheimer's, by increasing the strength of a certain frequency of our brainwaves. This noninvasive method has done well in early clinical trials carried out both by MIT and a startup firm co-founded by Tsai.

The human eye can perceive about 1 million colors, but languages have far fewer words to describe those colors. The way that a language divides up color space can be influenced by contact with other languages, according to a new MIT study. Among members of the Tsimane’ society, who live in a remote part of the Bolivian Amazon rainforest, the researchers found that those who had learned Spanish as a second language began to classify colors into more words, making color distinctions that are not commonly used by Tsimane’ who are monolingual. “Learning a second language enables you to understand these concepts that you didn’t have in your first language,” says BCS professor Edward Gibson, the senior author of the study.