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New study has determined that the total number of neurons, not an enlarged prefrontal region, differentiates the human brain from those of other primates.

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Researchers from Vanderbilt University, Nissan North America and Georgia Institute of Technology have teamed up to apply nanotechnology to fuel cells to give them more oomph.

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A Vanderbilt University study found that LGBTQ students attending high schools with gay-straight alliances reported significantly fewer incidences of bullying based on sexual orientation or gender expression and had a greater sense of personal safety compared to students in schools without GSAs.

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A new regulatory solution to protect traders and investors is needed in the age of Dark Pools, a prevalent and different kind of exchange.

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Fecal transplants are increasingly being used to treat certain human illnesses and there is a major upsurge in animal experiments involving fecal material.

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A Vanderbilt research team has identified some of the methods that allow mutant mitochondrial DNA to act selfishly by circumventing the mechanisms that cells use to regulate mitochondrial activity.

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Psychiatrists nearly always responded with prescriptions for antidepressants when clients complained of bad marriages, according to a new study spanning 20 years at a Midwestern medical center. The assumption that people struggling with their marriages or other domestic issues are suffering from depression is not supported by the way depression is defined medically.

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Mel Ziegler devoted extensive time and travel to collecting weathered and worn U.S. flags from all 50 states for his 'Flag Exchange' installation.

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Stimulating the brain with a mild electrical current can temporarily sharpen vision without glasses or contacts, Vanderbilt University researchers have found.

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Would you believe that Hillary Clinton’s supporters are more liberal than those of Bernie Sanders? How about this? In the voting booth, election-year droughts and floods have a major impact on whether an incumbent or challenger wins an election. And finally: People don’t choose a candidate because they agree with them on the issues.

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Poor moms who return to the workforce after a period of unemployment suffer significantly higher rates of depression, anxiety and physical symptoms of stress when they don’t have access to decent childcare, according to Vanderbilt sociology graduate student Anna Jacobs.

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State courts handle more than 90 percent of trials and judicial business issues that impact Americans the most—safety, health, finances and family. In the last decade alone roughly a billion cases have gone through the state judicial system. A first-of-its-kind database of more than 10,000 current state judges shows when it comes to race, gender and ethnicity, these courts are not representative of the people they serve.

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Millennials, those who were born in the 1980’s and 1990’s—have emerged as the largest age cohort in today’s U.S. workforce, bringing digital savvy and an ‘always-on’ mentality to most jobs. Yet, millennials and Generation Z, who were born in the late 1990’s and 2000’s, are also challenging traditional employers with their professional restlessness and increased need for feedback and mentoring.

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The first study to systematically measure the number of neurons in the brains of birds has found that they have significantly more neurons packed into their small brains than are stuffed into mammalian and even primate brains of the same mass.

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Questions are cropping up about the Summer Games of the XXXI Olympiad, scheduled for Aug. 5 to 21 in Rio de Janeiro. More than 100 doctors, researchers and health experts signed an open letter published June 3 urging the World Health Organization to either move the summer games from Rio de Janeiro or to delay them, saying they are concerned about the Zika virus’ potential impact on global health.

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Vanderbilt biologist Kenneth Catania has accidentally discovered that can electric eels make leaping attacks that dramatically increase the strength of the electric shocks they deliver and, in so doing, has confirmed a 200-year-old observation by famous 19th century explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.

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Ethnocentrism is carrying Donald Trump to the Republican nomination for president, although it may condemn him to defeat in the November election, says Vanderbilt University political scientist Cindy D. Kam. Ethnocentrism is the tendency to partition the human world into in-groups and out-groups: into “us” against “them.” These groups might be based on nationality, race-ethnicity, or religion, or any other salient social category.

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A new study provides the first-ever evidence that women who reveal personal family-related information that could explain gaps in their resume (like staying home to raise a child) dramatically raise their chances of getting hired compared to a women who focus on their resume credentials alone.

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The results of a new study make it far less likely that KIC 8462852, popularly known as Tabby’s star, is the home of industrious aliens who are gradually enclosing it in a vast shell called a Dyson sphere.

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Complicated new regulations added to complicated old regulations won’t protect the United States’ financial system from frightening crashes like that experienced in 2008, says a Vanderbilt professor who helped the Obama administration pull the financial sector out of that morass. Instead, “a much simpler and more surgical approach is needed,” said Morgan Ricks of Vanderbilt Law School, author of The Money Problem: Rethinking Financial Regulation (The University of Chicago Press).

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In an election season that will shatter the record for money spent on a presidential campaign, political scientists at Vanderbilt and UCLA have created SpotCheck, a new approach for assessing political ads using internet-based surveys. “We now can present evidence as opposed to speculation about the impact of a political spot,” says John Geer, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt, who is partnering with Professor of Political Science Lynn Vavreck at UCLA on this new approach.

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Rio is a California sea lion who can solve IQ tests that many people have trouble passing. In fact, she is so smart that scientists at the Long Marine Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz designed a series of tests that prove she is the first animal besides humans that can use basic logic (If A=B and B=C then A=C).

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An anonymous donor has pledged $5,000,000 to establish the Dean’s Chair in Engineering at Vanderbilt University’s School of Engineering, Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos announced at the school’s annual distinguished alumni celebration dinner April 14.

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Presidential candidate Donald Trump may be inadvertently tapping into a phenomenon that is energizing U.S. Latinos against him when he talks of sending illegal immigrants home and building a wall blocking off Mexico. Recent news reports have noted a surge of Latinos registering to vote with the intent to vote against Trump because of his negative statements about their ethnic group. These results are consistent with a 2015 study by Efrén Pérez of Vanderbilt University, Ricochet: How Elite Discourse Politicizes Racial and Ethnic Identities. The study predicted that when Latinos who strongly identify with their ethnic group perceive it is being disparaged, they respond by becoming more politically engaged and motivated to register and vote.

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given clearance to market and sell the powered lower-limb exoskeleton created by a team of Vanderbilt engineers and commercialized by the Parker Hannifin Corporation for both clinical and personal use in the United States.

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When Latinos hear tough talk about immigrants and immigration from politicians, their level of political trust is reduced and they start identifying more with their ethnic group than other qualities such as class or religion.

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Scientists from Vanderbilt and George Washington universities have worked out a way to make electric vehicles not just carbon neutral, but carbon negative by demonstrating how the graphite electrodes used in the lithium-ion batteries can be replaced with carbon recovered from the atmosphere.

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Astronomers have discovered an unnamed pair of stars that sets a new record for both the longest duration stellar eclipse (3.5 years) and longest period between eclipses (69 years) in a binary system.

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Many core political issues facing health and healthcare in the United States are being shaped and played out in the U.S. South, from resistance to the Affordable Care Act and gun control to the struggle for health justice for lower income and minority populations.

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Vanderbilt University Medical Center nephrologist and associate professor of medicine Dr. William H. Fissell IV, is making major progress on a first-of-its kind device to free kidney patients from dialysis. He is building an implantable artificial kidney with microchip filters and living kidney cells that will be powered by a patient’s own heart.

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Vanderbilt engineers have modified the cotton candy machine to create complex microfluidic networks that mimic the capillary system in living tissue and have demonstrated that these networks can keep cells alive and functioning in an artificial three-dimensional matrix.

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By obstructing most legislation President Obama sends its way, Congress has weakened rather than exercised its power, says a Vanderbilt University political expert.

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Bad feelings about each other rather than competing ideologies keep Republicans and Democrats from encouraging their representatives to compromise and get things done, say the authors of a new book about why Washington won’t work.

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A Vanderbilt University professor has researched true stories of people and their dogs—some tender and some disturbing—to make a compelling case for re-thinking our treatment of both.

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A new meta-analysis has found that the beneficial effects of using psychological therapy to treat the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome are not only short term but are also long lasting.

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Meet TrCel7a (pronounced tee-are-cell-seven-a). TrCel7a is a cellulase: a special enzyme that breaks down cellulose, the most plentiful natural polymer on the planet. The enzyme works like a microscopic wood chipper. It swallows strands of tightly bound cellulose and breaks them down into simple sugars. It works very slowly but, like a truck operating at a very low gear, it is extremely difficult to stop once it gets going.

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While some people today feel driven to purchase the latest smartphone or other technology, historian Michael Bess worries how near-future generations will deal with innovations ranging from pills that boost intelligence to bioengineered body parts for all ages.

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A handful of opportunistic states are luring banking business to their economies with relaxed trust fund rules more favorable and flexible for wealthy customers seeking to safeguard their assets for future generations.

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A new $3.5 million award from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy will support Vanderbilt University School of Engineering researchers’ efforts to create software that can control the Smart Grid – a decentralized power system that is more efficient, sustainable and reliable than America’s current electrical power delivery.

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The grizzled asteroid miner is a stock character in science fiction. Now, a couple of recent events – one legal and the other technological – have brought asteroid mining a step closer to reality. The legal step was taken when the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee passed a bill titled H.R. 2262—SPACE Act of 2015.

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Vanderbilt engineers have discovered that adding quantum dots made from fool's gold to the electrodes of standard lithium batteries can substantially boost their performance.

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An interdisciplinary team of biologists and medical researchers have created a new platform, which they call GEneSTATION specifically designed to leverage the growing knowledge of human genomics and evolution to advance scientific understanding of human pregnancy and translate it into new treatments for the problems that occur when this complex process goes awry.