UC Santa Cruz research innovations and academic programs advance brain and mental health.

Brain organoids can be a good step forward, assuming they are grown from induced human pluripotent stem cells. That allows us to sidestep ethical concerns about the use of human embryos, thereby ...

Human evolution is often told as a tidy story of adaptation, yet some of our most familiar body parts still defy straightforward explanation. From the jut of the human chin to the curve of the outer ...

A biologist with the US government’s research and development arm is working on a radical new approach to anti-aging treatments: replacing parts of the human brain with cloned tissues. Created in 2022 ...

Researchers have used a new human reference genome, which includes many duplicated and repeat sequences left out of the original human genome draft, to identify genes that make the human brain ...

Humans don’t just recognize each other’s voices—our brains also light up for the calls of chimpanzees, hinting at ancient communication roots shared with our closest primate relatives. Researchers ...

If this presidential cycle has unified us on anything, it might be that cognitive decline is a hard thing to talk about. Both President Biden and former President Trump face plenty of criticism, ...