The Ataxia Community Comes Together in Orlando April 9–11, 2026 for the Annual Ataxia Conference! LEARN MORE
In speech-language pathology, the term resonance refers to nasality in speech. In other words, how nasal a person’s speech sounds. When someone is congested, they likely sound hyponasal, or not nasal enough. This is because the congestion is blocking sound from being resonated in the nasal cavity, or the nose. Read More…
The Immune System of the Brain Though the brain is a powerful computational tool, it is also a sensitive and delicate organ. For this reason, it requires specialized protection. This includes the skull, the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord, and the blood-brain barrier (BBB), which is a specialized Read More…
Disease-relevant research is often first conducted in animal models such as mice. This is done to investigate the underlying disease mechanisms and to test promising treatment strategies before moving into clinical studies. The parallel rod floor test is an assay to measure motor coordination difficulties in mice. In the case Read More…
Speech intelligibility refers to how many words can be correctly understood by a listener. For example, if someone says the phrase, “My name is John,” and a listener hears, “My name is Tom,” then the listener correctly understood 75% of the speech. In a formal speech evaluation, the percentage of Read More…
Chorea is a neurological disorder characterized by involuntary, unusual, and abrupt movements of the body that appear to be out of control and without purpose. The word “chorea” is originated from the Greek word “choreia,” which means “dance”, accurately depicting the jerky, dance-like movements shown by people suffering from this Read More…
Mass spectrometry, also known as “mass spec”, is a very useful analytical tool that is often used in science to determine the masses of different compounds in a sample. Mass spec has a variety of applications but frequently in biological sciences. It is used to determine the identity and abundance Read More…
Speech not only consists of the words we say, but how we say them. That “how” is what is called prosody: the pitch, loudness, and timing of speech. The term prosody comes from the Greek word prosōidia meaning “song” or “melody.” Therefore, prosody is often viewed as the melody of speech. Read More…
Oligodendrocytes are a type of brain cell that play a crucial role in insulating neurons to facilitate efficient transmission of electrical signals. Similar to the rubber coating on cords, oligodendrocytes wrap around axons with a cholesterol-rich myelin structure, which speeds up the transmission of electrical impulses. Each oligodendrocyte can myelinate Read More…
The inferior olive is a beautifully squiggly structure found in the brainstem. The brainstem connects the spinal cord to the brain and contains three major regions: the midbrain, pons, and medulla. Within the medulla, there is an inferior olivary nucleus, or inferior olive, on each side. These inferior olives are Read More…
Meta-analysis refers to a research process. You might think of it as a ‘Cliff’s Notes’ summary that compiles, evaluates, and synthesizes all of the individual research reports that were completed by the others. Using statistics, a meta-analysis synthesizes the findings of multiple similar scientific studies to produce an overall result. Read More…
