A high-fat diet appears to make you dumber, but exercise makes you smarter. At least if you’re a rat. That’s what researchers at the University of Minnesota and the VA Medical Center found, according ...

See the rest of Slate’s Fitness Issue. A few years ago, a team of Iranian scientists in the city of Isfahan put about two dozen male rats on a strict exercise program: The animals were forced to run ...

Exercise is known to improve mood and memory, but the biological pathways connecting physical activity to brain function remain not entirely understood. In a new study published in Brain Medicine, ...

Something happens when a rat starts running. Not just the obvious things, the faster heart, the warming muscles, the rhythmic percussion of paws against the wheel. Something quieter. Something that ...

Exercise may not erase old memories, as some studies in animals have previously suggested. Running on an exercise wheel doesn’t make rats forget previous trips through an underwater maze, Ashok Shetty ...