Dyani Lewis Human brain cells engineered to evade detection by the immune system have successfully restored muscle control in a rat model of Parkinson’s disease1. The study is a step towards the development of a ‘universal’ cell line that can be transplanted into anyone, to cure a raft of diseases without the need for anti-rejection drugs. “It’s a one-cell-fits-all proposal,” says Clare Parish, a stem-cell biologist at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Melbourne, Australia, and a co-author of the study. The work, published today in Cell Stem Cell, builds on earlier efforts to ‘cloak’ cells from the immune system. Cloaking is a key goal for cell-replacement therapies being tested for conditions ranging from type 2 diabetes and Parkinson’s disease to heart failure and blindness. It would eliminate the need for immunosuppressant drugs, which increase the risk of infection and cancer, and cause tissue damage that ultimately shortens the life of a recipient. To help cells to evade the immune system, the researchers created a cell line with eight genes altered to increase their activity so they acted as an immune invisibility cloak. All of the genes have been shown to assist the placenta and cancer cells in naturally evading immune surveillance. For example, mouse embryonic stem cells engineered with the same set of genes were able to evade detection when transplanted into mice2. Instead of mouse embryonic cells, Parish and her team used human pluripotent stem cells, which can develop into most types of cell found in the body. After being engineered with the cloaking genes, the cells differentiated into nerve cells suitable for treating Parkinson’s disease. The researchers injected the neurons into mice whose immune systems had been replaced with human immune cells, and the neurons were not rejected, suggesting that they were able to evade detection. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 29742 - Posted: 04.12.2025

By Gayoung Lee edited by Allison Parshall Crows sometimes have a bad rap: they’re said to be loud and disruptive, and myths surrounding the birds tend to link them to death or misfortune. But crows deserve more love and charity, says Andreas Nieder, a neurophysiologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. They not only can be incredibly cute, cuddly and social but also are extremely smart—especially when it comes to geometry, as Nieder has found. In a paper published on Friday in Science Advances, Nieder and his colleagues report that crows display an impressive aptitude at distinguishing shapes by using geometric irregularities as a cognitive cue. These crows could even discern quite subtle differences. For the experiment, the crows perched in front of a digital screen that, almost like a video game, displayed progressively more complex combinations of shapes. First, the crows were taught to peck at a certain shape for a reward. Then they were presented with that same shape among five others—for example, one star shape placed among five moon shapes—and were rewarded if they correctly picked the "outlier." “Initially [the outlier] was very obvious,” Nieder says. But once the crows appeared to have familiarized themselves with how the “game” worked, Nieder and his team introduced more similar quadrilateral shapes to see if the crows would still be able to identify outliers. “And they could tell us, for instance, if they saw a figure that was just not a square, slightly skewed, among all the other squares,” Nieder says. “They really could do this spontaneously [and] discriminate the outlier shapes based on the geometric differences without us needing them to train them additionally.” Even when the researchers stopped rewarding them with treats, the crows continued to peck the outliers. © 2024 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 29741 - Posted: 04.12.2025

By Yasemin Saplakoglu Humans tend to put our own intelligence on a pedestal. Our brains can do math, employ logic, explore abstractions and think critically. But we can’t claim a monopoly on thought. Among a variety of nonhuman species known to display intelligent behavior, birds have been shown time and again to have advanced cognitive abilities. Ravens plan (opens a new tab) for the future, crows count and use tools (opens a new tab), cockatoos open and pillage (opens a new tab) booby-trapped garbage cans, and chickadees keep track (opens a new tab) of tens of thousands of seeds cached across a landscape. Notably, birds achieve such feats with brains that look completely different from ours: They’re smaller and lack the highly organized structures that scientists associate with mammalian intelligence. “A bird with a 10-gram brain is doing pretty much the same as a chimp with a 400-gram brain,” said Onur Güntürkün (opens a new tab), who studies brain structures at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. “How is it possible?” Researchers have long debated about the relationship between avian and mammalian intelligences. One possibility is that intelligence in vertebrates — animals with backbones, including mammals and birds — evolved once. In that case, both groups would have inherited the complex neural pathways that support cognition from a common ancestor: a lizardlike creature that lived 320 million years ago, when Earth’s continents were squished into one landmass. The other possibility is that the kinds of neural circuits that support vertebrate intelligence evolved independently in birds and mammals. It’s hard to track down which path evolution took, given that any trace of the ancient ancestor’s actual brain vanished in a geological blink. So biologists have taken other approaches — such as comparing brain structures in adult and developing animals today — to piece together how this kind of neurobiological complexity might have emerged. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 29738 - Posted: 04.09.2025

Avram Holmes. Human thought and behavior emerge through complex and reciprocal interactions that link microscale molecular and cellular processes with macroscale functional patterns. Functional MRI (fMRI), one of the most common methods for studying the human brain, detects these latter patterns through the “blood oxygen level dependent,” or BOLD, signal, a composite measure of both neural and vascular signals that reflects an indirect measure of brain activity. Despite an enormous investment by scientific funders and the research community in the use of fMRI, though, researchers still don’t fully understand the underlying mechanisms that drive individual or population-level differences measured via in-vivo brain imaging, which limits our ability to interpret those data. For fMRI to meaningfully contribute to progress in neuroscience, we need to develop research programs that link phenomena across levels, from genes and molecules to cells, circuits, networks and behavior. Without a concerted effort in this direction, fMRI will remain a methodological spandrel, a byproduct of technological development rather than a tool explicitly designed to reveal neural mechanisms, generating isolated datapoints that are left unintegrated with broader scientific theory or progress. Recently, the human functional neuroimaging community has turned a critical eye toward its own methods and findings. These debates have led to field-wide initiatives calling for larger and more diverse study samples, better phenotypic reliability and findings that generalize across populations. But researchers have put relatively little emphasis on contextualizing the resulting work across levels of analysis or on deciphering the biological mechanism that may underpin changes to the BOLD signal across groups and individual people or over the lifespan. Appeals to better integrate the different levels of neuroscience are not new. But despite persuasive arguments, fMRI researchers have largely remained scientifically siloed, isolated by a nearly ubiquitous focus on a single level of analysis and a rigid adherence to a select set of imaging methods. Our work is typically presented inside of field-specific echo chambers—departmental or group seminars, topic-specific journals and society meetings—where our methodological and analytic choices go unchallenged. What progress can we expect to make if we remain isolated from other fields of study? © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29735 - Posted: 04.09.2025

is a psychologist, writer and professor in the history and philosophy of science programme at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference (2010), Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society (2017) and Patriarchy Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality – and Why Men Still Win at Work (2025). She lives in Melbourne, Australia. Carole Hooven is a human evolutionary biologist with a focus on behavioural endocrinology. She is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, an associate in Harvard’s Department of Psychology, and the author of T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us (2021). She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Does biology determine destiny, or is society the dominant cause of masculine and feminine traits? In this spirited exchange, the psychologist Cordelia Fine and the evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven unpack the complex relationship between testosterone and human behaviour. Fine emphasises variability, flexibility and context – seeing gender as shaped by social forces as much as it is by hormones. By contrast, Hooven stresses consistent patterns; while acknowledging the influence of culture and the differences between individuals, she maintains that biology explains why certain sex-linked behaviours persist across cultures. © Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012-2025.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 29733 - Posted: 04.09.2025

By Smriti Mallapaty Neuroscientists have observed for the first time how structures deep in the brain are activated when the brain becomes aware of its own thoughts, known as conscious perception1. The brain is constantly bombarded with sights, sounds and other stimuli, but people are only ever aware of a sliver of the world around them — the taste of a piece of chocolate or the sound of someone’s voice, for example. Researchers have long known that the outer layer of the brain, called the cerebral cortex, plays a part in this experience of being aware of specific thoughts. The involvement of deeper brain structures has been much harder to elucidate, because they can be accessed only with invasive surgery. Designing experiments to test the concept in animals is also tricky. But studying these regions would allow researchers to broaden their theories of consciousness beyond the brain’s outer wrapping, say researchers. “The field of consciousness studies has evoked a lot of criticism and scepticism because this is a phenomenon that is so hard to study,” says Liad Mudrik, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University in Israel. But scientists have increasingly been using systematic and rigorous methods to investigate consciousness, she says. Aware or not In a study published in Science today1, Mingsha Zhang, a neuroscientist at Beijing Normal University, focused on the thalamus. This region at the centre of the brain is involved in processing sensory information and working memory, and is thought to have a role in conscious perception. Participants were already undergoing therapy for severe and persistent headaches, for which they had thin electrodes injected deep into their brains. This allowed Zhang and his colleagues to study their brain signals and measure conscious awareness. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 29731 - Posted: 04.05.2025

By Carl Zimmer After listening to hundreds of hours of ape calls, a team of scientists say they have detected a hallmark of human language: the ability to put together strings of sounds to create new meanings. The provocative finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, drew praise from some scholars and skepticism from others. Federica Amici, a primatologist at the University of Leipzig in Germany, said that the study helped place the roots of language even further back in time, to millions of years before the emergence of our species. “Differences between humans and other primates, including in communication, are far less distinct and well-defined than we have long assumed,” Dr. Amici said. But other researchers said that the study, which had been conducted on bonobos, close relatives of chimpanzees, had little to reveal about how we use words. “The present findings don’t tell us anything about the evolution of language,” said Johan Bolhuis, a neurobiologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Many species can communicate with sounds. But when an animal makes a sound, it typically means just one thing. Monkeys, for instance, can make one warning call in reference to a leopard and a different one for an incoming eagle flying. In contrast, we humans can string words together in ways that combine their individual meanings into something new. Suppose I say, “I am a bad dancer.” When I combine the words “bad” and “dancer,” I no longer mean them independently; I’m not saying, “I am a bad person who also happens to dance.” Instead, I mean that I don’t dance well. Linguists call this compositionality, and have long considered it an essential ingredient of language. “It’s the force behind language’s creativity and productivity,” said Simon Townsend, a comparative psychologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. “Theoretically, you can come up with any phrase that has never been uttered before.” © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 29730 - Posted: 04.05.2025

By Mitch Leslie Unlike the combative immune cells that protect us from pathogens, regulatory T cells (Tregs) are nurturers. They salve inflammation, promote healing of injured tissue, and rein in immune attacks to curb self-inflicted damage. Now, a study of mice reported today in Science suggests some Tregs also act on nerve cells to quell a specific type of pain—but only in females. Why only female rodents seem to benefit remains unclear, but researchers hope they might someday enlist these Tregs to address pain conditions, many of which disproportionately affect women. “It’s a very impressive paper,” says neuroscientist Gila Moalem-Taylor of the University of New South Wales Sydney, who wasn’t connected to the research. The study “uses elegant, sophisticated methods to conclusively demonstrate the mechanisms” by which the cells reduce one kind of sensitivity to pain, she says. Tregs, a type of white blood cell, are best known for their role in keeping the immune system in balance and preventing autoimmunity. But researchers have recently found that they also help control pain. For example, a 2021 study by neuroscientist Allan Basbaum of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and colleagues showed that Tregs reduce mice’s sensitivity to pain triggered by other immune cells that reside in the brain and spinal cord. That research and additional work suggested Tregs influence pain by targeting various immune cells and tamping down inflammation. But these studies left open the possibility that Tregs might also directly affect pain-sensing nerve cells. Basbaum, his postdoc Élora Midavaine, UCSF dermatologist Sakeen Kashem, and their colleagues launched the new study to nail down how the regulatory cells curb pain. They focused on Tregs that dwell in the meninges—the membranes that sheathe the brain and spinal cord—and in similar nearby membranes. The cells are much more abundant in these structures than elsewhere in the nervous system. To find out whether the cells affect pain perception, the scientists used genetically engineered mice whose Tregs are vulnerable to a toxin produced by the bacteria that cause diphtheria. Injecting this toxin into the meninges in the lower back killed about 90% of the Tregs in the membranes without harming Tregs in the rest of the body.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Glia
Link ID: 29729 - Posted: 04.05.2025

By Nathan H. Lents For generations, anthropologists have argued whether humans are evolved for monogamy or some other mating system, such as polygyny, polyandry, or promiscuity. But any exploration of monogamy must begin with a bifurcation of the concept into two completely different phenomena: social monogamy and sexual monogamy. WHAT I LEFT OUT is a recurring feature in which book authors are invited to share anecdotes and narratives that, for whatever reason, did not make it into their final manuscripts. In this installment, author Nathan H. Lents, professor of biology at John Jay College, shares a story that didn’t make it into his recent book “The Sexual Evolution: How 500 Million Years of Sex, Gender, and Mating Shape Modern Relationships” (Mariner Books). Sexual monogamy is just what it sounds like: The restriction of sexual intercourse to within a bonded pair. Social monogamy, also known as economic monogamy, describes the bonding itself, a strong, neurohormone-driven attachment between two adults that facilitates food and territory sharing, to the exclusion of others, for at least one breeding season, and generally purposed towards raising offspring. Because these two aspects of monogamy are so often enjoined among humans, they are considered two sides of the same coin. But, as it turns out, they are entirely separable among animals. In fact, social monogamy is extremely common in birds and somewhat common in mammals, while sexual monogamy is vanishingly rare among any species. Because of the unique way their embryos develop — externally but with constant warmth required — birds are the real stars of monogamy and have thus borne the brunt of its misconceptions. The marriage (if you’ll pardon the pun) of two very different behaviors into one concept is — and always was — unsupported by evidence from the natural world. Monogamy, as it is commonly understood, was the invention of anthropomorphic bias. Naturalists in the 19th and 20th centuries documented how pairs of various bird species dutifully toiled together building a nest, protecting the eggs, mutually feeding each other and their offspring, before eventually flying off into the sunset together. These prim and proper Victorians didn’t have to squint very hard to see a perfect model in nature of what they valued most in human society — lifelong and sexually exclusive marriage.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 29728 - Posted: 04.05.2025

By Adam Nossiter Ralph Holloway, an anthropologist who pioneered the idea that changes in brain structure, and not just size, were critical in the evolution of humans, died on March 12 at his home in Manhattan. He was 90. His death was announced by Columbia University’s anthropology department, where he taught for nearly 50 years. Mr. Holloway’s contrarian idea was that it wasn’t necessarily the big brains of humans that distinguished them from apes or primitive ancestors. Rather, it was the way human brains were organized. Brains from several million years ago don’t exist. But Dr. Holloway’s singular focus on casts of the interiors of skull fossils, which he usually made out of latex, allowed him to override this hurdle. He “compulsively collected” information from these casts, he wrote in a 2008 paper. Crucially, they offered a representation of the brain’s exterior edges, which allowed scientists to get a sense of the brain’s structure. Using a so-called endocast, Dr. Holloway was able to establish conclusively, for instance, that a famous and controversial two-million-year-old hominid fossil skull from a South Africa limestone quarry, known as the Taung child, belonged to one of mankind’s distant ancestors. The Taung child’s brain was small, leading many to doubt the conclusion of Raymond Dart, the anatomist who discovered it in the 1920s, that it was a human ancestor. In 1969, Dr. Holloway took his family to South Africa to meet the elderly Dr. Dart, to examine the natural limestone endocast that the Taung child’s positioning in the quarry had created and to make an endocast of his own. “I became convinced that the Taung endocast needed independent study,” he wrote in 2008, in order to “find an objective method(s) for deciding whether the cortex was reorganized as Dart had previously claimed,” so many years before. Dr. Holloway focused on a crescent-shaped furrow, called the lunate sulcus, at the back of the endocast. In his view, it was positioned like a human’s, which suggested to him that Dr. Dart had been right all along. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 29727 - Posted: 04.05.2025

Jon Hamilton New tests of blood and spinal fluid could help doctors quickly identify patients who would most benefit from treatment. New tests of blood and spinal fluid could help doctors quickly identify patients who would most benefit from treatment. Andrew Brookes/Getty Images When doctors suspect Alzheimer's, they can order a blood test to learn whether a patient's brain contains the sticky amyloid plaques that are a hallmark of the disease. But the results of that test won't tell the whole story, says Dr. Randall Bateman, a neurology professor at Washington University in St. Louis. "People can have a head full of amyloid, but no dementia or memory loss," Bateman says. So he and a team of scientists have developed a new blood test that can show whether Alzheimer's has actually begun to affect a person's thinking and memory. It joins another new test, this one of spinal fluid, that can predict whether the brain changes associated with Alzheimer's are likely to affect cognitive function. "It's a strong indicator of memory impairment," says Tony Wyss-Coray, a neurology professor at Stanford University. Both tests, described in the journal Nature Medicine, could help doctors identify patients who are likely to benefit from drugs that can clear the brain of amyloid plaques. Both were developed with funding from the National Institutes of Health. © 2025 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 29725 - Posted: 04.02.2025

By Sergiu P. Pasca The unbearable inaccessibility of the human brain has been a major barrier to understanding both how the human nervous system assembles itself and how psychiatric and neurological disorders emerge. But thanks to new advances, it is becoming possible to access functional aspects of human brain development and function that were previously out of reach. This progress has been driven primarily by advances in stem cell technologies, which make it possible to recapitulate developmental processes outside the human body. The journey began decades ago with the ability to grow stem cells in a dish, followed by the use of developmental signals to guide them into becoming neural cells. The field was truly catalyzed by the discovery of cell reprogramming and the democratization of stem cell technologies it enabled. Starting more than 15 years ago, my team and others began creating neurons from patients—initially rather inefficiently, but then with increasing ease as culture systems became more sophisticated. For example, cortical neurons derived from people with Timothy syndrome—a genetic form of autism and epilepsy caused by a mutation in a calcium channel present in excitable cells—revealed calcium deficits following depolarization. Some of these defects became more apparent when moving beyond traditional 2D preparations, such as when looking at the morphology of human neurons. For more than a decade, we and others have developed methods for growing these cells into more complex 3D structures, known as organoids, that mimic some of the structure and function of regions of the nervous system, offering a new window into human neurobiology and disease. Giving cells this third dimension of freedom unleashes self-organization: Mirroring in-vivo development, organoids generate diverse neural and glial cell types, starting from radial glia to intermediate progenitors, deep and superficial layer neurons and then astrocytes. These organoids can be maintained in vitro for years. Fascinatingly, developmental timing in organoids is largely preserved. For example, neurons maintained in culture for about nine months can transition to a postnatal state simply by surviving long enough in the dish. This observation in organoids offers a fundamental insight into development: Brain cells have an intrinsic, species-specific developmental “timer.” © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29724 - Posted: 04.02.2025

By Paula Span Joan Presky worries about dementia. Her mother lived with Alzheimer’s disease for 14 years, the last seven in a memory-care residence, and her maternal grandfather developed dementia, too. “I’m 100 percent convinced that this is in my future,” said Ms. Presky, 70, a retired attorney in Thornton, Colo. Last year, she spent almost a full day with a neuropsychologist, undergoing an extensive evaluation. The results indicated that her short-term memory was fine — which she found “shocking and comforting” — and that she tested average or above in every cognitive category but one. She’s not reassured. “I saw what Alzheimer’s was like,” she said of her mother’s long decline. “The memory of what she went through is profound for me.” The prospect of dementia, which encompasses Alzheimer’s disease and a number of other cognitive disorders, so frightens Americans that a recent study projecting steep increases in cases over the next three decades drew enormous public attention. The researchers’ findings, published in January in Nature Medicine, even showed up as a joke on the Weekend Update segment of “Saturday Night Live.” “Dementia is a devastating condition, and it’s very much related to the oldest ages,” said Dr. Josef Coresh, director of the Optimal Aging Institute at NYU Langone Health and the senior author of the study. “The globe is getting older.” Now the findings are being challenged by other dementia researchers who say that while increases are coming, they will be far smaller than Dr. Coresh and his co-authors predicted. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 29713 - Posted: 03.22.2025

By Laura Sanders There are countless metaphors for memory. It’s a leaky bucket, a steel trap, a file cabinet, words written in sand. But one of the most evocative — and neuroscientifically descriptive — invokes Lego bricks. A memory is like a Lego tower. It’s built from the ground up, then broken down, put away in bins and rebuilt in a slightly different form each time it’s taken out. This metaphor is beautifully articulated by psychologists Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy in their new book, Memory Lane. Perhaps the comparison speaks to me because I have watched my kids create elaborate villages of Lego bricks, only to be dismantled, put away (after much nagging) and reconstructed, always with a similar overall structure but with minor and occasionally major changes. These villages’ blueprints are largely stable, but also fluid and flexible, subject to the material whims of the builders at any point in time. Memory works this way, too, Greene and Murphy propose. Imagine your own memory lane as a series of buildings, modified in ways both small and big each time you call them to mind. “As we walk down Memory Lane, the buildings we pass — our memories of individual events — are under constant reconstruction,” Greene and Murphy write. In accessible prose, the book covers a lot of ground, from how we form memories to how delicate those memories really are. Readers may find it interesting (or perhaps upsetting) to learn how bad we all are at remembering why we did something, from trivial choices, like buying an album, to consequential ones, such as a yes or no vote on an abortion referendum. People change their reasoning — or at least, their memories of their reasoning — on these sorts of events all the time. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29712 - Posted: 03.22.2025

Nicola Davis Science correspondent Cat owners are being asked share their pet’s quirky traits and even post researchers their fur in an effort to shed light on how cats’ health and behaviour are influenced by their genetics. The scientists behind the project, Darwin’s Cats, are hoping to enrol 100,000 felines, from pedigrees to moggies, with the DNA of 5,000 cats expected to be sequenced in the next year. The team say the goal is to produce the world’s largest feline genetic database. “Unlike most existing databases, which tend to focus on specific breeds or veterinary applications, Darwin’s Cats is building a diverse, large-scale dataset that includes pet cats, strays and mixed breeds from all walks of life,” said Dr Elinor Karlsson, the chief scientist at the US nonprofit organisation Darwin’s Ark, director of the vertebrate genomics group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and associate professor at the UMass Chan medical school. “It’s important to note, this is an open data project, so we will share the data with other scientists as the dataset grows,” she added. The project follows on the heels of Darwin’s Dogs, a similar endeavour that has shed light on aspects of canine behaviour, disease and the genetic origins of modern breeds. Darwin’s Cats was launched in mid-2024 and already has more than 3,000 cats enrolled, although not all have submitted fur samples. Participants from all parts of the world are asked to complete a number of free surveys about their pet’s physical traits, behaviour, environment, and health. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29708 - Posted: 03.19.2025

By Evan Bush, Aria Bendix and Denise Chow “This is simply the end.” That was the five-word message that Rick Huganir, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, received from a colleague just before 6 p.m. two Fridays ago, with news that would send a wave of panic through the scientific community. When Huganir clicked on the link in the email, from fellow JHU neuroscientist Alex Kolodkin, he saw a new National Institutes of Health policy designed to slash federal spending on the indirect costs that keep universities and research institutes operating, including for new equipment, maintenance, utilities and support staff. “Am I reading this right 15%??” Huganir wrote back in disbelief, suddenly worried the cut could stall 25 years of work. In 1998, Huganir discovered a gene called SYNGAP1. About 1% of all children with intellectual disabilities have a mutation of the gene. He’s working to develop drugs to treat these children, who often have learning differences, seizures and sleep problems. He said his research is almost entirely reliant on NIH grants. The search for a cure for these rare disorders is a race against time, because researchers think treatment will be most effective if administered when patients are children. “We’re developing therapeutics for the kids and may have a therapeutic that could be curing these kids in the next several years, but that research is going to be compromised,” Huganir said in an interview, estimating that scientists in his field could start a Phase 1 clinical trial within the next five years. “Any delay or anything that inhibits our research is devastating to the parents.”

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 29707 - Posted: 03.15.2025

By Emily Kwong You probably know the feeling of having a hearty meal at a restaurant, and feeling full and satisfied … only to take a peek at the dessert menu and decide the cheesecake looks just irresistible. So why is it that you just absolutely couldn't have another bite, but you somehow make an exception for a sweet treat? Or as Jerry Sienfeld might put it back in the day "Whhaaaat's the deal with dessert?!" Scientists now have a better understanding of the neural origins of this urge thanks to a recent study published in the journal Science. Sponsor Message Working with mice, researchers tried to set up a scenario similar to the human experience described above. They started by offering a standard chow diet to mice who hadn't eaten since the previous day. That "meal" period lasted for 90 minutes, and the mice ate until they couldn't eat any more. Then it was time for a 30-minute "dessert" period. The first round of the experiment, researchers offered mice more chow for dessert, and the mice ate just a little bit more. The second time around, during the "dessert" period, they offered a high sugar feed to the mice for 30 minutes. The mice really went for the sugary feed, consuming six times more calories than when they had regular chow for dessert. In the mice, researchers monitored the activity of neurons that are associated with feelings of fullness, called POMC neurons. They're located in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which is "very important for promoting satiety," says Henning Fenselau, one of the study authors and a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research in Cologne, Germany. © 2025 npr

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 29706 - Posted: 03.15.2025

Andrew Gregory Health editor Doctors in London have successfully restored a sense of smell and taste in patients who lost it due to long Covid with pioneering surgery that expands their nasal airways to kickstart their recovery. Most patients diagnosed with Covid-19 recover fully. But the infectious disease can lead to serious long-term effects. About six in every 100 people who get Covid develop long Covid, with millions of people affected globally, according to the World Health Organization. Losing a sense of smell and taste are among more than 200 different symptoms reported by people with long Covid. Now surgeons at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH) have cured a dozen patients, each of whom had suffered a profound loss of smell after a Covid infection. All had experienced the problem for more than two years and other treatments, such as smell training and corticosteroids, had failed. In a study aiming to find new ways to resolve the issue, surgeons tried a technique called functional septorhinoplasty (fSRP), which is typically used to correct any deviation of the nasal septum, increasing the size of nasal passageways. This boosts airflow into the olfactory region, at the roof of the nasal cavity, which controls smell. Doctors said the surgery enabled an increased amount of odorants – chemical compounds that have a smell – to reach the roof of the nose, where sense of smell is located. They believe that increasing the delivery of odorants to this area “kickstarts” smell recovery in patients who have lost their sense of smell to long Covid. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 29697 - Posted: 03.08.2025

By Felicity Nelson A region in the brainstem, called the median raphe nucleus, contains neurons that control perseverance and exploration.Credit: K H Fung/Science Photo Library Whether mice persist with a task, explore new options or give up comes down to the activity of three types of neuron in the brain. In experiments, researchers at University College London (UCL) were able to control the three behaviours by switching the neurons on and off in a part of the animals’ brainstem called the median raphe nucleus. The findings are reported in Nature today1. “It’s quite remarkable that manipulation of specific neural subtypes in the median raphe nucleus mediates certain strategic behaviours,” says neuroscientist Roger Marek at the Queensland Brain Institute in Brisbane, Australia, who was not involved in the work. Whether these behaviours are controlled in the same way in humans needs to be confirmed, but if they are, this could be relevant to certain neuropsychiatric conditions that are associated with imbalances in the three behavioural strategies, says Sonja Hofer, a co-author of the paper and a systems neuroscientist at UCL. For instance, an overly high drive to persist with familiar actions and repetitive behaviours can be observed in people with obsessive–compulsive disorder and autism, she says. Conversely, pathological disengagement and lack of motivation are symptoms of major depressive disorder, and an excessive drive to explore and inability to persevere with a task is seen in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “It could be that changes in the firing rate of specific median raphe cell types could contribute to certain aspects of these conditions,” says Hofer. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 29696 - Posted: 03.08.2025

Nicola Davis Science correspondent Which songs birds sing can – as with human music – be influenced by age, social interactions and migration, researchers have found. Not all birds learn songs, but among those that do, individuals, neighbourhoods and populations can produce different collections of tunes, akin to different music albums. Now researchers have found that changes in the makeup of a group of birds can influence factors including which songs they learn, how similar those songs are to each other and how quickly songs are replaced. Dr Nilo Merino Recalde, the first author of the study, from the University of Oxford, said: “This is very interesting, I think, partly because it shows that there are all these kind of common elements at play when it comes to shaping learned traits, [similar to] what happens with human languages and human music.” But he said the parallels had their limits. “The function and the role of human music and language is very, very different to the function of birdsong,” he said. “Birdsong is used to repel rivals, to protect territories, to entice mates, this kind of thing. And that also shapes songs.” Writing in the journal Current Biology, Recalde and colleagues describe how they used physical tracking as well as artificial intelligence to match recorded songs to individual male great tits living in Wytham Woods in Oxford. In total, the study encompassed 20,000 hours of sound recordings and more than 100,000 songs, captured over three years. The researchers used their AI models to analyse the repertoires of individual birds, those within neighbourhoods and across the entire population to explore how similar the various songs were. As a result, the team were able to unpick how population turnover, immigration and age structure influenced the songs. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 29695 - Posted: 03.08.2025