Kristel Tjandra For two decades, Ann Johnson has been unable to walk or talk after she experienced a stroke that impaired her balance and her breathing and swallowing abilities. But in 2022, Johnson was finally able to hear her voice through an avatar, thanks to a brain implant. The implant is an example of the neurotechnologies that have entered human trials during the past five years. These devices, developed by research teams and firms including entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Neuralink, can alter the nervous system’s activity to influence functions such as speech, touch and movement. Last month, they were the topic of a meeting in Paris, hosted by the United Nations scientific and cultural agency UNESCO, at which delegates finalized a set of ethical principles to govern neurotechnologies. The recommendations focus on protecting users from technology misuse that could infringe on their human rights, including their autonomy and freedom of thought. The delegates, who included scientists, ethicists and legal specialists, decided on nine principles. These include recommendations that technology developers disclose how neural information is collected and used, and that they ensure the long-term safety of a product on people’s mental states. “This document clarifies how to protect human rights, especially in relation to the nervous system,” says Pedro Maldonado, a neuroscientist at the University of Chile in Santiago who was one of 24 experts who drafted the recommendations in 2024. The principles are not legally binding, but nations and organizations can use them to develop their own policies. In November, UNESCO’s 194 member states will vote on whether to adopt the standards. The meeting considered a range of neurotechnology applications, including devices designed to be implanted into the body and non-invasive devices, which are being explored in medicine, entertainment and education. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29820 - Posted: 06.04.2025

Danielle Wilhour Cerebrospinal fluid, or CSF, is a clear, colorless liquid that plays a crucial role in maintaining the health and function of your central nervous system. It cushions the brain and spinal cord, provides nutrients and removes waste products. Despite its importance, problems related to CSF often go unnoticed until something goes wrong. Recently, cerebrospinal fluid disorders drew public attention with the announcement that musician Billy Joel had been diagnosed with normal pressure hydrocephalus. In this condition, excess CSF accumulates in the brain’s cavities, enlarging them and putting pressure on surrounding brain tissue even though diagnostic readings appear normal. Because normal pressure hydrocephalus typically develops gradually and can mimic symptoms of other neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, it is often misdiagnosed. I am a neurologist and headache specialist. In my work treating patients with CSF pressure disorders, I have seen these conditions present in many different ways. Here’s what happens when your cerebrospinal fluid stops working. What is cerebrospinal fluid? CSF is made of water, proteins, sugars, ions and neurotransmitters. It is primarily produced by a network of cells called the choroid plexus, which is located in the brain’s ventricles, or cavities. The choroid plexus produces approximately 500 milliliters (17 ounces) of CSF daily, but only about 150 milliliters (5 ounces) are present within the central nervous system at any given time due to constant absorption and replenishment in the brain. This fluid circulates through the ventricles of the brain, the central canal of the spinal cord and the subarachnoid space surrounding the brain and spinal cord. © 2010–2025, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Biomechanics; Stroke
Link ID: 29812 - Posted: 05.31.2025

Alison Abbott Daiza Gordon watched her two younger brothers die when they were adolescents. They had Hunter syndrome, a rare, incurable disease — predominantly affecting boys — in which a gene for an important enzyme is missing. Guilt compounded her grief when her attempts to resuscitate her youngest brother failed. She was just 19 years old. Gordon went on to discover how merciless genetics can be. Her own three sons were all born with the condition. When her two eldest hit their second birthdays, the symptoms started to emerge: a thickening of facial features, loss of language, hearing and movement and other impacts to mental and physical development. But she sees hope for her sons that was denied to her brothers. Her children are enrolled in a clinical trial testing a technology to carry a replacement for the missing enzyme, called iduronate-2-sulfatase (IDS), into the brain. Early results indicate improvement in some of the condition’s cognitive and physical symptoms. Gordon’s eldest sons are no longer deaf and they have started to run around. They are meeting developmental milestones she’d never dared to hope for. Her two-year-old, who started the therapy when he was just three months old, is showing none of the early symptoms. “When I look at them, I realize they have a chance of an actual future,” says Gordon. Regular infusions of replacement IDS has been the standard of care for the past two decades, and it protects important organs such as the liver and kidneys from damage. But without help, the large enzyme can’t make it through the protective barrier that separates the blood from one of the most important organs — the brain. For Gordon’s children, that help comes from an innovative molecular transport system, a chemical tag attached to IDS that shuttles it through the tightly joined cells that make up the blood–brain barrier. Several such shuttles, which take advantage of natural transport systems in the brain, are now being developed. With the ability to move large biological drugs — including antibodies, proteins and the viruses used in gene therapy — these shuttles promise to revolutionize neuropharmacology. And that’s not just for rare diseases such as Hunter syndrome, but also for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and other common brain disorders. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Alzheimers
Link ID: 29811 - Posted: 05.28.2025

By Maggie Astor Billy Joel has canceled his upcoming concerts because of a brain disorder affecting his hearing, vision and balance, the singer-songwriter announced on Friday. The condition, called normal pressure hydrocephalus, or N.P.H., is estimated to affect hundreds of thousands of older Americans. Here’s what to know about it. What is normal pressure hydrocephalus? N.P.H. occurs when excess cerebrospinal fluid accumulates in the brain, causing difficulty walking, trouble controlling one’s bladder and memory problems. Those symptoms together suggest the disorder. The bladder symptoms can include incontinence and waking up at night to urinate with increasing frequency, said Dr. Charles Matouk, a neurosurgeon at Yale University and director of the university’s Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus Program. A statement posted to Mr. Joel’s social media accounts on Friday said his condition had been “exacerbated by recent concert performances.” N.P.H. is rare, but risk increases with age. Dr. Matouk estimated that it might affect less than 1 percent of the population ages 65 to 80, but likely 5 percent or more of people over 80. Experts say the condition is likely underdiagnosed because its symptoms can easily be dismissed as normal effects of aging. Dr. Matouk urged people to see a doctor if they experienced trouble walking, controlling their bladder and remembering things. How is it diagnosed? When a patient shows up with gait, bladder and memory problems, the first test may be a CT scan or M.R.I. In patients with N.P.H., that imaging will show enlargement of the brain’s fluid-filled ventricles. But the conclusive test is a spinal tap: Because that procedure removes cerebrospinal fluid, patients with N.P.H. experience a temporary alleviation of symptoms, confirming the diagnosis, Dr. Matouk said. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29801 - Posted: 05.24.2025

By Calli McMurray At least six new brain donors who can do a functional MRI scan—that’s what it will take to complete the most comprehensive human brain atlas yet, project investigators say. The Human and Mammalian Brain Atlas (HMBA) aims to capture information about the identity and location of cells across the entire brain and tie it, for the first time, to the functional organization of the cortex. The atlas, one of several projects in the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, stands to be “a quantum jump in the quality of the data and the resolution that we can analyze it,” says David Van Essen, professor of neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis and an HMBA investigator. The first atlas, published by the Allen Institute in 2011, contains gene expression information across the brain projected onto an MRI reference space. “By today’s standards, that’s really low-resolution information,” but it’s still “used like crazy,” says Ed Lein, co-creator of the first atlas and one of the lead investigators of the HMBA project at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Subsequent iterations mapped more of the human brain’s cellular and molecular landscape and at higher resolution. A “first draft” cell atlas, Lein says, published in a trove of papers in 2023, employed single-cell sequencing techniques to catalog thousands of cell types in the human brain. But as “exceptional” as these resources are, their utility is limited by a lack of functional information about the brain regions, says Avram Holmes, associate professor of psychiatry at Rutgers University, who is not involved with the project. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain imaging
Link ID: 29782 - Posted: 05.11.2025

By Rachel Lehmann-Haupt On a brisk January evening this year, I was speeding down I–295 in northeast Florida, under a full moon, to visit my dad’s brain. As I drove past shadowy cypress swamps, sinewy river estuaries, and gaudy-hued billboards of condominiums with waterslides and red umbrellas boasting, “Best place to live in Florida,” I was aware of the strangeness of my visit. Most people pay respects to their loved ones at memorials and grave sites, but I was intensely driven to check in on the last remaining physical part of my dad, immortalized in what seemed like the world’s most macabre library. Michael DeTure, a professor of neuroscience, stepped out of a golf cart to meet me. “Welcome to the bunker. Just 8,000 of your quietest friends in here,” he said in a melodic southern drawl, grinning in a way that told me he’s made this joke before. The bunker is an indiscriminate warehouse, part of the Mayo Clinic’s Jacksonville, Florida campus that houses its brain bank. DeTure opened the warehouse door, and I was met with a blast of cold air. In the back of the warehouse sat rows of buzzing white freezers. DeTure pointed to the freezer where my dad’s brain sat in a drawer in a plastic bag with his name written on it in black Sharpie pen. I welled up with tears and a feeling of intense fear. The room suddenly felt too cold, too sterile, too bright, and my head started to spin. I wanted to run away from this place. And then my brain escaped for me. I saw my dad on a beach on Cape Cod in 1977. He was in a bathing suit, shirtless, lying on a towel. I was 7 years old and snuggled up to him to protect myself from the wind. He was reading aloud to my mom and me from Evelyn Waugh’s novel, A Handful of Dust, whose title is from T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Wasteland”: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” He was reading the part about Tony Last, an English gentleman, being imprisoned by an eccentric recluse who forces him to read Dickens endlessly. © 2025 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Language; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29776 - Posted: 05.07.2025

By Yasemin Saplakoglu In 1943, a pair of neuroscientists were trying to describe how the human nervous system works when they accidentally laid the foundation for artificial intelligence. In their mathematical framework (opens a new tab) for how systems of cells can encode and process information, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts argued that each brain cell, or neuron, could be thought of as a logic device: It either turns on or it doesn’t. A network of such “all-or-none” neurons, they wrote, can perform simple calculations through true or false statements. “They were actually, in a sense, describing the very first artificial neural network,” said Tomaso Poggio (opens a new tab) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is one of the founders of computational neuroscience. McCulloch and Pitts’ framework laid the groundwork for many of the neural networks that underlie the most powerful AI systems. These algorithms, built to recognize patterns in data, have become so competent at complex tasks that their products can seem eerily human. ChatGPT’s text is so conversational and personal that some people are falling in love (opens a new tab). Image generators can create pictures so realistic that it can be hard to tell when they’re fake. And deep learning algorithms are solving scientific problems that have stumped humans for decades. These systems’ abilities are part of the reason the AI vocabulary is so rich in language from human thought, such as intelligence, learning and hallucination. But there is a problem: The initial McCulloch and Pitts framework is “complete rubbish,” said the science historian Matthew Cobb (opens a new tab) of the University of Manchester, who wrote the book The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience (opens a new tab). “Nervous systems aren’t wired up like that at all.” A promotional card for Quanta's AI series, which reads Science Promise and the Peril of AI, Explore the Series" When you poke at even the most general comparison between biological and artificial intelligence — that both learn by processing information across layers of networked nodes — their similarities quickly crumble. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Consciousness; Robotics
Link ID: 29770 - Posted: 05.03.2025

By Laura Dattaro In 2012, neuroscientists Sebastian Seung and J. Anthony Movshon squared off at a Columbia University event over the usefulness of connectomes—maps of every connection between every cell in the brain of a living organism. Such a map, Seung argued, could crack open the brain’s computations and provide insight into processes such as sensory perception and memory. But Movshon, professor of neural science and psychology at New York University, countered that the relationship between structure and function was not so straightforward—that even if you knew how all of a brain’s neurons connect to one another, you still wouldn’t understand how the organ turns electrical signals into cognition and behavior. The debate in the field continues, even though Seung and his colleagues in the FlyWire Consortium completed the first connectome of a female Drosophila melanogaster in 2023, and even though a slew of new computational models built from that and other connectomes hint that structure does, in fact, reveal something about function. “This is just the beginning, and that’s what’s exciting,” says Seung, professor of neuroscience at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. “These papers are kicking off a beginning to an entirely new field, which is connectome-based brain simulation.” A simulated fruit fly optic lobe, detailed in a September 2024 Nature paper, for example, accurately predicts which neurons in living fruit flies respond to different visual stimuli. “All the work that’s been done in the past year or two feels like the beginning of something new,” says John Tuthill, associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Washington. Tuthill was not involved in the optic lobe study but used a similar approach to identify a circuit that seems to control walking in flies. Most published models so far have made predictions about simple functions that were already understood from recordings of neural activity, Tuthill adds. But “you can see how this will build up to something that is eventually very insightful.” © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29769 - Posted: 05.03.2025

By Bruce Rosen The past two decades—and particularly the past 10 years, with the tool-focused efforts of the BRAIN Initiative—have delivered remarkable advances in our ability to study and manipulate the brain, both in exquisite cellular detail and across increasing swaths of brain territory. These advances resulted from improvements in tools such as optical imaging, chemogenetics and multiprobe electrodes, to name a few. Powerful as these technologies are, though, their invasive nature makes them ill-suited for widespread adoption in human brain research. Fortunately, our fundamental understanding of the physics and engineering behind noninvasive modalities—based largely on recording, generating and manipulating electromagnetic and acoustic fields in the human brain—has also progressed over the past decade. These advances are on the threshold of providing much more detailed recordings of electromagnetic activity, not only across the human cortex but at depth. And these same principles can improve our ability to precisely and noninvasively stimulate the human brain. Though these tools have limitations compared with their invasive counterparts, their noninvasive nature make them suitable for wide-scale investigation of the links between human behavior and action, as well as for individually understanding and treating an array of brain disorders. The most common method to assess brain electrophysiology is the electroencephalogram (EEG), first developed in the 1920s and now routinely used for both basic neuroscience and the clinical diagnosis of conditions ranging from epilepsy to sleep disorders to traumatic brain injury. It’s widely used, given its simplicity and low cost, but it has drawbacks. Understanding exactly where the EEG signals arise from in the brain is often difficult, for example; electric current from the brain must pass through multiple tissue layers (including overlying brain itself) before it can be detected with electrodes on the scalp surface, blurring the spatial resolution. Advanced computational methods combined with imaging data from MRI can partially mitigate these issues, but the analysis is complex, and results are imperfect. Still, because EEG can be readily combined with behavioral assessments and other

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29755 - Posted: 04.23.2025

By Carl Zimmer The human brain is so complex that scientific brains have a hard time making sense of it. A piece of neural tissue the size of a grain of sand might be packed with hundreds of thousands of cells linked together by miles of wiring. In 1979, Francis Crick, the Nobel-prize-winning scientist, concluded that the anatomy and activity in just a cubic millimeter of brain matter would forever exceed our understanding. “It is no use asking for the impossible,” Dr. Crick wrote. Forty-six years later, a team of more than 100 scientists has achieved that impossible, by recording the cellular activity and mapping the structure in a cubic millimeter of a mouse’s brain — less than one percent of its full volume. In accomplishing this feat, they amassed 1.6 petabytes of data — the equivalent of 22 years of nonstop high-definition video. “This is a milestone,” said Davi Bock, a neuroscientist at the University of Vermont who was not involved in the study, which was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Dr. Bock said that the advances that made it possible to chart a cubic millimeter of brain boded well for a new goal: mapping the wiring of the entire brain of a mouse. “It’s totally doable, and I think it’s worth doing,” he said. More than 130 years have passed since the Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal first spied individual neurons under a microscope, making out their peculiar branched shapes. Later generations of scientists worked out many of the details of how a neuron sends a spike of voltage down a long arm, called an axon. Each axon makes contact with tiny branches, or dendrites, of neighboring neurons. Some neurons excite their neighbors into firing voltage spikes of their own. Some quiet other neurons. Human thought somehow emerges from this mix of excitation and inhibition. But how that happens has remained a tremendous mystery, largely because scientists have been able to study only a few neurons at a time. In recent decades, technological advances have allowed scientists to start mapping brains in their entirety. In 1986, British researchers published the circuitry of a tiny worm, made up of 302 neurons. In subsequent years, researchers charted bigger brains, such as the 140,000 neurons in the brain of a fly. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29743 - Posted: 04.12.2025

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

Miryam Naddaf A brain-reading implant that translates neural signals into audible speech has allowed a woman with paralysis to hear what she intends to say nearly instantly. Researchers enhanced the device — known as a brain–computer interface (BCI) — with artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that decoded sentences as the woman thought of them, and then spoke them out loud using a synthetic voice. Unlike previous efforts, which could produce sounds only after users finished an entire sentence, the current approach can simultaneously detect words and turn them into speech within 3 seconds. The findings, published in Nature Neuroscience on 31 March1, represent a big step towards BCIs that are of practical use. Older speech-generating BCIs are similar to “a WhatsApp conversation”, says Christian Herff, a computational neuroscientist at Maastricht University, the Netherlands, who was not involved with the work. “I write a sentence, you write a sentence and you need some time to write a sentence again,” he says. “It just doesn’t flow like a normal conversation.” BCIs that stream speech in real time are “the next level” in research because they allow users to convey the tone and emphasis that are characteristic of natural speech, he adds. The study participant, Ann, lost her ability to speak after a stroke in her brainstem in 2005. Some 18 years later, she underwent a surgery to place a paper-thin rectangle containing 253 electrodes on the surface of her brain cortex. The implant can record the combined activity of thousands of neurons at the same time. Researchers personalized the synthetic voice to sound like Ann’s own voice from before her injury, by training AI algorithms on recordings from her wedding video. During the latest study, Ann silently mouthed 100 sentences from a set of 1,024 words and 50 phrases that appeared on a screen. The BCI device captured her neural signals every 80 milliseconds, starting 500 milliseconds before Ann started to silently say the sentences. It produced between 47 and 90 words per minute (natural conversation happens at around 160 words per minute).

Keyword: Language; Robotics
Link ID: 29726 - Posted: 04.02.2025

By Veronique Greenwood Encased in the skull, perched atop the spine, the brain has a carefully managed existence. It receives only certain nutrients, filtered through the blood-brain barrier; an elaborate system of protective membranes surrounds it. That privileged space contains a mystery. For more than a century, scientists have wondered: If it’s so hard for anything to get into the brain, how does waste get out? The brain has one of the highest metabolisms of any organ in the body, and that process must yield by-products that need to be removed. In the rest of the body, blood vessels are shadowed by a system of lymphatic vessels. Molecules that have served their purpose in the blood move into these fluid-filled tubes and are swept away to the lymph nodes for processing. But blood vessels in the brain have no such outlet. Several hundred kilometers of them, all told, seem to thread their way through this dense, busily working tissue without a matching waste system. However, the brain’s blood vessels are surrounded by open, fluid-filled spaces. In recent decades, the cerebrospinal fluid, or CSF, in those spaces has drawn a great deal of interest. “Maybe the CSF can be a highway, in a way, for the flow or exchange of different things within the brain,” said Steven Proulx, who studies the CSF system at the University of Bern. A recent paper in Cell contains a new report about what is going on around the brain (opens a new tab) and in its hidden cavities. A team at the University of Rochester led by the neurologist Maiken Nedergaard (opens a new tab) asked whether the slow pumping of the brain’s blood vessels might be able to push the fluid around, among, and in some cases through cells, to potentially drive a system of drainage. In a mouse model, researchers injected a glowing dye into CSF, manipulated the blood vessel walls to trigger a pumping action, and saw the dye concentration increase in the brain soon after. They concluded that the movement of blood vessels might be enough to move CSF, and possibly the brain’s waste, over long distances. © 2025 Simons Foundation.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Sleep
Link ID: 29722 - Posted: 03.27.2025

Nora Bradford Scientists have created the first map of the crucial structures called mitochondria throughout the entire brain ― a feat that could help to unravel age-related brain disorders1. The results show that mitochondria, which generate the energy that powers cells, differ in type and density in different parts of the brain. For example, the evolutionarily oldest brain regions have a lower density of mitochondria than newer regions. The map, which the study’s authors call the MitoBrainMap, is “both technically impressive and conceptually groundbreaking”, says Valentin Riedl, a neurobiologist at Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany, who was not involved in the project. The brain’s mitochondria are not just bit-part players. “The biology of the brain, we know now, is deeply intertwined with the energetics of the brain,” says Martin Picard, a psychobiologist at Columbia University in New York City, and a co-author of the study. And the brain accounts for 20% of the human body’s energy usage2. Wielding a tool typically used for woodworking, the study’s authors divided a slice of frozen human brain ― from a 54-year-old donor who died of a heart attack ― into 703 tiny cubes. Each cube measured 3 × 3 × 3 millimetres, which is comparable to the size of the units that make up standard 3D images of the brain. “The most challenging part was having so many samples,” says Picard. The team used biochemical and molecular techniques to determine the density of mitochondria in each of the 703 samples. In some samples, the researchers also estimated the mitochondria’s efficiency at producing energy. To extend their findings beyond a single brain slab, the authors developed a model to predict the numbers and types of mitochondria across the entire brain. They fed it brain-imaging data and the brain-cube data. To check their model, they applied it to other samples of the frozen brain slice and found that it accurately predicted the samples’ mitochondrial make-up. © 2025 Springer Nature

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29721 - Posted: 03.27.2025

Anna Bawden Health and social affairs correspondent Researchers have developed ultra-powerful scans that could enable surgery for previously treatment-resistant epilepsy. Globally, about 50 million people have epilepsy. In England, epileptic seizures are the sixth most common reason for hospital admission. About 360,000 people in the UK have focal epilepsy, which causes recurring seizures in a specific part of the brain. Many patients successfully treat their condition with medication but for more than 100,000 patients, their symptoms do not improve with drugs, leaving surgery as the only option. Finding brain lesions, a significant cause of epilepsy, can be tricky. Ultra-powerful MRI scanners are capable of identifying even tiny lesions in patients’ brains. These 7T MRI scanners produce much more detailed resolution on brain scans, enabling better detection of lesions. If surgeons can see the lesions on MRI scans, this can double the chances of the patient being free of seizures after surgery. But 7T scanners are also susceptible to “dark patches” known as signal dropouts. Now researchers in Cambridge and Paris have developed a new technique to overcome the problem. Scientists at the University of Cambridge’s Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre, and the Université Paris-Saclay, used eight transmitters around the brain, rather than the usual one, to “parallel transmit” MRI images, which significantly reduced the number of black spots. The first study to use this approach, doctors at Addenbrooke’s hospital, Cambridge, then trialled the technique with 31 drug-resistant epilepsy patients to see whether the parallel transmit 7T scanner was better than conventional 3T scanners at detecting brain lesions. The research, published in the journal Epilepsia, found that the parallel transmit 7T scanner identified previously unseen structural lesions in nine patients. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Brain imaging; Epilepsy
Link ID: 29716 - Posted: 03.22.2025

Five years ago Italian researchers published a study on the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. that detailed how one victim of the blast, a male presumed to be in his mid 20s, had been found nearby in the seaside settlement of Herculaneum. He was lying facedown and buried by ash on a wooden bed in the College of the Augustales, a public building dedicated to the worship of Emperor Augustus. Some scholars believe that the man was the center’s caretaker and was asleep at the time of the disaster. In 2018, one researcher discovered black, glossy shards embedded inside the caretaker’s skull. The paper, published in 2020, speculated that the heat of the explosion was so immense that it had fused the victim’s brain tissue into glass. Vesuvius Erupted, but When Exactly? March 2, 2025 Forensic analysis of the obsidian-like chips revealed proteins common in brain tissue and fatty acids found in human hair, while a chunk of charred wood unearthed near the skeleton indicated a thermal reading as high as 968 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly the dome temperature of a wood-fired Neapolitan pizza oven. It was the only known instance of soft tissue — much less any organic material — being naturally preserved as glass. On Thursday, a paper published in Nature verified that the fragments are indeed glassified brain. Using techniques such as electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and differential scanning calorimetry, scientists examined the physical properties of samples taken from the glassy fragments and demonstrated how they were formed and preserved. “The unique finding implies unique processes,” said Guido Giordano, a volcanologist at the Roma Tre University and lead author of the new study. Foremost among those processes is vitrification, by which material is burned at a high heat until it liquefies. To harden into glass, the substance requires rapid cooling, solidifying at a temperature higher than its surroundings. This makes organic glass formation challenging, Dr. Giordano said, as vitrification entails very specific temperature conditions and the liquid form must cool fast enough to avoid being crystallized as it congeals. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29690 - Posted: 03.05.2025

By Holly Barker Hunched over a microscope more than a century ago, Santiago Ramón y Cajal discovered that distinct types of neurons favor different brain regions. Looking at tissue from a pigeon’s cerebellum, he drew Purkinje cells, their dendrites outspread and twisted like a ravaged oak. And drawing from another sample—the first cortical layer of a newborn rabbit’s brain—he traced the tentacled nerve cells that would later bear his name. But the brain’s cellular organization is even more ordered than Ramón y Cajal could have imagined, a new study suggests. Different functional networks—measured using functional MRI—involve distinct blends of cell types, identified from their transcriptional profiles. And a machine-learning tool trained on cell distributions in postmortem tissue can identify functional networks based on these cellular “fingerprints,” the researchers found. The findings could address the gulf between neuroimaging and cell-based research, says the study’s principal investigator, Avram Holmes, associate professor of psychiatry at Rutgers University. “In-vivo imaging studies are almost never linked back to the underlying biological cascades that give rise to the phenotypes,” he says. But the new approach “lets you jump between fields of study—that was very difficult to do in the past.” Using bulk gene-expression data from postmortem human brain tissue—obtained from the Allen Human Brain Atlas—Holmes and his colleagues classified 24 different types of cells. They then mapped the cells’ spatial distribution to two features of large-scale brain organization derived from a popular fMRI atlas: networks, and those networks’ position in the cortical gradient, which is based on location, style of information processing and connectivity pattern. Unimodal sensorimotor networks—those that perceive stimuli and act on them—anchor one end of the gradient, and the other end is occupied by transmodal systems, such as the default mode network, that integrate multiple information streams across the cortex. The remaining networks are parked between these two extremes. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29689 - Posted: 03.01.2025

By Heidi Ledford A slimy barrier lining the brain’s blood vessels could hold the key to shielding the organ from the harmful effects of ageing, according to a study in mice. The study showed that this oozy barrier deteriorates with time, potentially allowing harmful molecules into brain tissue and sparking inflammatory responses. Gene therapy to restore the barrier reduced inflammation in the brain and improved learning and memory in aged mice. The work was published today in Nature1. The finding shines a spotlight on a cast of poorly understood molecules called mucins that coat the interior of blood vessels throughout the body and give mucus its slippery texture, says Carolyn Bertozzi, a Nobel-prizewinning chemist at Stanford University in California and a lead author of the study. “Mucins play a lot of interesting roles in the body,” she says. “But until recently, we didn’t have the tools to study them. They were invisible.” Snotty barrier Mucins are large proteins decorated with carbohydrates that form linkages with one another, creating a water-laden, gel-like substance. They are crucial constituents of the blood–brain barrier, a system that restricts the movement of some molecules from the blood into the brain. Researchers have long sought ways to sneak medicines past this barrier to treat diseases of the brain. Previous work also showed that the integrity of the barrier erodes with age2, suggesting that it could be an important target for therapies to combat diseases associated with ageing, such as Alzheimer’s disease. But scientists knew little about the contribution of mucins to these changes, until Sophia Shi, a graduate student at Stanford, decided to focus on a mucin-rich layer called the glycocalyx, which lines blood vessels. Shi and her colleagues looked at what happens to the glycocalyx in the brain as mice age. “The mucins on the young blood vessels were thick and juicy and plump,” says Bertozzi. “In the old mice, they were thin and lame and patchy.” © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Brain imaging
Link ID: 29688 - Posted: 03.01.2025

By Lydia Denworth When Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung of Princeton University saw high-resolution 2D electron microscope images in a 2018 Cell paper, they decided to try to build a fruit fly connectome with that dataset. Funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative, Murthy and Seung used the electron microscopy data to launch the work that resulted in FlyWire, a nine-paper package published in Nature in October 2024. The work made international headlines for its novelty and ambition. Not long ago, the length of the author list on the flagship FlyWire paper also would have been newsworthy: 46 researchers, including Murthy, Seung and first author Sven Dorkenwald. Neuroscience research has long been driven by individual labs and individual investigators, but today it is increasingly becoming a team sport similar to the FlyWire work—a 2024 preprint describing a study of hundreds of thousands of neuroscience papers published worldwide between 2001 and 2022 found a consistent rise in the number of authors per paper in nearly every country examined. There were 66 Nature Neuroscience papers in 2023 that had double-digit author counts, with the longest author list for that year comprising 209 names. The causes of this shift are related to technology breakthroughs that have allowed for the generation of massive datasets, as well as the general maturation of neuroscience, which is catching up with the large-scale, collaborative efforts put forth in other fields. The dual landmark papers in 2001 revealing the first draft of the Human Genome Project boasted 249 authors (in Nature) and 274 authors (in Science), and a fruit fly genome paper published in 2015 had more than 1,000. In physics, a 2015 paper providing an estimate of the mass of the Higgs boson listed more than 5,000 authors, thought to be a record. But researchers say long author lists are also raising questions about what kind of work is most productive for neuroscience and how to best parcel out credit. A stack of author names can diffuse “responsibility for what’s in the paper,” says neuroscientist J. Anthony Movshon of New York University. “We’re going to a place where it’s very hard to establish whose work you’re actually reading.” © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 29682 - Posted: 02.26.2025

By Fred Schwaller Andrea West remembers the first time she heard about a new class of migraine medication that could end her decades of pain. It was 2021 and she heard a scientist on the radio discussing the promise of gepants, a class of drug that for the first time seemed to prevent migraine attacks. West followed news about these drugs closely, and when she heard last year that atogepant was approved for use in the United Kingdom, she went straight to her physician. West had endured migraines for 70 years. Since she started taking the drug, she hasn’t had one. “It’s marvellous stuff. It’s genuinely changed my life,” she says. For ages, the perception of migraine has been one of suffering with little to no relief. In ancient Egypt, physicians strapped clay crocodiles to people’s heads and prayed for the best. And as late as the seventeenth century, surgeons bored holes into people’s skulls — some have suggested — to let the migraine out. The twentieth century brought much more effective treatments, but they did not work for a significant fraction of the roughly one billion people who experience migraine worldwide. Now there is a new sense of progress running through the field, brought about by developments on several fronts. Medical advances in the past few decades — including the approval of gepants and related treatments — have redefined migraine as “a treatable and manageable condition”, says Diana Krause, a neuropharmacologist at the University of California, Irvine. At the same time, research is leading to a better understanding about the condition — and pointing to directions for future work. Studies have shown, for example, that migraine is a broad phenomenon that originates in the brain and can manifest in many debilitating symptoms, including light sensitivities and aura, brain fog and fatigue. “I used to think that disability travels with pain, and it’s only when the pain gets severe that people are impaired. That’s not only false, but we have treatments to do something about it,” says Richard Lipton, a neurologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 29681 - Posted: 02.22.2025