By Katherine Ellison For most of her adult life, Katherine Sanders had what she calls a typical career for someone with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. After finishing her doctoral thesis on Bronze Age Syrian mythology, she bounced between unrelated jobs. She tutored university students. She sewed Victorian corsets for bridal outfits. She designed stained glass and sold picture frames. She enjoyed the work, but none of it felt like a calling. Life got harder when she found herself juggling part-time work with caring for a spirited five-year-old. Sanders, who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, burned meals on the stove and forgot to pick up her daughter from school. Finally, she decided to work with a coach to help her cope with her ADHD, a bedeviling condition whose hallmark symptoms are distraction, forgetfulness, restlessness and impulsivity. She began by enrolling in a digital course called Your ADHD Brain is A-OK. Like most ADHD coaches, Tracy Otsuka, the course producer, has herself been diagnosed with the disorder. Otsuka, based in Northern California, says she focuses on helping her clients shed shame as a prelude to finding their purpose and living more fulfilled lives. Participants in the self-paced course watch 26 videos and fill out worksheets designed to identify their values and strengths. Sanders says working with Otsuka led to a lightbulb moment for her. “This woman is very smart, she’s very savvy,” she says. “And she still did stuff like forget to pick her kid up from school.… She still does the same things as me.” The experience made Sanders realize that she, too, was smart but had a specific challenge she needed to learn to manage.

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 30134 - Posted: 02.21.2026

By Natalia Mesa Most male mammals do not dote on their young and may even attack them, but some African striped mice actively feed, groom and nuzzle their own and even others’ pups. These profound behavioral differences come down to a single gene: agouti. This gene controls pigment production in the hair or skin of many animals. But in African striped mice, it also acts as a volume knob to silence caregiving circuits in the brain, according to a study published today in Nature. “It’s remarkable that this one gene is able to lead to a dramatic change in behavior,” says Robert Froemke, professor of genetics, neuroscience and otolaryngology at New York University, who was not involved in the work. Male African striped mice that live in isolation for roughly 2 months after weaning tend to nurture pups later in life, even those that are not their own, whereas their peers that live with other mice tend to be indifferent fathers or even infanticidal, the study found. The fatherly mice express lower levels of agouti in the brain compared with their more aggressive counterparts, the study shows. “Agouti, we think, is a molecular integrator of environmental experience,” says study author Ricardo Mallarino, associate professor of molecular biology at Princeton University. Despite the fact that only about 5 percent of mammalian species show fatherly behavior, parental care may be the default mode in striped mice, the research suggests. Both males and females use the same brain circuitry to care for their young, but enhanced agouti expression in the brain suppresses these instincts in the former. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 30133 - Posted: 02.21.2026

Carlo Iacono Everyone is panicking about the death of reading. The statistics look damning: the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day has fallen by more than 40 per cent over the past 20 years, according to research published in iScience this year. The OECD calls the 2022 decline in educational outcomes ‘unprecedented’ across developed nations. In the OECD’s latest adult-skills survey, Denmark and Finland were the only participating countries where average literacy proficiency improved over the past decade. Your nephew speaks in TikTok references. Democracy itself apparently hangs by the thread of our collective attention span. This narrative has a seductive simplicity. Screens are destroying civilisation. Children can no longer think. We are witnessing the twilight of the literate mind. A recent Substack essay by James Marriott proclaimed the arrival of a ‘post-literate society’ and invited us to accept this as a fait accompli. (Marriott does also write for The Times.) The diagnosis is familiar: technology has fundamentally degraded our capacity for sustained thought, and there’s nothing to be done except write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance. I spend my working life in a university library, watching how people actually engage with information. What I observe doesn’t match this narrative. Not because the problems aren’t real, but because the diagnosis is wrong. The declinist position rests on a category error: treating ‘screen culture’ as a unified phenomenon with inherent cognitive properties. As if the same device that delivers algorithmically curated rage-bait and also the complete works of Shakespeare is itself the problem rather than how we decide to use it. © Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012-2026.

Keyword: Attention; Language
Link ID: 30132 - Posted: 02.21.2026

By Meghan Bartels On March 7, 1949, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) were stationed on a boat called the R/V Atlantis that was sailing off the coast of Bermuda. They lowered a primitive underwater recording setup into the ocean, and a boxy machine more regularly found in offices began etching the sounds of the sea—a chorus of eerie howls and rustling waves—into a thin plastic disk. That disk made its way to WHOI’s archives in Massachusetts, where it sat, an overlooked relic of the earliest days of underwater acoustic recording. Fast-forward nearly eight decades, and experts at WHOI have rediscovered the recording and determined it’s probably the oldest whale recording still in existence. The likely vocalist? A humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae). The scientists who stumbled on the rare recording are eager to use it for science. “Data from this time period simply don’t exist in most cases,” said Laela Sayigh, a marine bioacoustician at WHOI, in a statement. “This recording can provide insight into how humpback whale sounds have changed over time, as well as serving as a baseline for measuring how human activity shapes the ocean soundscape.” The recording dates to a time when the North Atlantic Ocean’s humpback whales were struggling because of decades of commercial whaling. By 1955, the population had likely fallen below 1,000 animals, experts have since estimated. And although humpback whales are due for a thorough census, even outdated estimates suggest there are at least 20 to 25 times the number of these animals in the region today. © 2025 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30131 - Posted: 02.21.2026

Heidi Ledford A simple blood test might one day serve as a molecular ‘clock’ that predicts not only whether someone will develop Alzheimer’s disease — but when. Blood tests are now approved for Alzheimer’s: how accurate are they? The test, published in Nature Medicine on 19 February1, is based on an abnormal form of a protein called tau that circulates in the blood, and begins to accumulate in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s well before symptoms such as memory loss appear. If validated in larger studies, the test could provide a way to intervene in the neurodegenerative disease at an earlier stage, when treatment is more likely to be effective. It could also provide a measurable biological marker, or ‘biomarker’, to make clinical trials of potential Alzheimer’s disease treatments easier and cheaper. “Predicting if and when patients are likely to develop Alzheimer’s symptoms could be useful in designing trials of interventions to prevent or delay symptom onset,” says Howard Fink, a physician at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Health Care System in Minnesota. But until further studies are done, people should not take the test themselves, says Suzanne Schindler, a neurologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, and lead author of the study. (In-home blood tests for the form of tau that the study focuses on are available to consumers.) “At this point, we do not recommend that any cognitively unimpaired individuals have any Alzheimer’s disease biomarker test,” Schindler adds. Abnormal tau proteins can form tangled fibres that disrupt communication among the brain’s nerve cells. Brain-imaging tests that detect tangled tau are sometimes used when diagnosing Alzheimer’s, and preliminary studies suggest that such tests might also be able to predict when a person’s Alzheimer’s symptoms will appear2,3. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 30130 - Posted: 02.21.2026

By Meghan Rosen Ozempic’s key ingredient may act directly on cartilage to repair creaky joints. In mice and people, semaglutide can ease symptoms of the joint disease osteoarthritis and thicken the cartilage pillowed between bones, researchers report February 9 in Cell Metabolism. Thicker cartilage suggests the tissue is being rebuilt, says Di Chen, a physician and biologist at Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology in China. “That’s a good thing,” he says. “That’s the key thing.” More cartilage means more cushion, which means less bone-on-bone grinding and less pain. Osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis, affecting more than 500 million people worldwide. The disease can affect the hands, knees, hips and other joints, causing severe pain as cartilage wears away and tissues inflame. There’s no cure, and no medications that prevent it from becoming worse. Doctors can only help patients try to manage pain, Chen says. Scientists think weight loss can help alleviate symptoms by reducing the load on joints. That’s why semaglutide, the smash weight loss drug in Ozempic and Wegovy, is considered a contender for osteoarthritis treatment. And indeed, in 2024, a clinical trial in people with obesity reported that the drug improved joint pain and function. Doctors assumed those benefits were due to weight loss, Chen says. His team wasn’t so sure. The researchers conducted a similar study in mice with a form of osteoarthritis. One group received semaglutide, the other did not. In the drug-free mice, Chen’s team restricted food intake to match that of the semaglutide group. Both groups shed weight, but only the treated mice saw joint-based benefits. These mice had less pain, less broken-down cartilage and more cartilage growth, the team found. The results suggest that weight loss isn’t driving semaglutide’s benefits. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Obesity
Link ID: 30129 - Posted: 02.21.2026

By Chris Simms Some sex differences in brain-connectivity patterns become more pronounced with age, according to new research. Researchers studying brain-imaging data from people aged between 8 and 100 found that sex differences in the brain’s connections are minimal in early life, but then increase drastically at puberty; some of these differences continue to grow throughout adult life. The study was published as a preprint on bioRxiv1, and has not yet been peer reviewed. The work could help us to understand why men and women have different likelihoods of developing some mental-health disorders — and perhaps give insight into treating them, say the researchers. For example, women are about twice as likely as men to develop anxiety or depression2, and boys are about four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder than girls3. “We are very excited about this study, which to our knowledge is the first one to compare how sex differences in brain networks evolve over the lifespan,” says Amy Kuceyeski, a computational neuroimager at Weill Cornell Medicine in Ithaca, New York. However, some neuroscientists who spoke to Nature aren’t convinced that the differences found between male and female brains are due to sex, and say the study does not address differences in gender roles, which are known to be important factors when researching brain mechanisms of health and disease. Human brains do not belong in distinct ‘female’ and ‘male’ categories, says Daphna Joel, a neuroscientist at the University of Tel Aviv in Israel, referring to a 2015 study she co-authored, which suggests that each human brain is a mosaic of features, some of which are more common in men, others in women4. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30128 - Posted: 02.18.2026

Jon Hamilton A little brain training today may help stave off Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia for at least 20 years. That's the conclusion of a study of older adults who participated in a cognitive exercise experiment in the 1990s that was designed to increase the brain's processing speed. The federally funded study of 2,802 people found that those who did eight to 10 roughly hourlong sessions of cognitive speed training, as well as at least one booster session, were about 25% less likely to be diagnosed with dementia over the next two decades. "We now have a gold-standard study that tells us that there is something we can do to reduce our risk for dementia," says Marilyn Albert, an author of the study and a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "It's super-exciting to see that these effects are still holding 20 years out," says Jennifer O'Brien, an associate professor of psychology at the University of South Florida who was not involved in the research. The study appears in the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions. The result is good news for people like George Kovach, 74, who started doing cognitive speed training a decade ago. This illustration shows a pink human brain with stick legs and stick arms. The pink stick arms are holding up a black barbell with black disk-shaped weights on each end. © 2026 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30127 - Posted: 02.18.2026

Ian Sample Science editor People with major depressive disorder can see a rapid and lasting improvement after a single dose of the psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT) when it is combined with psychotherapy, doctors have said. A small clinical trial involving 34 people found that psychedelic-assisted therapy prompted a swift reduction in depressive symptoms that endured long after the drug had worn off, with some still feeling the benefits six months later. “There is an immediate antidepressant effect that is significantly sustained over a three-month period and that’s exciting because this is one session with a drug, embedded in psychological support,” said Dr David Erritzoe, a psychiatrist at Imperial College London and lead investigator on the trial. Although preliminary, the results add to a growing body of evidence that psychedelic drugs, when coupled with psychotherapy, could help to alleviate depression in the millions of people worldwide who do not respond to existing antidepressants or therapies. An estimated 100 million people worldwide have treatment-resistant depression, defined as a major depressive disorder that has not responded to at least two antidepressants. About half are unable to perform routine daily tasks. The trial, reported in Nature Medicine, focused on people with moderate to severe treatment-resistant depression. One half received a single 21.5mg dose of DMT infused into a vein over 10 minutes. The other half received a placebo infused the same way. All of the participants had psychotherapy and follow-up assessments. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30126 - Posted: 02.18.2026

By Elizabeth Preston On the island of Golem Grad in North Macedonia, visitors may see a chain of tortoises mounting each other like a slow-moving, libidinous locomotive. It used to strike Dragan Arsovski, an ecologist at the Macedonian Ecological Society, as funny. Now that he knows what’s really going on, he isn’t laughing. This uninhabited island in a country that once was part of Yugoslavia is crawling with around 1,000 Hermann’s tortoises — especially males. They pursue mates aggressively, making life unhealthy and short for the island’s scarce females. Some of those females even die by walking off the island’s cliffs. In a paper published last month in the journal Ecology Letters, researchers have found that the relentless males are driving their population to extinction. The island, in Lake Prespa, has a forested plateau encircled by sheer cliffs. When Dr. Arsovski started studying the salad-plate-size tortoises in 2008, “it was quite a dense and seemingly prosperous population,” he said. But for some reason, there were far more adult males than females — 19 males for every female on the plateau, at the latest count. He and his colleagues documented how the males seemed to manage their carnal instincts by mounting each other. Then, after many years of study, Dr. Arsovski realized that the females were undersized and dying young. He also realized those once-comical copulatory trains were made up of many males pursuing just one female. When the female tired, the train would become a frenzied heap of reptiles. “She’s literally buried by males,” Dr. Arsovski said. He and his co-authors wrote that as part of the tortoises’ courtship, they “bump, bite (sometimes to the point of blood loss), mount and finally vigorously poke fleeing females” with a sharp tail tip. Three-quarters of the island’s females had genital injuries. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 30125 - Posted: 02.18.2026

By Nanthia Suthana Neuroscience has never been richer in data. Laboratories now generate detailed recordings of neural activity, behavior and physiology across species at scales unimaginable a decade ago. In rodents, researchers can monitor thousands of neurons simultaneously across distributed circuits during behavior. In humans, they can record from deep brain structures during ambulatory, real-world behavior, integrated with wearable sensors and linked to clinical symptoms and subjective experience. The field has access to neural signals spanning orders of magnitude in space, time and biological complexity. Yet despite this abundance, neuroscience remains deeply organized along species lines. Animal and human researchers often operate within separate conceptual frameworks, attend different conferences and develop theories that rarely confront data across species. This separation is no longer a minor inconvenience but a growing liability. The problem is not simply that cross-species translation is difficult; it is that the field has largely accepted this difficulty rather than treating it as a central scientific challenge. Neuroscience has also struggled to confront the fact that different species often tell different stories. As a result, neuroscience’s primary limitation today is not a lack of data or tools, but persistent fragmentation across model systems, recording modalities and analytic traditions. Findings are typically interpreted within species- and technique-specific frameworks, with little pressure to explain when, how or why neural principles should generalize across organisms. Researchers acknowledge differences but rarely use them to constrain or revise theory. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 30124 - Posted: 02.18.2026

By Alexa Robles-Gil Every elephant has about 1,000 whiskers on its trunk. They play a crucial role for the animals, which have thick skin and poor eyesight. Elephants cannot regrow these hairs, meaning a lost one creates a permanent sensory blind spot on a trunk, which they use for almost everything in daily life. And as such an important feature, they are also unique among mammalian facial hairs. “Elephant whiskers are aliens,” said Andrew Schulz, a mechanical engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany. In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, Dr. Schulz and his colleagues identified the structural features that give elephant whiskers a kind of “built-in” intelligence, providing the sensitivity that the largest mammals on land need to navigate their world. While other animals like rats can move their whiskers around, a behavior known as “whisking,” elephants lack the necessary muscles. That leaves their whiskers essentially stationary, even if they protrude from the flexible trunk. This puzzled Dr. Schulz, who had previously studied the movement of their trunks. “If elephant trunk whiskers can’t move, there’s probably something built into them that allows them to” function in a way similar to mammals that whisk, Dr. Schulz said. To find out, Dr. Schulz gathered scientists from many fields. Engineers, neuroscientists, biologists and material scientists were among the few who studied whiskers from baby and adult Asian elephants. (All elephant whiskers came from animals that had died naturally, and were donated by a zoo veterinarian; “We did not go up and pluck whiskers from elephants,” Dr. Schulz said.) © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Evolution
Link ID: 30123 - Posted: 02.14.2026

By Lauren Schneider Microglia may be a key mediator between maternal immune activation and a pup’s memory of contextual fear conditioning in early infancy, a new mouse study reports. The findings sharpen the picture of memory formation in early life, but the study’s approach to microglia has raised questions. That scrutiny comes as scientists reevaluate concepts such as synaptic pruning, through which microglia may shape neuronal circuits in early life and beyond. Humans and rodents are unable to recall some of the earliest memories formed after birth. This period of infantile amnesia offers researchers a window to test conditions that may alter the survival of engrams, the changes in the brain tied to memory formation. “Development is an experiment that nature does for you,” says study investigator Tomás Ryan, professor in neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. Activation of the immune system during pregnancy in mice leads to autism-like behaviors in their pups and reduces infantile amnesia, according to a previous study by Ryan’s team. Blocking microglial activity allows some infantile memories to persist in mice, Ryan and his colleagues report in the new paper, published 20 January in PLOS Biology. Administering minocycline in water daily starting one day before foot-shock conditioning at postnatal day 17 led to greater fear memory at postnatal day 25, after the typical onset of infantile amnesia. This recall was accompanied by a reactivation of associated engrams in the basolateral amygdala and central amygdalar nucleus. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Glia; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30122 - Posted: 02.14.2026

Andrew Gregory Health editor Reading, writing and learning a language or two can lower your risk of dementia by almost 40%, according to a study that suggests millions of people could prevent or delay the condition. Dementia is one of the world’s biggest health threats. The number of people living with the condition is forecast to triple to more than 150 million globally by 2050, and experts say it presents a big and rapidly growing threat to future health and social care systems in every community, country and continent. US researchers found that engaging in intellectually stimulating activities throughout life, such as reading, writing or learning a new language, was associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, and slower cognitive decline. The study author Andrea Zammit, of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, said the discovery suggested cognitive health in later life was “strongly influenced” by lifelong exposure to intellectually stimulating environments. “Our findings are encouraging, suggesting that consistently engaging in a variety of mentally stimulating activities throughout life may make a difference in cognition. Public investments that expand access to enriching environments, like libraries and early education programs designed to spark a lifelong love of learning, may help reduce the incidence of dementia.” Researchers tracked 1,939 people with an average age of 80 who did not have dementia at the start of the study. They were followed for an average of eight years. Participants completed surveys about cognitive activities and learning resources during three stages. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30121 - Posted: 02.14.2026

Mariana Lenharo Exercise pumps up your muscles — but it might also be pumping up your neurons. According to a study published today in Neuron1, repeated exercise sessions on a treadmill strengthen the wiring in a mouse’s brain, making certain neurons quicker to activate. This ‘rewiring’ was essential for mice in the study to gradually improve their running endurance. The work reveals that the brain — in mice and, presumably, in humans — is actively involved in the development of endurance, the ability to get better at a physical activity with repeated practice, says Nicholas Betley, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and a co-author of the paper. “You go for a run, and your lungs expand, your heart gets pumping better, your muscles break down and rebuild. All this great stuff happens, and the next time, it gets easier,” Betley says. “I didn’t expect that the brain was coordinating all of that.” Betley and his colleagues were curious about what happens in the brain as people get stronger through exercise. They decided to focus on the ventromedial hypothalamus, a brain region that regulates appetite and blood sugar. The team then zeroed in on a group of neurons in that region that produce a protein called steroidogenic factor 1 (SF1), which is known to play a part in regulating metabolism2. A previous study3 found that the deletion of the gene that codes for SF1 impairs endurance in mice. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Obesity; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30120 - Posted: 02.14.2026

Rachael Seidler Tianyi (Erik) Wang Going to space is harsh on the human body, and as a new study from our research team finds, the brain shifts upward and backward and deforms inside the skull after spaceflight. The extent of these changes was greater for those who spent longer in space. As NASA plans longer space missions, and space travel expands beyond professional astronauts, these findings will become more relevant. Why it matters On Earth, gravity constantly pulls fluids in your body and your brain toward the center of the Earth. In space, that force disappears. Body fluids shift toward the head, which gives astronauts a puffy face. Under normal gravity, the brain, cerebrospinal fluid and surrounding tissues reach a stable balance. In microgravity, that balance changes. Without gravity pulling downward, the brain floats in the skull and experiences various forces from the surrounding soft tissues and the skull itself. Earlier studies showed that the brain appears higher in the skull after spaceflight. But most of those studies focused on average or whole brain measures, which can hide important effects within different areas of the brain. Our goal was to look more closely. Astronauts need to exercise and take care of their bodies while in space. We analyzed brain MRI scans from 26 astronauts who spent different lengths of time in space, from a few weeks to over a year. To focus on the brain’s movement, we aligned each person’s skull across scans taken before and after spaceflight. One great story in your inbox every afternoon © 2010–2026, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Biomechanics
Link ID: 30119 - Posted: 02.14.2026

Yuki Noguchi At just over 5 foot, 5 inches, Christie Woodard weighs a lean 125 pounds. She's also open about relying on a low-dose GLP-1 to keep her weight there. She says sometimes people question why she's on the drug, "because they look at me and think I'm at healthy weight, or maybe they even think I'm thin." What people don't see is Woodard's previous struggles with obesity, which began in her 30s, and landed her at 260 pounds. She took up running half-marathons, but at that weight, it was painful. "I was not fast," she says. "I had massive issues; I was in physical therapy constantly. I tore my meniscus." Woodard, now 53 and living in Easton, Md., got gastric bypass surgery four years ago and cut her weight in half. Elated, she set a goal of completing half-marathons in all 50 states. Her weight remained stable until last year, when pounds began creeping back, despite adhering to a strict diet and lots of exercise. "I feel it in my knees, and mainly I feel it in my soul," she says. "I feel it in my confidence. It's messing with my head in a big way. I was terrified that I was going to go back to what I was." So her bariatric surgeon, Dr. Betsy Dovec, prescribed a low dose of the drug Zepbound, even though Woodard's body mass index didn't technically classify her as overweight. Dovec says Woodard isn't her only normal-weight patient on GLP-1s. "I prescribe medications for all types of people," she says. Though, she clarifies, she does not give the drugs to people for purely aesthetic reasons, like someone trying to shed a few pounds before an event, for example. © 2026 npr

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 30118 - Posted: 02.14.2026

By Amber Dance Real estate agents will tell you that a home’s most important feature is “location, location, location.” It’s similar in neuroscience: “Location is everything in the brain,” said Bosiljka Tasic (opens a new tab), a self-described “biological cartographer.” Brain injury in one spot could knock out memory; damage in another could interfere with personality. Neuroscientists and doctors are lost without a good map. Researchers have been mapping the brain for more than a century. By tracing cellular patterns that are visible under a microscope, they’ve created colorful charts and models that delineate regions and have been able to associate them with functions. In recent years, they’ve added vastly greater detail: They can now go cell by cell and define each one by its internal genetic activity. But no matter how carefully they slice and how deeply they analyze, their maps of the brain seem incomplete, muddled, inconsistent. For example, some large brain regions have been linked to many different tasks; scientists suspect that they should be subdivided into smaller regions, each with its own job. So far, mapping these cellular neighborhoods from enormous genetic datasets has been both a challenge and a chore. Recently, Tasic, a neuroscientist and genomicist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and her collaborators recruited artificial intelligence for the sorting and mapmaking effort. They fed genetic data from five mouse brains — 10.4 million individual cells with hundreds of genes per cell — into a custom machine learning algorithm. The program delivered maps that are a neuro-realtor’s dream, with known and novel subdivisions within larger brain regions. Humans couldn’t delineate such borders in several lifetimes, but the algorithm did it in hours. The authors published their methods (opens a new tab) in Nature Communications in October. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30117 - Posted: 02.11.2026

Jon Hamilton Parkinson's disease does more than cause tremor and trouble walking. It can also affect sleep, smell, digestion and even thinking. That may be because the disease disrupts communication in a brain network that links the body and mind, a team reports in the journal Nature. "It almost feels like a tunnel is jammed, so no traffic can go normally," says Hesheng Liu, a brain scientist at Changping Laboratory and Peking University in Beijing and an author of the study. The finding fits nicely with growing evidence that Parkinson's is a network disorder, rather than one limited to brain areas that control specific movements, says Peter Strick, a professor and chair of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh who was not involved in the study. Other degenerative brain diseases affect other brain networks in different ways. Alzheimer's, for example, tends to reduce connectivity in the default mode network, which supports memory and sense of self. ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) primarily damages the motor system network, which controls movement. Understanding the network affected by Parkinson's, which affects about 1 million people in the United States, could change the way doctors treat the disease. A mystery solved? People with Parkinson's often have symptoms that vary in ways that are hard to explain. For example, someone who usually is unable to stand may suddenly leap when faced with an emergency. And Parkinson's patients who can still walk may freeze if they try to carry on a conversation. © 2026 npr

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 30116 - Posted: 02.11.2026

By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim The placid chords of a Debussy prelude splashed through a darkened auditorium during a recital by the pianist Nicolas Namoradze at the University of California, San Francisco, on a November evening. A translucent image of Namoradze’s brain appeared above him on a screen: Electrical currents of different wavelengths, associated with varying levels of alertness, registered as colorful activity coursing through the model like storm fronts on a weather map. With each chord, clouds of green and blue bloomed, then faded as the sound receded. As the recital progressed with works by Bach, Beethoven and Scriabin, the image of the gently rotating brain showed a complex choreography of signals that sometimes ping-ponged between different areas or flickered simultaneously across the organ’s hemispheres. As a visual spectacle accompanying Namoradze’s pellucid playing, it was mesmerizing: an X-ray, seemingly, of virtuosity at work. But to the scientists in the audience, attendees at a conference on the neuroscience of music and dance, it was more than entertainment. It was evidence of a breakthrough in experiment design — one that opens up possibilities in an area that has long eluded scientific study: how music activates the brain, not in listeners, but in performers. It was also a reminder of the value artists can bring to scientific inquiry as active participants shaping studies of their craft. The neuroscientist Theodore Zanto, a member of the Neuroscape lab at U.C.S.F. that created the “Glass Brain” animations, said in an interview the next day that he was surprised — and moved — by the result. “It’s probably the cleanest real-time representation of what’s happening inside the brain during a piano performance,” he said. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Brain imaging
Link ID: 30115 - Posted: 02.11.2026