By The Transmitter The neuroscience field is fueled by its people. Check out The Transmitter’s stories from the past year about some of the scientists driving neuroscience forward, including one investigating prosocial behavior in rodents, and another recording—for the first time—individual neural signals in bats in the wild. And explore our remembrances for neuroscientists lost in 2025, such as a trailblazer in the memory field and a leader in the neural basis for hearing. Take a look at a growing challenge to the neuroscientist pipeline, and the work of two determined collaborators who shattered the perception that the octopus brain can’t be studied. Finally, we recognize some of the brightest young talents the field has to offer. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 30064 - Posted: 01.03.2026

Jon Hamilton SCOTT SIMON, HOST: And it has been a banner year in brain science. We've learned that lifestyle changes really can keep your brain young and that electrical pulses can help with rheumatoid arthritis, and that LSD can relieve anxiety and depression. Scientists even managed to replicate a human brain network that carries pain signals. NPR science correspondent Jon Hamilton joins us. Jon, thanks so much for being with us. JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: Hi, Scott. SIMON: Well, let's start with that brain network. What does it do? HAMILTON: Well, it recreates the pathway that carries brain signals from, say, your fingertip to the part of the brain that says, you know, ouch, that hurts. And that pathway has several sort of relay stations along the way. So a team at Stanford decided to recreate those stations using brain organoids, which are these pea-sized clumps of human brain cells that can mimic different types of brain tissue. In this case, the scientists used four different organoids representing the four types of nerve cells that relay pain signals. And when they put these organoids together in a dish, they spontaneously wired up to form the entire pain pathway. SIMON: That sounds extraordinary, but I have to ask - can you tell if the organoids in a dish felt anything? HAMILTON: You can, and the way you can tell is with red hot chile peppers. The scientists took the organoid that was acting like a nerve ending, and they exposed it to chemicals like the ones in hot chile peppers, you know, that burn your mouth. Here is Dr. Sergiu Pasca explaining what happened. SERGIU PASCA: We discovered that if you start adding some of these compounds that are inducing inflammatory responses of pain, then you start seeing that information traveling. The neurons that sends these signals get activated. And they transmit that information to the next station and the next station, all the way to the cortex. HAMILTON: There's good reason for this research, too. It's part of an effort to help people with chronic pain. SIMON: Let's move on to the whole question of trying to keep your brain young. Like, can you really do that? HAMILTON: Why, yes, you can. At least according to a really big study funded by the Alzheimer's Association. This study involved about 2,000 people in their 60s and 70s, and they were all pretty sedentary, at least at the beginning. Half of these people spent two years getting aerobic exercise at the gym, eating a Mediterranean diet, watching their blood pressure and taking part in this really demanding cognitive training program. The other people - they were just told to eat better and exercise more. At the end of the study, the people in the hardcore program did better on tests of thinking and memory. And their scores were actually as good as those from people a year or two younger than they were. © 2025 npr

Keyword: Miscellaneous; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30063 - Posted: 12.31.2025

By Allison Parshall The human brain has 86 billion neurons connected by roughly 100 trillion synapses, making it one of the most complex objects in the known universe. Each year neuroscientists make fascinating, important and downright strange discoveries about how this resilient structure works, and 2025 didn’t disappoint. Here are 10 of the most fascinating brain discoveries of this year for your own brain to noodle on. Brain scans of thousands of people revealed that the human brain has five distinct eras, with turning points in the way it is organized occurring at age nine, 32, 66 and 83. Across each of these stages—for example, the “adolescent” period between age nine and 32—people’s brains tend to experience the same types of changes. You don’t remember being a newborn or even a toddler. Adults’ earliest memories tend to start around preschool and no earlier. But recent research suggests that your brain was making memories back then; you just don’t have access to them now. A study of the infant hippocampus, a deep-brain structure crucial for memory formation, found that it can store memories once babies are around one year old—though it’s not clear why we can’t recall them once we grow up. Untangling Alzheimer’s Researchers also discovered another oddity of newborn babies’ brain: they have very high levels of a protein that, in adults, indicates Alzheimer’s disease. Tau proteins help to stabilize brain cells’ structure, but they can undergo chemical changes that lead them to become tangled up, a process linked to Alzheimer’s. The fact that healthy newborn brains have high levels of these proteins, which later decrease, suggests that these detrimental changes in adults could be avoided or reversed. Fluorescence light micrograph of neural progenitor cells. Astrocytes have been stained orange and neural progenitor cells green. Cell nuclei are blue © 2025 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Brain imaging; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30054 - Posted: 12.20.2025

Jon Hamilton A decades-long boom in brain science in the United States may be heading for a bust. Ongoing disruptions in federal funding are causing many young brain scientists to reconsider their career choice, according to leaders of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), which represents more than 37,000 researchers and clinicians. If those scientists change fields or leave the country, SfN officials say, it could hobble the nation's efforts to understand and treat brain disorders including Alzheimer's, autism, Parkinson's and schizophrenia. "The U.S. has been a world leader in research for decades, and that leadership position is now at risk," says John Morrison, a professor at the University of California, Davis and president of SfN. Morrison expects that discussions about federal funding are likely to have a prominent place in the group's annual five-day meeting, which begins Saturday in San Diego and is expected to attract about 20,000 brain scientists. "It's hard to escape, because we're all being directly affected by it," Morrison says. In the months since President Trump took office, the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation have been buffeted by cuts, grant terminations, and abrupt policy changes. Federal health officials have said those measures reflect an effort to reduce fraud and waste, end support of 'woke' science, and align research with the administration's priorities. But the process has been unsettling for young scientists like Clara Zundel, a postdoctoral researcher at Wayne State University in Detroit. © 2025 npr

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 30011 - Posted: 11.15.2025

By Andrea Thompson A school-aged child in Los Angeles County has died from a rare but always fatal complication from a measles infection they acquired when they were an infant who was too young to be vaccinated. The first dose of the vaccine is typically not administered until one year of age. Experts say the death underscores the need for high levels of vaccination in a population to protect the most vulnerable against the disease, as well as from side effects that can occur long after the initial illness has passed. “This case is a painful reminder of how dangerous measles can be, especially for our most vulnerable community members,” said Los Angeles County Health Officer Muntu Davis in a recent statement. The child who died suffered from subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), a progressive brain disorder that usually develops two to 10 years after a measles infection. The measles virus appears to mutate into a form that avoids detection by the immune system, allowing it to hide in the brain and eventually destroy neurons. “It’s just a virus that goes unchecked and destroys brain tissue, and we have no therapy for it,” said Walter Orenstein, an epidemiologist and professor emeritus at Emory University, to Scientific American earlier this year. People with SSPE experience a gradual, worsening loss of neurological function and usually die within one to three years after diagnosis, according to the Los Angeles County Health Department. The disorder affects only about one in every 10,000 people who contract measles. But the risk may be as high as about one in 600 for those who are infected as infants. “There is no treatment for this. Children who suffer from this will always die,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in a previous interview with Scientific American. © 2025 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29927 - Posted: 09.13.2025

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

Nicola Davis Science correspondent A new method for diagnosing brain tumours could cut the time patients wait for treatments by weeks to hours and raise the possibility of novel types of therapy, researchers have said. According to the Brain Tumour Charity, about 740,000 people around the world are diagnosed with a brain tumour each year, around half of which are non-cancerous. Once a brain tumour is found, a sample is taken during surgery and cells are immediately studied under a microscope by pathologists, who can often identify the type of tumour. However, genetic testing helps to make or confirm the diagnosis. “Almost all of the samples will go for further testing anyway. But for some of them it will be absolutely crucial, because you won’t know what you’re looking at,” said Prof Matthew Loose, a co-author of the research from the University of Nottingham. Loose noted that in the UK there could be a lag of eight weeks or longer between surgery and the full results of genetic tests, delaying the confirmation of a diagnosis and hence treatment such as chemotherapy. Writing in the journal Neuro-Oncology, Loose and colleagues report how they harnessed what is known as nanopore technology to cut this timeframe. The approach is based on devices that contain membranes featuring hundreds to thousands of tiny pores, each of which has an electric current passing through it. When DNA approaches a pore it is “unzipped” into single strands; as a strand passes through the pore it disrupts the electric current. Crucially, the different building blocks of DNA – and modifications to them – disrupt the current in characteristic ways, allowing the DNA to be “read”, or sequenced. These sequences are then compared against those relating to different types of brain tumours, using a software program built by the team. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 29795 - Posted: 05.21.2025

By Christina Caron On TikTok, misinformation about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder can be tricky to spot, according to a new study. The study, published on Wednesday in the journal PLOS One, found that fewer than 50 percent of the claims made in some of the most popular A.D.H.D. videos on TikTok offered information that matched diagnostic criteria or professional treatment recommendations for the disorder. And, the researchers found, even study participants who had already been diagnosed with A.D.H.D. had trouble discerning which information was most reliable. About half of the TikTok creators included in the study were using the platform to sell products, such as fidget spinners, or services like coaching. None of them were licensed mental health professionals. The lack of nuance is concerning, said Vasileia Karasavva, a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and the lead author of the study. If TikTok creators talk about difficulty concentrating, she added, they don’t typically mention that the symptom is not specific to A.D.H.D. or that it could also be a manifestation of a different mental disorder, like depression or anxiety. “The last thing we want to do is discourage people from expressing how they’re feeling, what they’re experiencing and finding community online,” Ms. Karasavva said. “At the same time, it might be that you self-diagnose with something that doesn’t apply to you, and then you don’t get the help that you actually need.” Ms. Karasavva’s results echo those of a 2022 study that also analyzed 100 popular TikTok videos about A.D.H.D. and found that half of them were misleading. “The data are alarming,” said Stephen P. Hinshaw, a professor of psychology and an expert in A.D.H.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in either study. The themes of the videos might easily resonate with viewers, he added, but “accurate diagnosis takes access, time and money.” © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 29714 - Posted: 03.22.2025

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 Mark Humphries There are many ways neuroscience could end. Prosaically, society may just lose interest. Of all the ways we can use our finite resources, studying the brain has only recently become one; it may one day return to dust. Other things may take precedence, like feeding the planet or preventing an asteroid strike. Or neuroscience may end as an incidental byproduct, one of the consequences of war or of thoughtlessly disassembling a government or of being sideswiped by a chunk of space rock. We would prefer it to end on our own terms. We would like neuroscience to end when we understand the brain. Which raises the obvious question: Is this possible? For the answer to be yes, three things need to be true: that there is a finite amount of stuff to know, that stuff is physically accessible and that we understand all the stuff we obtain. But each of these we can reasonably doubt. The existence of a finite amount of knowledge is not a given. Some arguments suggest that an infinite amount of knowledge is not only possible but inevitable. Physicist David Deutsch proposes the seemingly innocuous idea that knowledge grows when we find a good explanation for a phenomenon, an explanation whose details are hard to vary without changing its predictions and hence breaking it as an explanation. Bad explanations are those whose details can be varied without consequence. Ancient peoples attributing the changing seasons to the gods is a bad explanation, for those gods and their actions can be endlessly varied without altering the existence of four seasons occurring in strict order. Our attributing the changing seasons to the Earth’s tilt in its orbit of the sun is a good explanation, for if we omit the tilt, we lose the four seasons and the opposite patterns of seasons in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. A good explanation means we have nailed down some property of the universe sufficiently well that something can be built upon it. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 29702 - Posted: 03.12.2025

By Sydney Wyatt Numerous actions by the Trump administration over the past month have caused confusion and fear throughout the U.S. scientific community. In response, a group called Stand Up for Science, which says it opposes attacks on science and on efforts to improve diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in research, has planned rallies on 7 March in Washington, D.C., and across the United States. “The biggest thing for us is that science is for everyone, in that it benefits every person,” says rally co-organizer Colette Delawalla, a graduate student in clinical psychology at Emory University. “It doesn’t matter who you voted for. It doesn’t even matter if you voted or not.” The event is reminiscent of the 2017 March for Science, which drew more than 1 million attendees in 600 cites around the world to show support for scientific research and protest proposed budget cuts to the U.S. National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies during Donald Trump’s first term as president. Scientists were divided in their views about that march, with some criticizing it for a lack of concrete goals and others saying it engaged more people with science and policy than ever before. This year is no different. Some scientists say protests do little to change minds, whereas others say it can raise awareness. The effectiveness of a protest depends on several factors, including the clarity of its goals, the scope of the target audience, the tactics used and whether the movement continues after the initial event, says Susan Olzak, professor emerita of sociology at Stanford University. “Temporary, fleeting protests are not likely to have much of an effect on anything, but if you have a sustained campaign, then you’re more likely to have some kind of impact, even if it’s just on public opinion,” Olzak says. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 29693 - Posted: 03.05.2025

By Lola Butcher Last September, Eliezer Masliah, a prominent Alzheimer’s disease researcher, stepped away from his influential position at the National Institutes of Health after the organization, where he oversaw a $2.6 billion budget for neuroscience research, found falsified or fabricated images in his scientific articles. That same month, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced neuroscientist Lindsay Burns, her boss, and their company would pay more than $40 million to settle charges they had made misleading statements about research results from their clinical trial of a possible treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. Also in September: A $30 million clinical trial to study a stroke treatment developed by Berislav Zlokovic, a well-known Alzheimer’s expert, and his colleagues was canceled amid an investigation into whether he had manipulated images and data in research publications. Shortly thereafter, Zlokovic, director of the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute at the University of Southern California medical school, was placed on indefinite administrative leave. Is there a pattern here? And, if there is, can neurology patients trust treatments that are based on published scientific research? That is what Charles Piller, an investigative reporter for Science magazine, examines in “Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s,” and his analysis is not comforting. As for the first question — is there a pattern? — Piller’s relentless reporting reveals that dozens of neuroscientists, including some of the most prominent in the world, appear to be responsible for inaccurate images in their published research. Those problematic images have prompted many of their articles to be retracted, corrected, or flagged as being “of concern” by the journals in which they were published.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 29687 - 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 Meredith Wadman, Jocelyn Kaiser President Donald Trump’s return to the White House is already having a big impact at the $47.4 billion U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), with the new administration imposing a wide range of restrictions, including the abrupt cancellation of meetings such as grant review panels. Officials have also ordered a communications pause, a freeze on hiring, and an indefinite ban on travel. The moves have generated extensive confusion and uncertainty at the nation’s largest research agency, which has become a target for Trump’s political allies. “The impact of the collective executive orders and directives appears devastating,” one senior NIH employee says. Today, for example, officials halted midstream a training workshop for junior scientists, called off a workshop on adolescent learning minutes before it was to begin, and canceled meetings of two advisory councils. Panels that were scheduled to review grant proposals also received eleventh-hour word that they wouldn’t be meeting. “This kind of disruption could have long ripple effects,” says Jane Liebschutz, an opioid addiction researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who posted on Bluesky about the canceled study sections. “Even short delays will put the United States behind in research.” She and colleagues are feeling “a lot of uncertainty, fear, and panic,” Liebschutz says. The hiring freeze is governmentwide, whereas a pause on communications and travel appears to be limited to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent agency. Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in. But some NIH staff suggested these measures, which include pulling job ads and rescinding offers, are more extreme than any previously. Researchers who planned to present their work at meetings must cancel their trips, as must NIH officials promoting agency programs off site or visiting distant branches of the agency. “Future travel requests for any reason are not authorized and should not be approved,” the memo said.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 29640 - Posted: 01.25.2025

By Rebecca Horne The drawings and photographs of Santiago Ramón y Cajal are familiar to any neuroscientist—and probably anyone even remotely interested in the field. Most people who take a cursory look at his iconic images might assume that he created them using only direct observation. But that’s not the case, according to a paper published in March 2024 by Dawn Hunter, visual artist and associate professor of art at the University of South Carolina, and her colleagues. For instance, the Golgi-stained tissue Ramón y Cajal drew contained neurons that were cut in half—so he painstakingly reconstructed the cells by drawing from elements in multiple slides. And he also fleshed out his illustrations using educated guesses and classical drawing principles, such as contrast and occlusion. In this way, Ramón y Cajal’s art training was essential to his research, Hunter says. She came across Ramón y Cajal’s drawings while creating illustrations for a neuroscience textbook. “The first time I saw his work, out of pure inspiration, I decided to draw it,” she says. “It was in those moments of drawing that I realized his process was more profound and conceptually layered than merely retracing pencil lines with ink. Examining Ramón y Cajal’s work through the act of drawing is a more active experience than viewing his work as a gallery visitor or in a textbook.” In 2015, Hunter installed her drawings and paintings alongside original Ramón y Cajal works in an ongoing exhibition at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). That effort led to a Fulbright fellowship to Spain in 2017, providing her access to the Legado Cajal archives at the Instituto Cajal National Archives, which contain thousands of Ramón y Cajal artifacts. Hunter spoke to The Transmitter about her research in Spain and her realizations about how Ramón y Cajal worked as an artist and as a scientist. The Transmitter: What do you think your work contributes that is new? Dawn Hunter: It spells out the connection to [Ramón y Cajal’s] art training. There are some things that to me as a painter are obvious to zero in on that nobody’s really talked about. For example, Ramón y Cajal’s copying of the Renaissance painter Rafael’s entire portfolio. That in itself is a profound thing. © 2024 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29338 - Posted: 06.04.2024

By Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy What makes a desert tortoise happy? Before you answer, we should be more specific: We’re talking about a Sonoran desert tortoise, one of a few species of drab, stocky tortoises native to North America’s most arid landscapes. Adapted to the rocky crevices that striate the hills from western Arizona to northern Mexico, this long-lived reptile impassively plods its range, browsing wildflowers, scrub grasses and cactus paddles during the hours when it’s not sheltering from the brutal heat or bitter cold. Sonoran desert tortoises evolved to thrive in an environment so different from what humans find comfortable that we can rarely hope to encounter one during our necessarily short forays — under brimmed hats and layers of sunblock, carrying liters of water and guided by GPS — into their native habitat. This past November, in a large, carpeted banquet room on the University of Wisconsin’s River Falls campus, hundreds of undergraduate, graduate and veterinary students silently considered the lived experience of a Sonoran desert tortoise. Perhaps nine in 10 of the participants were women, reflecting the current demographics of students drawn to veterinary medicine and other animal-related fields. From 23 universities in the United States and Canada, and one in the Netherlands, they had traveled here to compete in an unusual test of empathy with a wide range of creatures: the Animal Welfare Assessment Contest. That morning in the banquet room, the academics and experts who organize the contest (under the sponsorship of the American Veterinary Medical Association, the nation’s primary professional society for vets) laid out three different fictional scenarios, each one involving a binary choice: Which animals are better off? One scenario involved groups of laying hens in two different facilities, a family farm versus a more corporate affair. Another involved bison being raised for meat, some in a smaller, more managed operation and others ranging more widely with less hands-on human contact. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Rights; Emotions
Link ID: 29268 - Posted: 04.24.2024

By Jyoti Madhusoodanan When the Philadelphia-based company Bioquark announced a plan in 2016 to regenerate neurons in brain-dead people, their proposal elicited skepticism and backlash. Researchers questioned the scientific merits of the planned study, which sought to inject stem cells and other materials into recently deceased subjects. Ethicists said it bordered on quackery and would exploit grieving families. Bioquark has since folded. But quietly, a physician who was involved in the controversial proposal, Himanshu Bansal, has continued the research. Bansal recently told Undark that he has been conducting work funded by him and his research team at a private hospital in Rudrapur, India, experimenting mostly with young adults who have succumbed to traffic accidents. He said he has data for 20 subjects for the first phase of the study and 11 for the second — some of whom showed glimmers of renewed electrical activity — and he plans to expand the study to include several more. Bansal said he has submitted his results to peer-reviewed journals over the past several years but has yet to find one that would publish them. Bansal may be among the more controversial figures conducting research with people who have been declared brain dead, but not by any stretch is he the only one. In recent years, high-profile experiments implanting non-human organs into human bodies, a procedure known as xenotransplantation, have fueled rising interest in using brain-dead subjects to study procedures that are too risky to perform on living people. With the support of a ventilator and other equipment, a person’s heart, kidneys, immune system, and other body parts can function for days, sometimes weeks or more, after brain death. For researchers who seek to understand drug delivery, organ transplantation, and other complexities of human physiology, these bodies can provide a more faithful simulacrum of a living human being than could be achieved with animals or lab-grown cells and tissues.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 29217 - Posted: 03.26.2024

By Sara Reardon For the past few decades, scientists studying candidate antidepressant drugs have had a convenient animal test: how long a rodent dropped in water keeps swimming. Invented in 1977, the forced swim test (FST) hinged on the idea that a depressed animal would give up quickly. It seemed to work: Antidepressants and electroconvulsive therapy often made the animal try harder. The test remains popular, appearing in about 600 papers per year. But researchers have recently begun to question the assumption that the test really gauges depression and is a good predictor of human responses to drugs. Opposition to the test is snowballing, driven in part by concerns it is unnecessarily cruel given its spotty results. This month, following similar moves by the Australian government, the United Kingdom’s Home Office announced it would require U.K. researchers to justify the use of the test and would encourage other U.K. ministries that regulate animal research to “completely eliminate” it. Such changes add urgency to efforts to develop better animal tests of psychiatric drugs’ effects. Neurobiologist Anne Mallien of Heidelberg University, who studies the effects of the FST on rodents’ well-being, says she would love to have other options. “The thing is that alternatives are somewhat missing.” In the FST, researchers put a mouse or rat in a container of water, usually for about 5 minutes, and time how long it exerts itself before giving up and simply floating. Rodents will often swim longer when treated with psychiatric drugs. “But does that mean something for [human medicine]?” says neuroscientist Carole Morel at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The rodents’ high stress levels could complicate the results, and an intelligent animal quickly learns that researchers will rescue it once it gives up.

Keyword: Depression; Animal Rights
Link ID: 29201 - Posted: 03.21.2024

By The Transmitter It has been a year of many firsts for the Transmitter team. Despite launching this site just over a month ago, though, we published dozens of news stories on a range of important topics in neuroscience research earlier in the year in Spectrum. Here, we bring you a short list of some of our favorites, which broke news about changes in research leadership, exposed issues in studies involving human participants, provided new insights into the brain’s neuropeptide signaling network and memory-encoding mechanisms, and gave glimpses into the lives neuroscientists lead outside of work. ‘Wireless’ connectomes detail signaling outside synapses Connectomes were once again all the rage this year. As some teams continued to map the complete circuitry of increasingly larger brains — including those of a larval and an adult fruit fly — other teams went back to basics, plugging some invisible gaps of the humble roundworm’s synaptic connectome. Those latter efforts detail how neurons communicate using short proteins called neuropeptides outside synapses, helping to address key criticisms of conventional wiring diagrams. Neural ‘barcodes’ help seed-stashing birds recall their hidden haul As we enter the throes of winter here in New York City, some of the resident non-migratory birds may begin to seek out the seeds they stashed earlier in the year to help them survive for the next few months. Their ability to relocate their caches may stem from memories stored in the hippocampus in the form of non-overlapping patterns of brain activity, or “barcodes,” new research suggests. These barcodes originate when a bird hides a seed and reappear only when the bird returns to that same seed — and may represent the basis for episodic memories of specific events in time. © 2023 Simons Foundation.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 29068 - Posted: 12.27.2023

By Robert Kolker Barb was the youngest in her large Irish Catholic family — a surprise baby, the ninth child, born 10 years after the eighth. Living in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, her family followed the football schedule: high school games on Friday night, college games on Saturday, the Steelers on Sunday. Dad was an engineer, mom was a homemaker and Barb was the family mascot, blond and adorable, watching her brothers and sisters finish school and go on to their careers. Barb was the only child left at home in the 1980s to witness the seams of her parents’ marriage come apart. Her father all but left, and her mother turned inward, sitting quietly in front of the television, always smoking, often with a cocktail. Something had overtaken her, though it wasn’t clear what. Barb observed it all with a measure of detachment; her parents had been older than most, and her sisters and brothers supplied more than enough parental energy to make up the difference. And so in 1990, when Barb was 14 and her mother learned she had breast cancer and died within months at the age of 62, Barb was shattered and bewildered but also protected. Her siblings had already stepped in, three of them living back home. Together they arrived at a shared understanding of the tragedy. Their mother could have lived longer if she had cut back on her drinking sooner or gone to see a doctor or hadn’t smoked. Six years later, Barb was 20 and in college when someone else in the family needed help. Her sister Christy was the second-born, 24 years older than Barb and the star of the family in many ways. She had traveled extensively as a pharmaceutical-company executive while raising two children with her husband in a nice house in a New Jersey suburb. But where once Christy was capable and professionally ambitious and socially conscious, now, at 44, she was alone, her clothes unkempt and ripped, her hair unwashed, her marriage over. Again, the family came together: Susan, the third-born, volunteered to take care of Christy full time, and Jenny, the eighth, searched for a specialist (the family members asked to be identified by their first names to protect their privacy). Depression was the first suspected diagnosis, then schizophrenia, though neither seemed quite right. Christy wasn’t sad or delusional; she wasn’t even upset. It was more as if she were reverting to a childlike state, losing her knack for self-regulation. Her personality was diluting — on its way out, with seemingly nothing to replace it. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 28855 - Posted: 07.22.2023