By Jim Robbins Imagine a chicken that could speak or a pigeon with a voice rivaling that of the most musical songbirds. Granted, the world probably doesn’t need any gossiping chickens or pigeons breaking out in song. But why some birds learn to create a deep repertoire and others are unable to has long been a research focus of the neurobiologist Erich D. Jarvis. “Vocal learning, just like spoken language itself, is a rare trait,” said Dr. Jarvis, who directs the Neurogenetics of Language laboratory at Rockefeller University in New York. He studies the small group of species capable of speech, focusing on birds and mice, and he has long hoped to genetically engineer an animal that can vocalize in new ways. Introducing manipulated genes into the brain of a bird or a mouse that doesn’t vocalize could create that ability and provide new clues into the origins of speech. It may also one day help in finding treatments for people with speech problems or brain disorders. Dr. Jarvis, 60, didn’t start his career in neuroengineering. He once hoped to become a professional dancer, performing ballet at Manhattan’s renowned High School for the Performing Arts and then studying at the Alvin Ailey dance school. He was a member of the Westchester Ballet Company when he began wondering how the brain was able to create dance movements. His mentor at Rockefeller was Fernando Nottebohm, the researcher who discovered in the early 1980s that songbird brains generate new neurons each spring to enable them to sing. That revolutionary understanding of neurogenesis led to further findings that all brains, including human ones, grow new neurons throughout life. Until then, it had been scientific gospel that people came into the world with a fixed number. From 2002 to 2005, Dr. Jarvis helped lead the Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium, a project that renamed the regions of the avian brain to show that it was remarkably sophisticated. The research undermined the use of the term “bird brain” as a pejorative. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30316 - Posted: 07.08.2026

By Sandy Ong On a Sunday afternoon in April, the main minibus terminal in Sukabumi, Indonesia, looked sleepy from the outside. But in an open space round the back, hundreds of men were gathered. Amid chatter and cigarette smoke, the air buzzed with excitement, for one of the region’s biggest bird-singing competitions was set to begin, and a motorbike was among the prizes. As the day progressed, dozens of songbirds were brought out for their 10-minute rounds, from tiny garden sunbirds and grey-cheeked bulbuls to larger oriental magpie-robins and orange-headed thrushes. Then the emcee announced the main event — the singing contest among the highly popular, strikingly handsome white-rumped shamas — and a hush fell over the crowd. The shamas’ owners murmured final words of encouragement and stepped away from their cages. Judges swept in with clipboards, assessing each bird for its song, ability to hold a steady tune, volume and showmanship. Soon it was down to a final two birds . . . and then “Baby White” was crowned the winner amid cheers from the crowd. Many men gathered on a patio beneath hanging cages holding songbirds Since the 1970s, songbird competitions have grown in popularity across Indonesia. With goats, motorcycles, watches and money (sometimes worth up to 10 years’ salary) up for grabs, the events are driving hordes of people to keep songbirds as pets. Indonesians have a long-standing culture of keeping birds as pets, and songbirds are especially popular, prized by collectors for their melodious singing and colorful plumage. “I keep songbirds as a hobby, to relieve stress and also gain a bit of money,” explained Harry Gunawan, a 78-year-old businessman and owner of 39 shamas, including the multiple prizewinning Baby White, while waiting for his new motorbike. Gunawan’s shamas are among an estimated 66 million to 84 million caged birds that are kept across Java, the island where 56 percent of Indonesia’s population lives and one in three households owns birds. These include more than 3 million white-rumped shamas and 2 million oriental magpie-robins. Wild birds are believed to be better songsters; hence, many are trapped in forests then crammed into tiny crates, drainpipes and even plastic bottles, destined for pet markets in Jakarta, Surabaya and other big cities. Birds that survive the journey — estimates of mortality rates range from 30 to 80 percent — will spend the rest of their lives confined to cages.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30315 - Posted: 07.08.2026

By Azeen Ghorayshi In early June, Ally Betchan and her family made the monthly trek from their small central Texas town to a therapy center in Austin, hoping that she could learn to communicate. Like nearly 30 percent of people with autism, Ally is severely disabled and does not speak. Ally, 22, sat quietly in a small room next to her instructor, Soma Mukhopadhyay, a sprightly 63-year-old who, by contrast, talked almost nonstop. More than 30 years ago, Ms. Mukhopadhyay taught her nonspeaking autistic son, Tito, to write and type independently, creating a communication method that supporters hailed as transformative and critics have challenged ever since. Ms. Mukhopadhyay held up a clear plastic sheet marked with the alphabet, prompting Ally to make up a story. As Ally tugged rhythmically at her purse, she slowly pointed at letters to spell “DONNA KNOWS,” and then seemed to get stuck, pointing to a jumble of letters. “I’m so lost,” Ms. Mukhopadhyay said, shaking the sheet and pressing her to try again. As Ms. Mukhopadhyay occasionally tapped under the letter board on her thigh or leaned in the direction of a letter, Ally eventually spelled: “CARING HURTS.” “‘Donna knows caring hurts’ — that is a life lesson,” Ms. Mukhopadhyay said, nodding in agreement. Then, Ally jabbed many letters in quick succession, but distinctly: “SHE LOVES THOSE WHO CARE FOR HER.” Sitting beside her, Ally’s mother, aunt and grandmother smiled. Ms. Mukhopadhyay’s technique, called the Rapid Prompting Method, or R.P.M., is one of several intended to help nonverbal people learn to communicate using letter boards held in midair by another person. At the core of these assisted spelling methods is a radical assertion: that nonspeaking autistic people, many of whom have been considered intellectually disabled their whole lives, may have typical or even extraordinary cognitive abilities, obscured by motor problems and an overwhelmed sensory system that has cut them off from the world around them. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism; Language
Link ID: 30314 - Posted: 07.08.2026

Ian Sample Science editor A scientist who decoded the vocalisations that a bird uses to communicate has won a $100,000 prize for making progress towards a world in which humans can talk to the animals – without being met with a blank response. Dr Julie Elie at the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded the 2026 Coller-Dolittle prize for two-way interspecies communication after working out the 11 core calls in the zebra finch vocabulary and their meanings. Her work revealed how the birds announce who they are and what they are doing, and recognise one another regardless of what they are saying by using individual signatures. She also found that at times, the birds confused calls with similar meanings more than those that sounded the same. “I’m really super-honoured,” Elie said on winning the prize, adding that she hoped the work was a step forwards in the “great endeavour” to communicate with animals. Prof Yossi Yovel, a zoologist at Tel Aviv University and chair of the panel of judges, said the work marked “a key moment in the field”. The prize was launched in 2024 by the Jeremy Coller Foundation, which promotes awareness of animal welfare and animal sentience, in partnership with Tel Aviv University. Beyond the annual prizes for progress, the foundation has established a $10m grand prize for cracking the problem of two-way human-animal communication. Elie decided to study zebra finches because they are so vocal – meaning they produce plenty of data. “The question I asked myself when hearing these chatty songbirds was what are they saying?” she said. For more than a decade, Elie observed and recorded the sounds the birds made and classified the calls according to the situation and the bird that made them. She then used machine learning to analyse what and how information was encoded in the calls. Finally, she ran tests that showed the birds agreed with her classification. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30301 - Posted: 06.27.2026

By K. R. Callaway In the flatwoods of South Florida, tiny brown birds emerge from the underbrush to sing from the branches of pine trees. To human ears, their songs sound nearly identical, but any given population of these birds — Bachman’s sparrows — uses as many as 120 different song types to communicate. Like human language, birdsong is dynamic. Every avian generation makes choices about which songs to continue singing, which to improve upon and which to drop altogether. A single Bachman’s sparrow might learn only 48 of the songs used by its community, and for decades researchers have been trying to figure out how baby sparrows choose which songs to adopt. Previous studies have focused on social and cultural factors. During their critical song-learning phase of development, young songbirds imitate the adult males in their group who are successful in courtship or have elaborately ornamented plumage. Now, a new study of Bachman’s sparrows reveals another possible part of the equation: the physical environment. Trees, dense shrubs and even wind can scatter or block the transmission of some sound waves, and researchers suspect that young sparrows are less likely to latch onto degraded songs, leading in turn to some songs becoming rarer than others. “The rarer song types don’t propagate quite as well over distance than the common ones do,” said Rindy Anderson, a behavioral ecologist at Florida Atlantic University and an author of the study, which appeared on March 24 in the journal Bioacoustics. All the Bachman’s sparrow song types have a similar form, with a buzzing or whistling note followed by a trill. Some trills are faster or slower than others, and some complex songs contain trills of several frequencies. Researchers recorded a variety of rare and common sparrow songs and then rerecorded them playing in different environments — among dense trees, windy plains and other places that Bachman’s sparrows frequent but that could distort audio signals. Under these conditions, the researchers found that rarer songs did not propagate as well as common songs. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 30300 - Posted: 06.27.2026

By Calli McMurray Kanga the marmoset places her hand on the lever and looks at Dodson, a fellow marmoset working with her on a task. As it becomes apparent that Dodson is ready to pull his own lever, neurons in Kanga’s dorsomedial prefrontal cortex ramp up their firing. The activity reaches its peak as Kanga decides to pull the lever, in sync with her partner. As a reward for their coordinated effort, both marmosets earn a sip of liquid marshmallow fluff. This type of neuronal computation underlies the “evidence accumulation model,” a major theory of how perceptual decisions are made: The brain gathers evidence and executes a decision once the evidence reaches a certain threshold. The marmoset study, which was published last month in Neuron, demonstrates that the model also applies to social decisions. This result wasn’t a given; making a social decision relies on the changing behavior of another animal, and the actions of the decider can influence what the other animal does, says study investigator Monika Jadi, associate professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Yale University. “It’s a very recurrent system,” she says. Support for the evidence accumulation model has come largely from highly controlled experiments; the fact that the same activity pattern appears in a social and less constrained task “implies that this is a generalizable computation,” says Timothy Hanks, associate professor of neurology at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the work. Social, perceptual, foraging and other decisions are “categories we’ve created,” but there may not be anything “acutely different” about them, says Cory Miller, professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study. “I love this line of work; I think it’s super powerful.” © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Emotions
Link ID: 30297 - Posted: 06.27.2026

A San Francisco startup with ties to Elon Musk’s Neuralink has started testing its brain implant to detect and treat cancer in humans. Coherence Neuro says it temporarily placed its coin-sized implant in the brains of three people undergoing surgery to have brain tumors removed at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia. The implant was in place for roughly 30 minutes before being removed, providing an important safety check before the device can be implanted long-term in patients with brain cancer. Known as a brain-computer interface, the Coherence Neuro device is designed to sense the unique electrical signals of tumors and deliver mild electrical stimulation to prevent their growth. In the time the implant was in the patients’ brains, the company was able to see how it performed for a short period. (The patients had consented prior to surgery.) Matthew MacDougall, Neuralink’s head neurosurgeon, is an adviser and investor in Coherence. Rory Murphy, a neurosurgeon at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Arizona who is an investigator in one of Neuralink’s trials, is also slated to be involved in future trials of the Coherence device. The idea behind treating brain tumors with electrical stimulation comes from the long-held observation that cancerous tissue has distinctive electrical properties. “These are electrical conditions, just like epilepsy, just like depression. This is a network problem in the brain,” says Ben Woodington, chief executive officer and cofounder of Coherence. © 2026 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Biomechanics
Link ID: 30296 - Posted: 06.24.2026

Nicola Davis Science correspondent From “Howdy” to “G’day”, English – like other languages – is rich in dialects. Now researchers have found sperm whales on different sides of the Mediterranean show similar variations in their vocalisations. Sperm whales communicate vocally using sequences of short clicks called codas. However, the rhythmic pattern of these clicks, known as the dialect, can differ between different matriarchal groups. Crucially, one group of sperm whales will only associate with another if they share the same dialect and hence belong to the same “vocal clan”. “The dialect is used to form social structures, within which these animals will cooperate,” said Dr Luke Rendell, of the University of St Andrews and a co-author of the new study, noting similarities in how humans might be more comfortable striking up a conversation with someone who sounds similar to themselves. a whale Now Rendell and colleagues say they have discovered two different dialects among Mediterraean sperm whales – a small, endangered population of a few thousand individuals that are thought to have first entered these waters about 20,000 years ago. What’s more, they say the finding offers new insights into how sperm whale dialects arise. Writing in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the team note genetic studies have previously suggested Mediterranean sperm whales have become isolated from other sperm whales. There are also signs that mating between those in the western and eastern Mediterranean basins is restricted, although individuals have been spotted moving between the two. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30292 - Posted: 06.24.2026

Max Kozlov In the fraction of a second before a person speaks, their brain weaves together complex grammar, precise vocabulary and the underlying meaning of the language. Now, researchers have tracked the electrical crackle of individual brain cells in real time during unscripted conversations, capturing how sentences are built before a single word is spoken. By observing these neurons in a region of the human brain called the frontotemporal cortex, scientists have discovered that individual brain cells act as specialized linguistic building blocks. “We used to think language was this diffuse, whole-network phenomenon,” says Ziv Williams, a neurosurgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston and co-author of the study. “But it turns out you have specific neurons that only care if a word is a noun, or only care if a phrase is ending.” The work was published today in Nature1. To capture this activity, Williams and his colleagues used electrodes that were temporarily implanted in people with epilepsy to monitor their seizures. Because these participants were awake and speaking freely, the team could observe how the brain operated as they spoke. Neuroscientist Jing Cai, also at MGH, says that this set-up provided a rare opportunity to eavesdrop on the cellular processes that underlie speech, capturing details that standard brain-imaging devices cannot obtain. Access to such data provides a “rare” glimpse into the biological machinery that governs speech, says Angela Friederici, a neuropsychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 30291 - Posted: 06.20.2026

By K. R. Callaway Speak a language your whole life and its grammatical rules become ingrained. That’s why you might correctly guess that the present participle of the verb “absquatulate” is “absquatulating,” even if you are completely unfamiliar with the word. But the rules of grammar can vary widely between languages, and neuroscientists long theorized that bilingual speakers must process different languages with separate patterns of brain activity. In a new study, however, researchers found that these patterns were more alike than had been expected. When deciding how to make a word singular or plural, for instance, bilingual people exhibit strikingly similar brain activity regardless of whether they are speaking in their first or second language. “It wasn’t obvious that it was going to be so shared,” said Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, a psychologist and neuroscientist at New York University and an author of the study, which was published on Monday in the journal JNeurosci. “I think this is arguably one of the first very fine-grained findings of how truly integrated two languages in the brain are.” Early research viewed bilingualism as an “add on” or “disruption” to the processing of one’s native language, said Judith Kroll, a psycholinguist at the University of California, Irvine who was not involved in the new study. Subsequent studies have found that bilingual brains tend to display physical differences, such as more efficient white matter and changes to the gray matter, and to perform better on memory and concentration tasks. Now scientists are probing further, to understand whether core aspects of the brain’s neural network does double or triple duty to process multiple languages. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30286 - Posted: 06.17.2026

Miryam Naddaf A brain implant is helping a man with paralysis to communicate with his family and friends and to use his personal computer at home. The brain–computer interface (BCI) has given 48-year-old study participant Casey Harrell, who was diagnosed with a type of motor neuron disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis six years ago, the ability to communicate with an average speed of 56 words per minute. It translates neural activity into text that appears on a computer screen and allows him to operate a computer, send text messages and e-mails and continue his job working in climate advocacy. It is “nothing short of revolutionary”, says Harrell, who is based in Oakland, California. “This has allowed me to keep working and earn money and insurance for my family. This is reconnecting me with friends and family who are too shy or too afraid to come over and not be able to understand me.” The study, published in Nature Medicine on 15 June1, analysed Harrell’s home use of the BCI for nearly two years and is “the most extensive data set and the longest-running speech communication of anyone” with such an implant, says co-author Sergey Stavisky, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis. Previous studies of participants testing BCIs at home showed that the devices had limited efficiency, and more-advanced devices have been tested only in the laboratory. “This is actually helping the patient in day-to-day life,” says Christian Herff, a computational neuroscientist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. BCIs are “really becoming a medical device instead of a research tool”, he adds. Remarkable quality In 2023, Harrell had 256 microelectrodes implanted in his brain’s speech motor cortex. The electrodes were connected to electronic recording devices through titanium pedestals attached to his skull. He began to use the BCI device to decode his speech in the lab with the help of Stavisky and his colleagues. The researchers then trained Harrell and his care partners to operate the BCI system at home. After roughly 40 weeks, he began using the device independently; he is still using it today. The device also has a text-to-speech system that can read completed sentences aloud using a synthesized version of Harrell’s voice from before he was diagnosed. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Robotics; Language
Link ID: 30284 - Posted: 06.17.2026

By Jake Buehler Zebra finches sing their young into biological preparedness for hot weather, all before they even leave the egg. As the heat punishes sun-crisped Australian woodlands, the adult birds make a rapid, peeping “heat call”. That signal kicks off genetic changes in unhatched baby zebra finches’ brains, researchers report June 11 in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The tune appears to give developing finches a physiology-bending forecast, giving them a leg up once they emerge into the broiling conditions on the other side of the eggshell. A decade ago, behavioral ecologist Mylene Mariette and her colleagues discovered that exposure to these heat calls in the egg shortly before hatching changed how the chicks dealt with high temperatures. They grew more slowly, preferred warmer places to nest and seemed better equipped to handle hot conditions. But it was unknown how hearing a simple song could trigger these kinds of physical and behavioral changes in the young. Mariette, of Deakin University in Waurn Ponds, Australia and Julia George, a neuroscientist at Clemson University in South Carolina wanted to know if the songs might initiate changes in the hypothalamus, a small region of the brain heavily involved in regulating metabolism and responses to heat. Hear the finch’s heat-induced call This high-pitched, rapid peeping is the “heat call” of the Australian zebra finch. The effect the call has on the developing brain’s vasculature may make the chicks more resilient against heat stroke. But the impact lasts the birds’ entire life. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Epigenetics
Link ID: 30278 - Posted: 06.13.2026

Ian Sample Claire was in bad shape. She had been brought to the ward on a stretcher and hoisted on to a bed where she lay curled up in a ball. She was unable to speak, her eyes flat and face expressionless. While she could move her right arm a little, her left arm and both legs were immobile. Life had changed dramatically for Claire, a mother of three in her late 30s, many months earlier, when she collapsed while on a night out with friends. A weakness in an artery at the base of her brain had ruptured, spilling blood around her frontal lobe. She was taken to hospital, where surgeons removed two side plate-sized pieces of bone from her skull to relieve the pressure on her brain. She spent months in intensive care. Can a patient with such profound impairment improve in any meaningful way, especially so long after the event? That was the question for Orlando Swayne, a consultant neurologist and co-lead of the pioneering neurorehabilitation unit at the National hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, a Victorian redbrick building in Queen Square, central London. It was a few years before the pandemic when Swayne first met Claire on the ward. She made eye contact but showed no other response. He knew from the referring hospital that she could write single-word answers to queries, but these revealed characteristic signs of the brain damage she had sustained. Before leaving her bedside to tend to other patients, Swayne asked if she had any questions. With a pencil clenched in her right hand, she wrote: “Questions, questions, questions,” and then tailed off into a wiggly line. The pathological repetition comes from a failure in the frontal lobe to keep actions moving along in sequence. “There are some patients who start off, when we first work with them, severely impaired – and I mean very severely impaired,” says Swayne. Claire (not her real name) was one such patient. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Stroke; Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 30268 - Posted: 06.03.2026

By Jake Currie Chimpanzees and humans share 98 percent of their genomes, so what’s in that 2 percent that makes us uniquely human? According to a new study published in Science Advances, a tiny portion of these genes play an outsized role in our language skills—and Neanderthals had the same sequences. Subscribe to skip ads Featured Video These segments of the human genome, known as Human Ancestor Quickly Evolved Regions (HAQERs) are non-coding sequences that showed accelerated evolution after humans split from the ancestor they shared with apes. Even though they represent only 0.1 percent of our genes, they’re responsible for the neural “hardware” for language. “What we’re seeing is how a very small part of the genome can have an outsized influence, not just on who we were as a species, but on who we are as individuals,” study author Jacob Michaelson of the University of Iowa said in a statement. “These aren’t genes we’re talking about. They’re regulatory regions that act like the volume knob on genes.” The HAQERs also interact with another vital speech gene: FOXP2. Identified in 1998, FOXP2 is a transcription factor active in the development of the neural circuitry of language use, and mutations in the gene can cause speech problems. “So, if the HAQERs are like volume knobs that can be turned, FOXP2 is one of the hands that is turning these volume knobs,” Michaelson said. © Nautilus 2026

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 30215 - Posted: 04.26.2026

Nicholas Humphrey In his novel Penguin Island (1908), Anatole France spins a wonderful tale about a blind old monk who sets off from Brittany on a mission to the Hebrides and lands on an island inhabited only by penguins. Though the birds speak a strange language, he assumes they must be human beings. So he proceeds to baptise them. When the news of this reaches heaven, it causes a major stir. God himself is embarrassed. He gathers an assembly of clerics and doctors, and asks them for an opinion on the delicate question of whether the birds must now be given souls. It is a matter of more than theoretical importance. ‘The Christian state,’ St Cornelius points out, ‘is not without serious inconveniences for a penguin … The habits of birds are, in many points, contrary to the commandments of the Church …’ After lengthy discussion, they settle on a compromise. The baptised penguins are indeed to be granted souls – but, on St Catherine’s recommendation, their souls are to be of small size. For the penguins, souls were an unexpected bonus. As René Descartes, the philosopher-scientist of the 17th century, had explained, nonhuman animals in general, in a state of nature, are mere soulless machines. Here’s a sketch of a Cartesian penguin, without even a smidgen of a soul. Descartes believed that humans too are machines of a kind. But he held that, with humans, thankfully, God has arranged the addition of a soul as standard practice. Early in infancy, the material substance of the human brain is put into communication via the pineal gland with the separate substance of the mind: res extensa (extended stuff) is joined by res cogitans (thinking stuff). The consciousness that results lays the foundation for the soul. © Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012-2026

Keyword: Consciousness; Language
Link ID: 30204 - Posted: 04.18.2026

Oliver Milman We may appear to have little in common with sperm whales – enormous, ocean-dwelling animals that last shared a common ancestor with humans more than 90 million years ago. But the whales’ vocalized communications are remarkably similar to our own, researchers have discovered. Not only do sperm whale have a form of “alphabet” and form vowels within their vocalizations but the structure of these vowels behaves in the same way as human speech, the new study has found. Sperm whales communicate in a series of short clicks called codas. Analysis of these clicks shows that the whales can differentiate vowels through the short or elongated clicks or through rising or falling tones, using patterns similar to languages such as Mandarin, Latin and Slovenian. The structure of the whales’ communication has “close parallels in the phonetics and phonology of human languages, suggesting independent evolution”, the paper, published in the Proceedings B journal, states. Sperm whale coda vocalizations are “highly complex and represent one of the closest parallels to human phonology of any analyzed animal communication system”, it added. The findings are the latest discovery about the lives of sperm whales by Project Ceti (standing for Cetacean Translation Initiative), an organization that has studied whales off the coast of Dominica in an attempt to find out what they are saying. Last month, the project released video of a sperm whale giving birth while other whales supported it. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30201 - Posted: 04.15.2026

Lynne Peeples In 2021, dermatologist David Ozog was on holiday with his family in the Bahamas, when his 18-year-old son had a massive stroke. The teenager was airlifted to Florida, and then to Chicago for surgery. As his son was lying partially paralysed in a hospital bed, Ozog got a call from a colleague who had an unconventional suggestion. The colleague, a dermatologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, told Ozog about research he was conducting with the US Department of Defense. Early results hinted that red and near-infrared light applied to the head might protect neural tissue after brain injury. He urged Ozog to consider trying it on his son. Ozog stayed up until 4 a.m. that night reading scientific papers and, ultimately, ordering several panels made of red and near-infrared light-emitting diodes (LEDs). “I started sneaking them into the hospital,” says Ozog, who works at Henry Ford Health in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Today, his son is walking and back in university. Ozog cannot prove that light therapy made a difference, but he thinks that it helped. He has since become a convert to an idea that, at the time, was considered fringe. “I thought the same thing,” he says, “How could shining this thing on you possibly have any biologic effect?” But what was at the margins of medicine just a few years ago is now edging towards the mainstream. Red-light devices are increasingly appearing in dermatology offices, wellness centres, locker rooms and homes. According to some projections, the global market will surpass US$1 billion by 2030, propelled by a surge of companies promising benefits for everything from ageing skin to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) — claims echoed widely across social media. Experts warn that there is considerable hype about red-light therapy. But a growing body of legitimate science has been exploring the benefits for several conditions. Clinical studies have reported improvements in peripheral neuropathy1, retinal degeneration2 and certain neurological disorders3. For some indications, expert groups now recommend red-light regimens1. Researchers are also uncovering how red and near-infrared light might exert these effects. Mitochondria — the power plants of the cell — are emerging as a central piece of the puzzle. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Stroke; Parkinsons
Link ID: 30182 - Posted: 03.28.2026

Max Kozlov For decades, scientists have struggled to understand exactly how years of taking hits to the head while playing sports can translate into severe memory loss and dementia later in life. Now, a study1 published today in Science Translational Medicine reveals that the protective shield known as the blood–brain barrier can be damaged and leaky decades after an athlete retires from sport. This persistent leakiness seems to trigger a long-lasting immune response that is closely tied to cognitive decline, the study finds. The work is a “very important study that finds the disruption of the blood–brain barrier many years after head trauma”, says Katerina Akassoglou, a neuroimmunologist at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, California, who was not involved in the research. Part of the difficulty in studying the long-term effects of head trauma is that some neurodegenerative conditions, such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), can be diagnosed only by examining neuronal tissue after death, says Matthew Campbell, a specialist in neurovascular genetics at Trinity College Dublin, who co-authored the paper. Campbell and his colleagues wanted to see whether they could spot warning signs in living athletes by looking at the blood–brain barrier, a dense layer of cells lining the blood vessels that supply the brain. This layer usually keeps harmful substances from leaking out of the blood and into brain tissue. To investigate, the researchers scanned the brains of 47 athletes who had retired from playing contact sports with a high risk of concussion and repetitive head impact, such as rugby and boxing. They also examined a control group of non-athletes and athletes who had played non-contact sports. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 30170 - Posted: 03.21.2026

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