By Elizabeth Preston To our human eyes, a mouse’s furred face doesn’t betray much emotion. But if you watch the body language of a mouse who’s reunited with one of her sisters after five days in a cage alone, you might suspect you know what she’s feeling. The formerly isolated mouse chatters in squeaks too high for a human to hear. She follows her sister, crawling beneath the other mouse’s body as if trying to get a hug. She looks like she’s feeling what you or I feel when meeting a long-lost friend or a family member — maybe with more sniffing. Loneliness isn’t just for humans, and neither are its harms. Over the past decade or so, some researchers have come to believe that an animal’s craving for the company of others isn’t just a preference, but a basic, deeply held need. When we don’t socialize enough, we feel the lack like hunger or thirst, they say. When we’ve had our fill of togetherness, we feel satisfied or quenched. The amount of socializing a creature needs may be particular to that species, and even to that individual. Scientists have found within-species social differences in birds, monkeys, fish and even cockroaches. Among humans, “you can feel lonely at a party, or you can feel fine alone in your office,” says Kay Tye, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California. Whatever the ideal degree of togetherness, Tye and others think that an animal’s need to balance time alone and time with others represents a kind of homeostasis: an equilibrium that’s critical for survival. Today, they are on a hunt to find where, in the brain, this equilibrium is controlled — and hoping their work will hold dividends for lonely humans.

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 30269 - Posted: 06.06.2026

By Hannah Thomasy Prairie voles have a reputation as one of the most social rodents, but when Aubrey Kelly tried to use them to study the neurobiology of group dynamics, she discovered limits to their sociability. “Prairie voles are indeed super social with their pair-bond partner and with their offspring,” says Kelly, associate professor of psychology at Emory University. “But if an adult prairie vole encounters a stranger, they’re going to fight—oftentimes to the death.” She shifted her focus to paternal care in the voles but stayed on the lookout for a truly social rodent that lived in rich, complex communities. As a graduate student, she had studied the neural circuitry that contributes to such societies in zebra finches, and she hoped to make similar inroads in mammalian brains. “I got really into the idea of animal societies and how individuals can just get along in big groups, which is something that we do ourselves,” Kelly says. About four years later, a colleague introduced her to spiny mice. Despite their name, these animals are more closely related to gerbils than to laboratory mice. They live in large, flexible, mixed-sex groups and rarely brawl, the colleague told her. Kelly was intrigued—perhaps these groups were the miniature mammal societies she had been searching for. Her subsequent work has demonstrated that, indeed, these critters not only tolerate groups but actually prefer them: When given a choice between associating with two peers or eight peers, they spend the majority of their time with the larger group. Now Kelly is digging into the neural mechanisms underlying this communal lifestyle. Kelly spoke with The Transmitter about spiny mouse “friendships,” custom CRISPR tools and the neurobiology of coexistence. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Aggression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 30266 - Posted: 06.03.2026

By Elizabeth Pennisi Homing pigeons don’t rely on gut instinct to return to the roost. But a nearby organ — the liver — might point the way. White blood cells in the birds’ livers accumulate iron and act as an internal compass when clouds block the sun that normally helps them navigate, researchers report May 28 in Science. While scientists generally agree that some animals use Earth’s magnetic field to guide migrations, they had not pinned down how, and the new work offers a surprising explanation. For decades, researchers have fiercely debated first if and then how birds sense magnetic fields and use them for navigation. One prominent idea involves proteins in their eyes undergoing a reaction in magnetic fields. No one has been able to prove exactly how this so-called “quantum effect” is in play. Other animals that orient using Earth’s magnetism, such as bats and sharks, lack the proteins, so the debate languished unresolved. Ornithologist Martin Wikelski of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Radolfzell, Germany, and immunologist Christian Kurts of the University of Bonn in Germany stumbled on another idea more than a decade ago at a conference coffee break. Kurts mentioned how frustrated he was that immune system cells called macrophages in mouse spleens would stick to magnetic columns in instruments used to separate different types of cells, ruining his experiments. The reason the macrophages were sticking, he discovered, was that they accumulated and recycled damaged red blood cells’ iron atoms, which aligned in magnetic fields. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026

Keyword: Animal Migration; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 30264 - Posted: 05.30.2026

Simon Spichak Acute stress makes it difficult to link memories of past events with fresh information, a study1 suggests. The results help to explain why people struggle to show insight under pressure. The study, published today in Science Advances, combined brain imaging and psychological testing to show how stress disrupts people’s ability to tap into records of previous experiences and make deductions. The combination of behavioural testing and neural imaging “to actually see what’s going awry is really compelling”, says Brice Kuhl, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon in Eugene, who was not involved in the study. Only connect The brain connects new and old information to make inferences through a cognitive process called integration. For example, if you have a memory of your friend wearing a bright green jacket, and you see a bright green jacket on a park bench, you might integrate your memory and the visual input to infer that your friend is at the park. This ability can be impaired in individuals with some mental-health conditions, such as anxiety disorders and psychosis. The brain area called the hippocampus is essential for integration. Since it is also particularly vulnerable to stress, Lars Schwabe, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany, and his colleagues decided to test how acute stress would affect the brain’s ability to integrate information and make inferences. Memory task On the experiment’s first day, 121 participants were asked to memorize a series of paired images, each containing one image of an animal and one image of either a face or a scene. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Stress; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30255 - Posted: 05.23.2026

By Nicole Rust Anthropic’s artificial intelligence (AI), Claude, like other large language models (LLMs), appears to express emotions ranging from joy to despair when interacting with human users. In a report the company shared in April, researchers examined the model’s inner workings to understand why these emotional expressions happen and what they reflect about how Claude works. They concluded that these emotional displays are nontrivial, reflecting more than simple repetitions of patterns in Claude’s training data (the common pairing of the phrases “rainy day” and “feeling sad,” for example). At the same time, they found no evidence that Claude has genuine feelings like our own. Instead, Claude’s emotion equivalents contribute to its ability to adaptively solve complex problems. Like human emotions, this adaptivity comes at a cost, sometimes leading Claude to make irrational decisions. We should not conflate Claude’s emotions with our own, but studying emotion equivalents in Claude and other AIs can help lay the foundation for understanding the mysterious, multifaceted functions that emotions serve in humans. To understand Anthropic’s claims about Claude, we first need to grapple with its definition of “emotion.” For many, the term implies an inner experience—feelings such as happiness, fear or despair. But that is not the only way to define it. Consider “memory.” Like emotion, memory can refer to an inner experience: When we remember, we experience something. Yet when we talk about the memory of our laptop—having it retrieve an image, for example—we do not think of it as having an inner experience. In this second sense, memory is defined functionally; it is simply the capacity to store information for later recall and use. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 30248 - Posted: 05.20.2026

By Richard Stone The wind picks up dust from the unpaved road one afternoon in December as Jack van Honk turns into a ramshackle neighborhood in Lambert’s Bay, on the west coast of South Africa. A stocky woman in a red patterned sundress steps out of a small home painted palest sea green, her ochre-dirt yard crowded with potted plants, many medicinal. She smiles broadly, deep wrinkles creasing a face that is cherubic and yet careworn beyond her 47 years. “Doctor! I missed you,” she beams, her husky voice barely more than a hoarse whisper. Maria carries a rare genetic mutation that is almost unknown outside of southern Africa. Its effects have been to calcify a part of the brain called the basolateral amygdala, and to thicken and scar the vocal cords. A friend of Maria with the same condition lives several hours inland, and sometimes they meet when van Honk brings them to Cape Town for brain scans and other tests. “It helps to know I’m not alone,” Maria says. By every measure of daily life — holding down a job, keeping a household running, raising two teenage sons — Maria is competent and engaged. “You talk to her, and you don’t see anything wrong,” says van Honk, a social neuroscientist at the University of Cape Town. She and others he knows with her condition, Urbach-Wiethe disease, “are kind, sweet people by nature.” In an interview in her kitchen, Maria struggles to recollect even a fleeting moment of unhappiness — before mentioning that she kicked out her partner some years ago because of his drinking. Photograph of a woman in a red dress standing in her yard. Maria lives with a rare genetic disorder that damages part of the amygdala — a brain region increasingly linked not just to fear, but to how humans weigh the needs of others.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 30246 - Posted: 05.16.2026

By Hannah Thomasy For nearly a decade, Vincent Bombail has been tickling rats. It’s been a standard technique used in the study of animal happiness. But not all rats particularly enjoy the experience, data show. Female rats prefer gentler, more playful tickling than males, Bombail and his colleagues report April 15 in Biology Letters. The findings suggest that the same physical experience evokes a different emotional response in different individuals, potentially influencing the results of studies on animal happiness. “This research helps us understand these animals as playful but also rich and complex and having opinions,” says Daniel Weary, an animal welfare scientist at the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the study. “Understanding the affective lives of animals is actually one of the coolest and most difficult questions there is in science,” he says. As early as the 1930s, researchers deliberately exposed rats to standardized negative experiences to study the physical effects of stress. Figuring out how to study positive experiences took longer. It wasn’t until the 1990s that researchers developed the standard tickling protocol, where a researcher flips a rat over, pins it on its back and tickles its belly. The protocol is intended to mimic the rough-and-tumble play of young male rats. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 30242 - Posted: 05.16.2026

By Alonso Daboub Brain cells that help make us human are also uniquely vulnerable to multiple sclerosis. A newfound cellular repair kit can’t keep up with the disease’s damage, leading to the cell death that’s a hallmark of progressive MS, researchers report April 1 in two papers in Nature. The discovery uncovers an important and underexplored mechanism behind how the condition progressively shrinks the brain. By better understanding how MS kills brain cells, scientists can design treatments aimed at preventing cognitive decline, says David Rowitch, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge. Each year, 10,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with MS. The body’s immune system attacks neurons in the brain, causing inflammation and unpredictable flare-ups of muscle weakness, tingling and pain. Research has primarily focused on the way the disease causes nerve fibers to lose myelin, the fatty insulation that helps them send messages. But in a second, progressive phase, neurons in the brain begin to die. Patients experience sharper declines in their cognitive ability, leading to difficulties in memory and reasoning as their brains shrink. “There’s no treatment really for that part,” says Steve Fancy, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco Previous research identified a specific group of neurons in the human cortex, the brain’s wrinkly outermost layer, that are particularly vulnerable to degeneration in progressive MS. Called CUX2 neurons, these brain cells help make up two layers of the cortex thought to play an important role in things like cognition and computation. These layers in the brain are “really very important for making us human,” Fancy says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 30238 - Posted: 05.09.2026

By Kristen French What is a cat, and how do we know when we’ve encountered one? This question may be harder to answer than it seems. Neuroscientists Lisa Feldman Barrett and Earl Miller say people typically think about categories such as cat and apple backward—bottom-up instead of top-down. In reality, you don’t hear a meow, and see whiskers and paws and then conclude, “Cat!” Before any of this happens, your brain has sent signals about a “cat hypothesis”—and a plan for how to respond to a cat—to your body, based on past experience, Barrett and Miller say. This cat hypothesis, in turn, actively orchestrates what signals your body processes and how. In other words, the brain constructs classifications on the fly, and we’re not even conscious this is happening until after the fact. Barrett, a renowned Harvard neuroscientist and psychologist who has written for Nautilus and is best known for her theory of constructed emotion, teamed up with Miller to review “converging” evidence from a wide range of disciplines: neuroanatomy, electrophysiology, brain imaging, and cognitive science. The pair published their results recently in Nature Reviews: Neuroscience. Their new theory of categories has a lot in common with Barrett’s theory of how emotions work. She argues that emotions aren’t hardwired universal reactions, but are instead predictions constructed rapidly and in the moment from internal bodily sensations, past experiences, and cultural context. While her work on emotions has been highly influential, it remains an active subject of debate in the field of psychology. I spoke with Barrett and Miller about what they call “folk psychology,” and how their theory of categorization relates to so-called beginner’s mind, human bias, and objectivity and mental illness. We also talked about Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s modes of thinking fast and slow. © Copyright 2026

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 30226 - Posted: 05.02.2026

By Ellen Barry Edna Foa, an Israeli American psychologist who pressed her field — and her patients — to more directly confront fear and anxiety, revolutionizing the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, died on March 24 at a hospital in Philadelphia. She was 88. Her death, from complications of pneumonia, was confirmed by her daughter Yael Foa. Dr. Foa completed her training in the late 1960s, when clinicians tended to treat people with severe anxiety disorders cautiously and gradually. One of her first patients, a woman with an intense fear of objects related to death, had been prescribed a course of “systematic desensitization.” Dr. Foa was instructed to visit her every day carrying a small stone from a cemetery, bringing the stone a little closer each time until at long last the patient would be able to hold it. “We started to feel that she will never get better at that rate,” Dr. Foa recalled in a 2018 podcast interview. Dr. Foa decided to move faster, driving the patient to a funeral home and bringing her inside so that the woman was forced to deal with her distress. Avoiding those feelings, Dr. Foa posited, was actually holding the patient back. This theory culminated, about a decade later, in Dr. Foa’s landmark innovation. In the 1980s, she developed prolonged exposure therapy, a structured protocol of eight to 12 90-minute sessions in which the patient recounts a traumatic event in the present tense, lingering on the most vivid and upsetting elements. Then the patient undertakes real life exposure to reminders of the event. These sessions could be uncomfortable, Dr. Foa acknowledged. But they served to ease the patient’s sensitivity and correct flawed thinking, demonstrating that there was no harm in confronting the feared object, place or event. Over the years that followed, a series of studies supported the approach’s effectiveness. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 30203 - Posted: 04.18.2026

By Michael S. Rosenwald Thomas S. Langner, a sociologist who helped lead a landmark study of New Yorkers that revealed striking insights about the social, cultural and economic forces that shape mental illness, died on March 16 at his home in Sandy Hook, Conn. He was 102. His wife, Susan Kassirer, confirmed the death. When “Mental Health in the Metropolis: The Midtown Manhattan Study” was published in 1962, headline writers had a field day with the top-line finding: that only 18.5 percent of Manhattan residents could be considered psychologically well adjusted, while 23 percent showed significant impairment in daily functioning. “City Gets Mental Test, Results Are Real Crazy,” Newsday declared. The Daytona Beach Morning Journal wondered: “New York Living for ‘Nuts’ Only?” The actual substance of the two-part study — the second installment appeared in 1963 — was the challenge it posed to the widely held view in psychiatry that biological and individual factors are the primary drivers of mental illness. Professor Langner, along with a team of psychiatrists, anthropologists and social workers at Cornell University Medical College (now Weill Cornell Medicine), spent more than a decade studying 1,660 people who lived on the East Side of Manhattan, between 59th and 96th Streets. The researchers concluded that developing mental illness didn’t simply come down to a genetic lottery. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 30198 - Posted: 04.15.2026

By Claudia López Lloreda A previously unrecognized population of fibroblasts seals off the base of the choroid plexus—the network of blood vessels and cerebrospinal-fluid-producing epithelial cells that line the ventricles—from the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and the rest of the brain, a new study in mice shows. The newly identified barrier provides an added layer of protection that is distinct from the well-known blood-brain barrier and the one that the epithelial cells form between the blood and the CSF. The findings help settle a long-standing debate about whether there was a blind spot in the choroid plexus that gave the periphery access into the brain, says Britta Engelhardt, professor of immunobiology at the University of Bern, who was not involved in the work. “Some [scientists] speculated that there is a leak, like an opening, a secret window into the brain, and others said, ‘No, there must be a barrier that we have overlooked.’ And it’s very obvious now.” Fibroblasts at the base of the choroid plexus, connected by adherens and tight junction proteins, cluster together around blood vessels and form a sealed barrier in mice, the researchers found. This structure represents a crucial component of compartmentalization in the choroid plexus, Engelhardt says. The cells were also present in human postmortem brain samples. Similar to other barriers, the seal becomes leaky in response to inflammation triggered by lipopolysaccharide, a component of the bacterial cell wall, and it may coordinate immune cell crossing from the blood into the brain, the study also showed. The work was published in February in Nature Neuroscience. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30190 - Posted: 04.04.2026

By Diana Kwon Human minds often wander. Whether we’re busy at work, doing chores or exercising, our thoughts frequently shift away from the task at hand. These spontaneous thoughts sometimes turn toward sensations in the body, such as our heartbeat or breath, and that could affect our immediate emotional state and long-term mental health, researchers report March 25 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many studies focus on thinking about memories, events and other people, what scientists consider the cognitive aspects of mind wandering, says Micah Allen, a neuroscientist at Aarhus University in Denmark. This research suggests that mind wandering plays an important role in planning, learning, creativity and other important mental processes. It has also been linked to negative emotions and some, such as obsessively ruminating on past mistakes, may contribute to depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and other mental illnesses. Do you share our vision for a healthier, happier world through science? But how the mind might drift to bodily sensations, what some researchers call “body wandering,” and its effects have largely been overlooked, Allen says. He and colleagues had 536 people lie still in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner and then complete a questionnaire about what was on their minds during that time. In addition to the typical content of daydreams, such as memories, plans or social interactions, participants reported paying attention to sensations in their body, such as their breathing, heartbeats and bladder. The team also found evidence of this in the MRI scans: Body wandering appeared to have a distinct brain signature from that of “cognitive” mind wandering. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Stress; Attention
Link ID: 30188 - Posted: 04.04.2026

By Ellen Barry When Cohen Miles-Rath walks into his father’s house, the history of his psychosis is right there in front of him. There is the place where he was standing when he received a cryptic message on his phone: The devil had entered his father’s body. There is the drawer where he spotted a knife whose handle was white — the color of God! There is the floor where, as they grappled over the knife, Cohen bit off part of his father’s earlobe, and blood spattered over both of them. There is the spot where, pinned to the floor, Cohen reached up with the knife and slashed wildly at his father’s throat. The violence lasted seconds but changed his whole life. With voices still racketing in his head, Cohen found himself in jail, facing charges of second-degree assault and criminal mischief, felonies punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Stunned and bleeding, his father had pressed charges, and taken out a restraining order against him. But Cohen hadn’t killed him. In the years that followed, he had the feeling that he had walked right up to the edge of a chasm. About 300 times a year in the United States, a child kills a parent, making up around 2 percent of all homicides. A large portion of these cases involve people like Cohen: young men with severe mental illness who are living at home. When mounting symptoms of psychosis make school or work impossible, parents are the support system of last resort. Paranoid delusions can cruelly invert that logic, turning people against the figure closest to them. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 30186 - Posted: 04.01.2026

By Andrew Jacobs Over the past two years, Australia, a country long known for its strict drug laws, has been allowing psychiatrists to treat post-traumatic stress disorder with MDMA, the chemical compound better known as Ecstasy or molly. The early results have been striking, researchers say, with more than half of patients who received MDMA along with psychotherapy reporting significant relief from PTSD. Just as notably, Australian drug regulators have not recorded any serious adverse events among the nearly 200 patients who have been through the program, which includes up to three dosing sessions with MDMA, a synthetic stimulant that promotes empathy, emotional connection and feelings of euphoria. That data point is especially relevant given the contentious debate in the United States over the safety of MDMA — one that in 2024 helped sink the prospects for MDMA therapy at the Food and Drug Administration. “Compared to conventional treatments, the outcomes we’re seeing to date with MDMA-assisted therapy have been extraordinary,” said Dr. Ranil Gunewardene, a psychiatrist in Sydney who has treated more than 40 patients since the Australian regulators created a legal pathway for the drug. But Australia’s experiment with psychedelic medicine also highlights the limitations and constraints that the nascent field is likely to face as it gains wider attention from regulators and practitioners. Because Australia is the first country to legalize and regulate MDMA therapy, researchers have been especially eager for real-world data about a drug that has been pejoratively associated with rave culture. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30177 - Posted: 03.25.2026

By Sarah Scoles When George W. Maschke applied to work for the FBI in 1994, he had already held a security clearance for over 11 years. The government had deemed him trustworthy through his career in the Army. But soon, a machine and a man would not come to the same conclusion. His application to be a special agent had passed initial muster. And so, in the spring of 1995, according to his account, he found himself sitting across from an FBI polygraph examiner, answering questions about his life and loyalties. He told the truth, he said in an interview with Undark. But in a blog post on his website, he recalled the examiner told him that the polygraph machine — which measured some of Maschke’s physiological responses — indicated that he was being deceptive about keeping classified information secret, and about his contacts with foreign intelligence agencies. After a failed polygraph exam in which he says he told the truth, George Maschke eventually co-founded the advocacy website AntiPolygraph.org. “My entire career prospects were basically shattered,” said Maschke. “How could I have told the truth and failed the polygraph?” He wanted an answer. And so soon after his failed exam, he said he went to the research library to try to learn more about what had transpired between his body, that machine, and the measuring man. Further spurred by another negative polygraph experience, the resulting deep dive on polygraphs and examination methods eventually led him to co-found the advocacy website AntiPolygraph.org. “When I had my polygraph experience, I had no one to talk to,” said Maschke, who went on to work as a legal translator in the Netherlands. He hoped his public-facing website meant others wouldn’t have that experience.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 30175 - Posted: 03.25.2026

By Holly Barker Astrocytes—but not neurons—in the amygdala encode anxiety-like states in mice, according to a paper published today in Neuron. The findings suggest that the cells—which are altered in people with some neuropsychiatric conditions, including autism—contribute to mental health difficulties documented in such groups. “In a very sophisticated way, the [study] shows that astrocytes are these core computational cells for highly complicated behaviors,” says Michael Wheeler, assistant professor of neurology at Harvard University, who did not contribute to the new work. “Astrocytes are understanding and signaling computations in these circuits.” Violent movies and other stressful stimuli activate the amygdala, human imaging studies have shown. And in mice, neurons in the basolateral amygdala are active when the animals are placed in exposed environments, which they find aversive, previous research has found. But that neuronal activity appears to mark shifts between defensive and exploratory behaviors rather than tracking anxiety-related ones, according to a later study. The new findings suggest that astrocytes not only help neurons to regulate anxiety—as previous studies have shown—but “instruct local neurons from the top down,” says study investigator Ciaran Murphy-Royal, associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Montreal. The cells’ activity appears to function as a “safety signal,” that relays danger to other brain regions, he says. Murphy-Royal and his colleagues used calcium imaging to measure astrocytic activity in the mouse basolateral amygdala. Calcium release tracked with freezing, hesitancy and other behaviors reminiscent of anxiety as mice investigated various environments, the team found. In the elevated plus maze, for example, astrocyte activity rose when the rodents explored an open arm of the maze and surged whenever mice peeked over the edge of the suspended setup. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Emotions; Glia
Link ID: 30174 - Posted: 03.25.2026

By Simon Makin A brain repair kit that helps yaks and other animals naturally cope with low oxygen levels at high altitudes may point to a new way to treat brain diseases such as multiple sclerosis. In mice with brain damage that mimics MS, the kit’s tools lessened signs of damage in young mice exposed to low oxygen and improved symptoms of MS in adult mice, researchers report March 13 in Neuron. Previous research found that animals living on the Tibetan Plateau, such as yaks and antelopes, carry a mutation in a gene called Retsat. Their lowland counterparts lack the mutation, leading scientists to suspect that it helps protect the brain in low-oxygen environments. “People usually think it’s because of better lung capability, but I wondered whether evolutionary adaptation changes the brain,” says Liang Zhang, a neuroscientist at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. In particular, he was intrigued that these animals have normal white matter in their brains. White matter makes up about half the brain; it consists of bundles of nerve fibers that allow different brain regions to communicate. This neural wiring is wrapped in myelin, a fatty substance that ensures nerve fibers conduct signals efficiently. In MS, the immune system attacks myelin, leading to neurological symptoms and problems with balance and coordination. Myelin production requires a lot of energy, which the brain gets from oxygen. Low oxygen levels, known as hypoxia, can therefore disrupt myelination. During gestation, such disruption can lead to conditions such as cerebral palsy in newborns. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 30160 - Posted: 03.14.2026

By Viviane Callier The difference between a doting dad and a deadbeat one may come down to a molecular switch in the brain — at least in African striped mice. Boosting activity of a particular gene in part of the brain known for regulating maternal care turned nurturing males into standoffish ones and even, in some cases, into mouse pup killers, researchers report February 18 in Nature. The findings reveal how social context can alter gene activity in the brain and thereby shape male caregiving. Male caregiving is prevalent in fish and amphibians, suggesting that it is a very ancient behavior in vertebrates. Among mammals, however, fewer than 5 percent of species have fathers that stick around to raise their young. Male African striped mice (Rhabdomys pumilio) are one of the exceptions to the rule, though they vary a lot in their nurturing tendencies, making them an ideal species in which to study the factors that influence this behavior. Some look after the young and groom them; others ignore the pups or even attack them. The same male could become aggressive or doting. To understand that behavior, comparative neurobiologist Forrest Rogers and his colleagues observed the mice’s social environment. In laboratory settings, group-housed males tended to be aggressive toward mouse pups when introduced to them. But surprisingly, when these males were moved to be housed alone, they became very paternal. “I thought clearly something must be wrong, because all the work we know of in mice and rats is that if you socially isolate them, they become very anxious and often not the most caring of individuals,” says Rogers, of Princeton University. But the lone African striped male mice didn’t seem anxious at all. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 30159 - Posted: 03.14.2026

By Robert Draper The hallucinations began the moment I lay back onto the mat and pulled the mask over my eyes. Oh, I instantly thought, this is not at all what I expected. The first images were assembled like a film strip, a sharply focused Technicolor row of strong, grim-faced men who appeared to be some sort of tribal chiefs. Within seconds, a green tint covered their faces, which then dissolved, replaced by images of conflict. Bodies strewed across a battlefield. Starving children. They, too, dissolved. A pile of rocks took shape. From the pile, several long, dark snakes slithered out. This could be unpleasant, I thought. A crackling sensation coursed through my entire body, as if all my neurons were firing — not in any way painful, but also inescapable. I could feel my hands sweating. My ears buzzed, and it wasn’t long before I heard the murmuring voices of people who weren’t there, followed by the sound of puking from people who were. There were 11 of us in the treatment room, in a basement in a cottage that overlooked the Pacific Ocean just south of Tijuana, Mexico, where ibogaine — a Schedule I drug in the United States — is legal. It was the night before Thanksgiving. We all had our reasons for coming to the treatment clinic called Ambio Life Sciences. Several in the group were veterans suffering from PTSD, traumatic brain injury, substance abuse or some combination of those. A sex-crimes detective had been in a terrible car accident and lost much of her short-term memory. A Marine veteran and blueberry farmer in Georgia was quietly drinking his life away. And there was Erin, a Texas-based corporate consultant who had suffered trauma that began in childhood and continued in the workplace. Erin’s mat was next to mine at the far end of the treatment room. Because we were the only two in the group not to throw up during the 10-hour experience, we later referred to ours as the Quiet Corner. The drug is derived from the Tabernanthe iboga plant, found mainly in Gabon in central Africa. The powerful hallucinogen has long been used there in the initiation ritual that is part of the Bwiti spiritual tradition, involving an intense all-night group ceremony of dance and music and fire-keeping that culminates in a trancelike state. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30156 - Posted: 03.11.2026