By Meghan Rosen It sounds like something from a horror movie: A disease that eats through bone, dissolving the fused plates of the skull like bubbling acid. But a type of brain cancer called glioblastoma actually does something similar, triggering the erosion of living skull tissue, researchers report October 3 in Nature Neuroscience. The work shows in gory detail that brain cancer can erode bone, a harmful effect that wasn’t previously known, says Jinan Behnan, a brain tumor immunologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, New York. Behnan’s findings uncover a creepy new facet of glioblastoma, an enigmatic cancer still cloaked in scientific questions. “We really still don’t understand exactly what this disease is,” she says. Glioblastoma is an aggressive form of brain cancer that’s particularly lethal and nearly impossible to cure. In the United States, doctors diagnose more than 12,000 new cases every year. Five years after diagnosis, only about five percent of patients over 40 years old survive. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 29982 - Posted: 10.25.2025

By Catherine Offord Neuroscientists have been studying synapses, the fundamental junctions that allow rapid communication between neurons, for well over a century. But now, a research team has identified a different set of neuronal connections in the brain—one that might bypass synapses altogether, the group reports today in Science. Using high-resolution images of mouse and human brains, the researchers documented a network of tubes, each about 3 micrometers long and just a few hundred nanometers thick, connecting neurons to one another. In mouse cells, the team found evidence of neuron-to-neuron transfer of electrical signals via these nanotubes, and even the passage of proteins linked to Alzheimer’s disease. “We’ve been looking at the brain forever now, and every once in a while, a surprise comes along,” says Lary Walker, a neuroscientist and professor emeritus at Emory University who was not involved in the work. Although there’s still a lot to pin down about these nanotubes’ basic biology, he suggests the discovery could have wide implications for scientists’ understanding of neuronal communication and disease. Researchers already knew some cells form nanotubes. In a 2004 Science paper, a team in Germany described tiny channels that emerged spontaneously between rat kidney cells in a dish and allowed the transfer of organelles. Studies since then have documented these so-called tunneling nanotubes (TNT) in a variety of cell and tissue types, and have linked their presence to processes including organ development, tissue repair, and the spread of viruses within the body. Recent research has identified TNTs forming between neurons and microglia, the brain’s immune cells, and hinted that they have important functions in brain health and disease. But scientists have struggled to find such conduits connecting neurons to one another in the mammalian brain. The search is particularly tricky because neurons’ branching ends, or dendrites, form a tangled mass with one another, and because researchers lack molecular markers distinguishing nanotubes from other cell structures. © 2025 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain imaging
Link ID: 29957 - Posted: 10.04.2025

By Calli McMurray The authors behind a contentious 2022 Science paper that purported to measure neuronal activity using functional MRI (fMRI) retracted the work today. The retraction marks the end of the road for the method, called “direct imaging of neuronal activity,” or DIANA, says Noam Shemesh, principal investigator at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, who was not involved in the now-retracted work. But many neuroimaging researchers still hope to one day use fMRI to capture neuronal activity. “MRI is such a rich modality. It has such rich physics, and not all of it has been exploited in the functional sense,” Shemesh says. DIANA collected fMRI data in a way that enabled the researchers to measure signal changes on the order of tens of milliseconds. The team, led by Jang-Yeon Park at Sungkyunkwan University, captured a signal peak in the somatosensory cortex of mice 25 milliseconds after shocking their whisker pads. Despite an initial flurry of excitement from the field, other labs could not replicate the results. As a result, the paper received an editorial expression of concern in August 2023 because “the methods described in the paper are inadequate to allow reproduction of the results and … the results may have been biased by subjective data selection,” the notice states. Following the editorial expression of concern, “we reanalyzed the data. Unfortunately, the additional results revealed unexpected MR signal characteristics and did not robustly support the original conclusions. We are therefore retracting the paper,” the retraction notice states. Science did not have any additional comment beyond what is outlined in the expression of concern and retraction notice. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29943 - Posted: 09.27.2025

Ivana Drobnjak O'Brien An ultrasound “helmet” offers potential new ways for treating neurological conditions without surgery or other invasive procedures, a study has shown. The device can target brain regions 1,000 times smaller than ultrasound can, and could replace existing approaches such as deep brain stimulation (DBS) in treating Parkinson’s disease. It also holds potential for conditions such as depression, Tourette syndrome, chronic pain, Alzheimer’s and addiction. Unlike DBS, which requires a highly invasive procedure in which electrodes are implanted deep in the brain to deliver electrical pulses, using ultrasound sends mechanical pulses into the brain. But no one had managed to create an approach capable of delivering them precisely enough to make a meaningful impact until now. A study published in Nature Communications introduces a breakthrough system that can hit brain regions 30 times smaller than previous deep-brain ultrasound devices could. “It is a head helmet with 256 sources that fits inside an MRI scanner,” said the author and participant Ioana Grigoras, of Oxford University. “It is chunky and claustrophobic putting it on the head at first, but then you get comfortable.” Current DBS methods used on Parkinson’s patients use hard metal frames that are screwed into the head to hold them down. To test the system, the researchers applied it to seven volunteers, directing ultrasound waves to a tiny region the size of a grain of rice in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), the key pathway for visual information that comes from the eyes to the brain. “The waves reached their target with remarkable accuracy,” the senior author Prof Charlotte Stagg of Oxford University said. “That alone was extraordinary, and no one has done it before.” Follow-up experiments showed that modulating the LGN produced lasting effects in the visual cortex, reducing its activity. “The equivalent in patients with Parkinson’s would be targeting a motor control region and seeing tremors disappear,” she added. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limite

Keyword: Parkinsons; Brain imaging
Link ID: 29919 - Posted: 09.06.2025

By Claudia López Lloreda The process of making a decision engages neurons across the entire brain, according to a new mouse dataset created by an international collaboration. “Many, many areas are recruited even for what are arguably rather simple decisions,” says Anne Churchland, professor of neurobiology at University of California, Los Angeles and one of the founding members of the collaboration, called the International Brain Laboratory (IBL). The canonical model suggests that the activity underlying vision-dependent decisions goes from the visual thalamus to the primary visual cortex and association areas, and then possibly to the frontal cortex, Churchland says. But the new findings suggest that “maybe there’s more parallel processing and less of a straightforward circuit than we thought.” Churchland and other scientists established the IBL in 2017 out of frustration with small-scale studies of decision-making that analyzed only one or two brain regions at a time. The IBL aimed to study how the brain integrates information and makes a decision at scale. “We came together as a large group with the realization that a large team effort could be transformative in these questions that had been kind of stymieing all of us,” Churchland says. After years of standardizing their methods and instrumentation across the 12 participating labs, the IBL team constructed a brain-wide map of neural activity in mice as they complete a decision-making task. That map, published today in Nature, reveals that the activity associated with choices and motor actions shows up widely across the brain. The same is true for the activity underlying decisions based on prior knowledge, according to a companion paper by the same team, also published today in Nature. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Attention; Brain imaging
Link ID: 29918 - Posted: 09.06.2025

By Claudia López Lloreda fMRI researchers have long faced a conundrum: Given finite resources and time to spend on scanning, is it better to scan lots of participants for a short time each, or a smaller number of people for a longer time? A new study quantifies this tradeoff for brain-wide association studies (BWAS), which aim to link brain differences to physical and cognitive traits. Using large-scale public fMRI datasets, the team found that their ability to accurately predict cognitive features from functional connectivity data increased with sample size and with scan length, up to 20 minutes. But accuracy began to plateau for longer scans, and beyond 30 minutes, the added length (and cost) provided diminishing returns. A half-hour seems to be the optimal scanning time, says Thomas Yeo, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the National University of Singapore and principal investigator of the study. Scan duration is “essentially providing a different knob for people to tune” to meet power requirements in their fMRI experiments, he says. Although the neuroimaging community already knew that scan time is important and five minutes is insufficient, “this is one of the first major studies in the past few years to really quantitatively map that out” for BWAS studies, says Brenden Tervo-Clemmens, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Minnesota, who was not involved with the study. Tervo-Clemmens and his colleagues had previously shown in a 2022 study the importance of sample size in BWAS, calculating that these analyses need thousands of participants to get meaningful associations. This new study adds another part of the equation, he says. Yeo’s team developed the Optimal Scan Time Calculator to help other neuroscientists design their own studies. “Democratizing these complex methodological issues into a usable package is really, really useful,” Tervo-Clemmens says. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29903 - Posted: 08.27.2025

By Lydia Denworth A remarkably bright pulsing dot has appeared on the monitor in front of us. We are watching, in real time, the brain activity of a graduate student named Nick, who is having an afternoon nap inside an imaging machine at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Lewis has her laboratory. The bright spot first appears toward the bottom of the screen, about where Nick’s throat meets his jaw. It moves slowly upward, fades and then is followed by another bright dot. “It really comes and goes,” says Lewis, who is also affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital. “It’s in waves.” This moving dot depicts something few people have ever seen: fresh cerebrospinal fluid flowing from the spinal cord into the brain, part of a process that researchers are now learning is vital for keeping us healthy. For decades biologists have pondered a basic problem. As human brains whir and wonder throughout the day, they generate waste—excess proteins and other molecules that can be toxic if not removed. Among those proteins are amyloid beta and tau, key drivers of Alzheimer’s disease. Until recently, it was entirely unclear how the brain takes out this potentially neurotoxic trash. In the rest of the body, garbage removal is handled initially by the lymphatic system. Excess fluid and the waste it carries move from tissue into the spleen, lymph nodes and other parts of the system, where certain particles are removed and put into the bloodstream to be excreted. It was long thought that the brain can’t use the same trick, because the so-called blood-brain barrier, a protective border that keeps infections from reaching critical neural circuitry, stops the transport of most everything in and out. © 2025 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Sleep; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 29895 - Posted: 08.20.2025

By Siddhant Pusdekar The food we eat, the air we breathe, and our daily activities all shape how our minds work. Yet most brain research focuses on a narrow slice of humanity: people in high-income countries in the Northern Hemisphere. That leaves a vast gap in our understanding of how neural activity varies across cultures, environments, and lifestyles. A team of researchers from Tanzania and India has taken a step toward closing that gap. In a study published this week in eNeuro, they describe a strategy for collecting data from the brains of diverse groups—from hunter-gatherers to urban dwellers—using electroencephalography (EEG). The technology relies on portable headsets, widely used in clinical settings, that record the brain’s electrical activity through electrodes placed on the scalp. The researchers trained trusted community members as “surveyors,” who visited participants where they live and work to gather EEG data and conduct surveys about their lifestyles and experiences. The initial effort, which involved nearly 8000 volunteers across Tanzania and India, shows that this kind of data collection in low- and middle-income countries is feasible and affordable, the researchers say. The work cost them $50 for each person studied, a fraction of equivalent, large-scale studies conducted in research labs. A: I think mental health is one of the defining health issues in India. When we survey 18- to 24-year-olds, 50% tell us that almost every other day of the month they don’t feel like going to work or college. India is a young country and is increasingly relying on its youth to grow its economy. If they can’t function in their daily activities, you can’t expect them to be productive and contribute to the economy.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29869 - Posted: 07.26.2025

By Diana Kwon A new sensor makes it possible for the first time to simultaneously track dopamine and up to two additional molecules in the brains of living animals. The sensor, dubbed HaloDA1.0, uses a novel dopamine-tagging system that emits light at the far-red end of the color spectrum, according to the team behind the work. “There’s a real need to monitor multiple relevant molecules, as they’re doing here,” says Nicolas Tritsch, assistant professor of neuroscience at McGill University, who was not involved in the study. Because dopamine is involved in a range of key brain functions, when studying its effects on a cell it’s important to consider other neuromodulators that are released at the same time, as well as the signaling cascades these molecules may trigger, Tritsch says. Most dopamine-tracking strategies genetically encode a naturally occurring fluorescent protein into dopamine receptors; when dopamine attaches to the modified receptors, the fluorescent protein changes shape and emits light. But naturally occurring fluorescent proteins have a limited color palette, which has made it difficult to develop sensors that can go beyond two-color imaging, says study investigator Yulong Li, professor of life sciences at Peking University. Instead of genetically encoding a fluorescent protein, HaloDA1.0 attaches a synthetic molecule called HaloTag to dopamine receptors. This tag binds tightly to previously developed artificial dyes that change shape and fluoresce in the far-red spectrum when dopamine binds to its receptors. Because the dyes fluoresce at the far end of the red spectrum, it leaves room for other sensors to glow at different wavelengths. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29868 - Posted: 07.26.2025

By Katarina Zimmer Using a tiny, spherical glass lens sandwiched between two brass plates, the 17th century Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was the first to officially describe red blood cells and sperm cells in human tissues, and observe “animalcules” — bacteria and protists — in the water of a lake. Increasingly powerful light microscopes followed, revealing cell organelles like the nucleus and energy-producing mitochondria. But by 1873, scientists realized there was a limit to the level of detail. When light passes through a lens, the light gets spread out through diffraction. This means that two objects can’t be distinguished if they’re less than roughly 250 nanometers (250 billionths of a meter) apart — instead, they’ll appear as a blur. That put the inner workings of cell structures off limits. Electron microscopy, which uses electron beams instead of light, offers higher resolution. But the resulting black-and-white images make it hard tell proteins apart, and the method only works on dead cells. Now, however, optics engineers and physicists have developed sophisticated tricks to overcome the diffraction limit of light microscopes, opening up a new world of detail. These “super-resolution” light microscopy techniques can distinguish objects down to 100 nanometers and sometimes even less than 10 nanometers. Scientists attach tiny, colored fluorescent tags to individual proteins or bits of DNA, often in living cells where they can watch them in action. As a result, they are now filling in key knowledge gaps about how cells work and what goes wrong in neurological diseases and cancers, or during viral infections. “We can really see new biology — things that we were hoping to see but hadn’t seen before,” says molecular cell biologist Lothar Schermelleh, who directs an imaging center at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Here’s some of what scientists are learning in this new age of light microscopy. Overcoming the diffraction limit

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29862 - Posted: 07.19.2025

Mariana Lenharo A speedy imaging method can map the nerves running from a mouse’s brain and spinal cord to the rest of its body at micrometre-scale resolution, revealing details such as individual fibres travelling from a key nerve to distant organs1. Previous efforts have mapped the network of connections between nerve cells, known as the connectome, in the mouse brain. But tracing the complex paths of nerves through the rest of the body has been challenging. To do so, the creators of the new map used a custom-built microscope to scan exposed tissue, completing the process in just 40 hours. Nerves look blue in the reconstructed view of a genetically engineered mouse (left) whose neurons produce a fluorescent marker. In a separate animal (right), antibodies detail the sympathetic nerves (purple). Credit: M.-Y. Shi et al./Cell (CC-BY-4.0) The method, described today in Cell, is an important technical achievement, says Ann-Shyn Chiang, a neuroscientist at the National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan, who was not involved with the research. “This work is a major step forward in expanding connectomics beyond the brain,” he says. To prepare a mouse’s body for the scan, researchers treat it with chemicals that make its tissues transparent by removing fat, calcium and other components that block light. This provides a clear view of the nerves, which have been labelled with fluorescent marker proteins. The see-through body is then placed into a device that combines a slicing tool and a microscope that takes 3D images. A piston gradually pushes the mouse towards the slicing blade, 400 micrometres at a time. After each slice, a microscope images the newly exposed surface of the mouse, capturing details up to 600 micrometres deep — roughly the thickness of six sheets of paper — below the surface. The body then advances for the next cut. The cycle repeats around 200 times without pause, to cover the entire body. The images are then combined. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Brain imaging; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29853 - Posted: 07.12.2025

Heidi Ledford Telltale features in standard brain images can reveal how quickly a person is ageing, a study of more than 50,000 brain scans has shown1. Pivotal features include the thickness of the cerebral cortex — a region that controls language and thinking — and the volume of grey matter that it contains. These and other characteristics can predict how quickly a person’s ability to think and remember will decline with age, as well as their risk of frailty, disease and death. Although it’s too soon to use the new results in the clinic, the test provides advantages over previously reported ‘clocks’ — typically based on blood tests — that purport to measure the pace of ageing, says Mahdi Moqri, a computational biologist who studies ageing at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. “Imaging offers unique, direct insights into the brain’s structural ageing, providing information that blood-based or molecular biomarkers alone can’t capture,” says Moqri, who was not involved in the study. The results were published today in Nature Aging. Genetics, environment and disease all affect the speed of biological ageing. As a result, chronological age does not always reflect the pace at which time takes its toll on the body. Researchers have been racing to develop measures to fill that gap. Ageing clocks could be used early in life to assess an individual’s risk of age-related illness, when it might still be possible to intervene. They could also aid testing of treatments aimed at slowing ageing, by providing a marker to track the effects of the intervention in real time. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain imaging
Link ID: 29848 - Posted: 07.02.2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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