By Alissa de Chassey A long-standing model of the hippocampus’s role in memory needs to be revised, according to a new preprint. For more than half a century, memory theories treated the CA3 region of the hippocampus as a uniform population of pyramidal neurons that form one broad recurrent, or autoassociative, network; the cells synapse onto each other and also send signals to the CA1 region. The network stores memories as synapses strengthen among coactivated cells, each encoding a different piece of the memory. And because of this architecture, a partial cue can reactivate a full memory, such as when the taste of a madeleine sparks a flood of childhood memories for the narrator of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” But it turns out that picture may be wrong. The CA3 instead comprises two distinct types of pyramidal neurons arranged in two layers, with different morphology, physiology and connectivity patterns, the preprint suggests. The findings were posted on bioRxiv in July. “These two cell types are very different, and one of them is totally breaking what the textbook would say,” says study investigator Jake Watson, a postdoctoral researcher in Peter Jonas’ lab at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. A single transcription factor, ST18, distinguishes the two populations, the study reveals: A set of superficial CA3 neurons that express ST18 forms a recurrent network as predicted by the classical model, and a deeper set, which does not express ST18, regulates the superficial one. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30359 - Posted: 08.05.2026

BY Christie Wilcox The vagus nerve snakes through the human body like an elaborate highway system, transmitting signals from the brain to the heart, lungs, and gastrointestinal system and back. But despite its critical role in regulating breathing, heart rate, and digestion, researchers have long struggled to map its anatomical structure—until now. Scientists have created the first comprehensive map of the human vagus nerve, tracing thousands of individual nerve fibers stretching from the lower brain stem to all major organs. The map—announced last week and detailed in a data set released earlier this year—might help scientists and doctors more precisely stimulate the nerve as a potential treatment for conditions such as epilepsy, stroke, and inflammatory diseases. Some existing therapies stimulate the vagus nerve with electrodes implanted in the chest or neck sending signals that can suppress seizure activity in the brain, for example, or blunt pain. But the vagus nerve is a staggeringly intricate network: After forking into a main left and right branch, it shoots out finer branches made up of fascicles—small bundles of nerve fibers—that project to organs throughout the body. That complexity makes it hard to isolate and target specific nerve fibers or to understand the effects of stimulating at a given point. “We place an electrode on the vagus nerve, and things happen. But why do these things happen in this certain way?” asks Stavros Zanos, the physician-scientist at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research who led the mapping project. “We just had no idea, and we looked at the literature, and it just wasn’t there.” To build a comprehensive map of the nerve structures, Zanos and his colleagues analyzed 30 sets of left and right vagus nerves dissected from 30 human cadavers. © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Stress
Link ID: 30358 - Posted: 08.05.2026

By Alexandra Pattillo It was 2022, and Christina was running out of options. The Londoner, then age 34, was desperate to fix her anorexia nervosa, even as the disease consumed her. After six years of battling the disease, she’d tried various forms of behavioral therapy and months of in-patient care, but nothing stuck. At its worst, the disease was preventing her from sleeping and zapping so much energy that she was unable to climb her stairs or brush her teeth. She needed a radical fix. “You become your anorexia,” says Christina (a pseudonym to protect her privacy). “You have no life around it. You don’t laugh. You don’t smile. You don’t find joy in anything,” she recalls. Her relationships suffered, and she almost lost her job and house. Eventually, a frantic Google search for “cures for anorexia” alerted her to a clinical trial for the psychedelic psilocybin—an active ingredient in magic mushrooms—as a treatment for the disease. She signed up. “I genuinely believe, had I not done that trial, I would either be stuck in a hospital loop, or I wouldn't be here today,” she says. “It saved my life.” Life with an eating disorder can turn the mind and body into a prison. Intrusive, never-ending thought spirals drive compulsive behaviors such as binging, overexercising, purging and restrictive eating. Conventional psychiatric treatments, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy or antidepressants, work in only about half of patients. People with anorexia are more than 18 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population—the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder. © 2026 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN INC.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30357 - Posted: 08.05.2026

By Clarissa Brincat To avoid ending up with a less committed mate, some female birds listen for red flags in their suitor’s song. Male pied flycatchers change their song after mating, and females use these song features to tell if a male is already paired, researchers report July 1 in Ethology. The results are consistent with earlier research showing that most female pied flycatchers prefer to settle with an unmated male. “The female doesn’t really care about the song,” says behavioral ecologist Stephen Nowicki of Duke University, who was not involved in the work. “She cares because the song is a reliable indicator of some quality of the male,” including whether it already has a mate. Once its first mate lays eggs, a male pied flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca) will often set up another nest several hundred meters away and court passing females. The stakes are high for the females, as a male splitting its time between two nests provides less help raising chicks. Ethologist Helene Lampe and her colleagues recorded 17 wild males twice — once while a male was a bachelor, and again after it had mated and moved to a second territory to woo another female. Using bioacoustics software, the team found that two things changed. The songs got shorter — from about two seconds to about 1.7 — and the male repeated itself less. “Usually, a male will cycle through his song syllables in an orderly manner — one or two syllables are usually repeated from one song to the next,” says Lampe, of the University of Oslo. “But when they become polyterritorial, they do it much less often.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 30356 - Posted: 08.05.2026

By RJ Mackenzie LONDON — A protein marker of Alzheimer’s disease in the brain may also help diagnose cases of the brain condition chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, early data suggest. The condition, which is linked to repeated head trauma, currently can be identified only in autopsies. But measurements of an Alzheimer’s-associated protein, eMTBR-tau243, might one day bring testing to the living: In confirmed CTE cases, levels of the protein increased the more advanced the disease had been at death, researchers reported July 15 at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference. The data, which have yet to be peer-reviewed, suggest a path toward a first way of diagnosing CTE in living people, says Chihiro Sato, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis. While the results would need to be confirmed in a larger dataset, “we think there’s potential.” The ability to diagnose patients while they are still alive would provide clarity to patients about their well-being and be invaluable to getting them involved in future trials of any CTE treatments, says John Arena, a neurosurgeon at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research. Diagnosing CTE currently requires a careful examination of the brain after death, which has complicated efforts to identify how many people are affected by the condition. A 2018 study found that CTE-like damage affected 1 of 164 donated brains. But CTE is far more common in people repeatedly exposed to head trauma, like athletes in contact sports. In 2023, the Boston University CTE Center reported that CTE pathology was present in more than 90 percent of brains in a sample of 376 former NFL players. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Alzheimers
Link ID: 30355 - Posted: 08.01.2026

By Rivka Galchen During his first year as a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, Ren Ng was hurriedly putting together a survey course on computer graphics. In the syllabus he had inherited, a full week had been devoted to the subject of color. Ng thought that was a bit much. “I’m, like, Come on. It’s R.G.B.,” he said, referring to the red, green, and blue subpixels that constitute anything you see on a screen—your cluttered desktop, a Sahara-desert screen saver, the stream of the Netherlands-Japan World Cup game. Ng started gathering slides that would cover the wavelengths of light, the biology of the human eye—the basics—“Blah, blah, blah,” he said. A colleague shared a slide that he thought might be useful. It included a minutely detailed photograph of a patch of retina, seen through a microscope, which was attributed to Austin Roorda, a professor of vision science and optometry just across campus. Roorda’s lab had helped develop technology that could map the layout of individual cone cells—those primarily responsible for perceiving color—and that, furthermore, could target a single cone cell with light. Eyes are constantly moving; cone cells are extremely small; how color is translated from the millions of cone cells to the mind remains pretty mysterious; this was awesome work. Roorda’s lab was using the new technology to explore eye disease and the mechanics of how we see. Ng had his own notion, though: he wondered if it could be used to see a color that had never been seen before. To understand what Ng had in mind requires knowing a bit of the blah, blah, blah of color vision. We humans experience three primary colors not because the world is fundamentally composed of three colors but because our retinas typically have three kinds of color-perceiving cone cells. L cone cells respond to the relatively longer wavelengths of visible light, M cone cells to the medium wavelengths, and S cone cells to the shorter ones. In effect, this means that L cells respond most strongly to red light, M to green, and S to blue. But when you look at your hand—or a blade of grass, or a clear blue sky, or a fire truck—it is always some mixture of L, M, and S cone cells that are being stimulated. Ng’s idea was to use the Roorda lab’s technology to stimulate an array of cone cells in a manner that would never occur naturally. Ng said, “I e-mailed him, basically, What would happen if you stimulated only the M cells? Would that be like the greenest green, or what?” Roorda did not reply. © 2026 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 30354 - Posted: 08.01.2026

By Natalia Mesa Theoretical models of the brain often treat neurons as single, homogenous units. But dendrites can store information about the past and make predictions about the future independently of the cell body, according to a new study. “In the artificial-intelligence community, dendrites are underappreciated,” says Eilif Muller, associate professor of neurosciences at the University of Montreal, who was not involved in the study. “In this paper, and as we study dendrites more, we’re getting a glimpse into mechanisms that allow us to learn rapidly but stably.” Dendritic activity can dissociate from cell body activity, depending on an animal’s goal, the new work shows. The findings are the first in-vivo evidence of the long-standing theoretical prediction that a neuron’s dendrites play a separate role from cell bodies in neural computations. The study was published in Science earlier this month. “There’s been decades of studies on how dendrites function: Are they passive, or do they play a more active role in cognitive processes?” says study investigator Attila Losonczy, professor of neuroscience at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Action potentials generated at the soma can backpropagate into the dendrites, making the two compartments’ activity hard to tease apart. Losonczy and his colleagues used ultrafast voltage imaging to record electrical activity in the dendrites of pyramidal place cells in the CA3 region of the hippocampus of mice as the animals moved around in a virtual environment and received a sip of water in certain locations; the place cells fire when a mouse is in a specific location in space. When the reward locations changed, dendrites retained information about the original sites. But when the entire virtual environment changed, dendrites were the first to encode new locations of rewards—the cell body caught up later. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30353 - Posted: 08.01.2026

By Ailie McWhinnie On a research trip to Indonesia in 2007, Yosuke Kaifu saw for himself the skull of “Flo”—the skeletal remains first discovered 4 years earlier that heralded the existence of a diminutive human relative called Homo floresiensis. These so-called “Hobbits,” which stood about 1 meter tall, lived on the Indonesian island of Flores until about 50,000 years ago. The University of Tokyo anthropologist was drawn to one anatomical peculiarity: The skull’s right side is slightly smooshed. Some researchers had previously attributed this abnormality to disease, others to distortion after burial. But when Kaifu showed it to a clinician back in Japan, he received a surprising response: It looked like a harmless condition known as deformational plagiocephaly, or flattening of the skull, that occurs today in about one in six babies. Usually, the skull rounds out over time, but in some cases, it can persist into adulthood. The condition arises because the human skull remains soft for the first months of life to allow for the enormous amount of brain growth that occurs after birth. Repeated pressure on one side can cause flattening, and because babies cannot hold up their own heads, they are prone to resting it on one side when put down. Such helplessness is thought to be a concession to babies’ brains being relatively underdeveloped at birth to allow them to fit through the birth canal. Kaifu reasoned that deformational plagiocephaly in the skulls of ancient hominins could be a good indicator that they, too, were helpless as infants. After examining hundreds of skulls, they conclude today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B that at least two other lineages of humans shared this trait with us, suggesting it has deep evolutionary origins. “I thought it was a very ingenious study,” says Lia Betti, an anthropologist at University College London. © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30352 - Posted: 08.01.2026

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen Lindsay Clancy, a 35-year-old former nurse, is on trial in Massachusetts for the murder of her three young children in 2023. The details of the case are disturbing—according to court records, Clancy strangled her children, aged five years, three years and eight months, to death before she attempted to take her own life. Clancy has pled not guilty to the murder charges on the basis that she suffered from a mental health disorder called postpartum psychosis. During this episode, Clancy’s lawyers have said, she was convinced by voices in her head to kill her children and herself. The prosecution has argued the killings were premeditated. The ongoing, high-profile trial has thrust the topic of maternal mental health—and postpartum psychosis in particular—into the national spotlight. But behind the headlines, maternal mental health experts say the disorder is nuanced, understudied and, importantly, treatable. Postpartum psychosis is a rare and severe mental disorder that occurs in people who have given birth. It occurs after about one to two of every 1,000 live births, explains Khatiya Moon, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. It’s different from postpartum depression—the onset of depression following childbirth—which is more common and can affect around one in five to 10 people who have given birth. The symptoms of postpartum psychosis are “variable,” Moon says, but may include delusions, paranoia, purposeless or repetitive behavior, as well as hallucinations—hearing voices, seeing things or even feeling sensations on the skin that aren’t there. © 2026 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN INC.

Keyword: Depression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 30351 - Posted: 08.01.2026

Mariana Lenharo As artificial-intelligence systems become more and more sophisticated, the question of whether they might become conscious is capturing the public’s attention — and is sending tech firms to hire philosophers. The problem is, researchers still haven’t agreed on what gives rise to consciousness in humans, let alone an AI chatbot. So some scientists who study human consciousness — the subjective state of being aware of yourself and your surroundings — worry that all the hype will make it harder to find answers. “What we might see is a sort of capture of consciousness research by the AI sector, where less emphasis is placed on the neuroscience and philosophy of how consciousness happens in real brains, and more on looking for computational ‘signatures’ of consciousness in AI,” says Anil Seth, a consciousness scientist at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK. Seth and others think that consciousness is very unlikely outside of biological organisms and are frustrated by the focus on AI. Some are suspicious of AI firms’ hype, and think that there should be more investigation of how the humanization of chatbots could affect people negatively. But there are researchers who think that tech firms’ obsession with consciousness is a boon for a field that was not taken seriously as a scientific endeavour for years. They see the hype as bringing more interest and, importantly, more funding. Running into problems Earlier this month, it became clear that determining whether an AI system is sentient will be extremely challenging without knowing more about human consciousness. Researchers at AI firm Anthropic, in San Francisco, California, posted a non-peer-reviewed study suggesting that they had found something in the company’s large language model (LLM) Claude that is comparable to conscious thoughts in humans. By measuring patterns in Claude’s processing, they uncovered words that Claude ‘thought’ about as it worked through a request but did not necessarily include in its output. The authors compare this internal activity with the brain’s ‘global workspace’, a concept borrowed from one of the most popular theories of human consciousness. The global workspace theory (GWT) posits that information enters human consciousness when it is broadcast across the brain, in a type of processing hub for the mind. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 30350 - Posted: 07.29.2026

By Emily Anthes One day last summer, a curious white-faced capuchin encountered a strange contraption in the forest. There, in the middle of the Taboga Forest Reserve in Costa Rica, sat a 15-inch touch screen, mounted in a wooden frame. As the monkey, an alpha male named Papi, began investigating — poking the device here, prodding it there — his fingers landed on the screen. Suddenly, a piece of dried banana dropped into a tray below the frame. Before long, Papi learned the basic rules of the device: touch the screen, get a dried banana slice. He also provided proof of concept for CapuchinAI, a new device designed to assess the cognitive abilities of monkeys in the wild. The testing apparatus, which the researchers described in a new paper, used A.I.-powered facial recognition software to detect capuchins in real time and record their responses to a simple learning task. The scientists hope that more sophisticated versions of the device, which they will begin testing in the coming weeks, will shed new light on primate evolution and intelligence, and answer questions that would be impossible to study in a lab, such as how a monkey’s smarts affect its success and survival. “If we really want to understand how primates make decisions, if we want to understand how they’re using these large brains that they evolved, we have to really put it in the context of the world in which they’re navigating,” said Marcela Benítez, a primatologist at Emory University and an author of the new paper, which was published in the American Journal of Primatology on Tuesday. “But that is a lot easier said than done.” Dr. Benítez has been studying the white-faced capuchins at Taboga for years, logging their behavior, recording their vocalizations and measuring their hormone levels. For the new study, she and her colleagues used images of some of these monkeys to train an artificial intelligence model to identify capuchins and distinguish them from the other animals roaming the forest. Then they built a portable testing station equipped with a touch screen, webcam and 3-D-printed food dispenser. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 30349 - Posted: 07.29.2026

Maria Godoy School used to be pretty easy for Kate Jarvis when she was a little girl, back in the 1980s. She was a straight-A student, creative, and so organized that she'd even prep her toothbrush with toothpaste each night before school. She says her mother used to call her "bright-eyed and bushy tailed." Then puberty hit, and everything started to fall apart. She found it harder to focus in school, and her grades slipped. "It really hit my self-esteem badly. I felt pretty awful about myself," she says. In high school, she was diagnosed with anxiety and depression. She struggled to fit in. She says it stung when teachers would write comments like, "Kate has so much potential, if only she'd apply herself." "So it felt like character flaws rather than what it really was, which was undiagnosed ADHD," says Jarvis, who didn't get a diagnosis until her late 30s. Kate Jarvis says that her diagnosis of ADHD in her 30s felt revolutionary. “Something I had been wrestling with for 25 years had a name, causes, symptoms and effects.” However, the diagnosis came with challenges as well. “Just because you know what something is, doesn’t mean you can immediately fix it. And that’s what I felt, like I needed to fix myself.” Kate Jarvis says that her diagnosis of ADHD in her 30s felt revolutionary. "Something I had been wrestling with for 25 years had a name, causes, symptoms and effects." However, the diagnosis came with challenges as well. "Just because you know what something is, doesn't mean you can immediately fix it. And that's what I felt - like I needed to fix myself." Jarvis family © 2026 npr

Keyword: ADHD; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 30348 - Posted: 07.29.2026

By Emily Laber-Warren When sunlight hits an octopus, it can trigger a swift color change and instant camouflage, thanks to light-sensitive molecules embedded in the creature’s skin. When sunlight falls on a bird’s skull, similar compounds deep in the animal’s brain register changes in day length and help drive decisions on when to mate or migrate. Photosensitive proteins called opsins that respond instantly to sunlight can be found within and outside the eye in nearly every animal, and they govern not only vision but also a range of behaviors. Until about a quarter-century ago, though, the scientific consensus was that in humans, the only role for opsins was to help us see. But a surge of research over the past couple of decades has increasingly revealed that, like honeybees, zebra fish, rodents and other creatures, we harbor opsins that aren’t involved in vision, both in our eyes and throughout our bodies. These molecules appear to play a broad role in human biology, affecting mood, metabolism, sleep, thinking and social behavior. Since life’s beginnings, organisms on this sunbaked planet have had to evolve ways to protect against ultraviolet light, which can damage DNA. But it shouldn’t be surprising that, as dangerous as sunlight can be, most animals also rely on it to regulate key aspects of physiology, including body temperature, navigation, growth and sexual development. Across the animal kingdom, researchers are discovering that light-sensing opsins are involved in an array of biological processes beyond vision. These include camouflage; sensing seasonal changes via lengthening or shortening day lengths; synchronizing with the 24-hour cycle — as well as mood, healing and more.

Keyword: Vision; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 30347 - Posted: 07.29.2026

Max Kozlov How does the brain know when it’s time to wake up? Researchers have identified1 a chemical signal that serves as a timer in the mouse brain, logging both the length of a single sleep session and the number of interruptions and predicting how likely an animal is to wake up at any given moment. This signal could offer a new way to measure ‘sleep debt’, or accumulated sleep loss. Such a biomarker could one day lead to methods for checking whether someone is sleep-deprived, says Ketema Paul, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the research. “We really don’t have what a lot of people call the sobriety test for sleep,” Paul says, adding that such a test could be useful to ensure that people in high-stakes occupations, such as driving trucks or working in a hospital emergency department, are able to remain alert. “The negative effects of sleep loss can have serious negative consequences.” Previous sleep research has focused mostly on the brain circuitry that snaps people awake in seconds or on how sleep debt accrues after days of bad sleep. But the intermediate time scale — how the brain keeps track of the minutes or hours spent in a single continuous session of sleep — has remained a mystery. To investigate, Yao Chen, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and her team searched for molecular signals that shift gradually during a sleep session. The researchers used a specialized fluorescent sensor in the brains of mice to watch, in real time, the effects of protein kinase A, or PKA — an enzyme also found in humans and previously linked to wakefulness2. This enzyme adds chemical ‘tags’ to proteins on the surface of brain cells. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Sleep; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 30346 - Posted: 07.29.2026

By Emily Singer It all started at the bar at a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory meeting more than 10 years ago. A scientist pulled out his iPad and began showing Tyler Sloan, then a neuroscience graduate student, a 3D video that flew through the bundled nerve fibers of the spinal cord in a tissue-cleared embryo. “My first thought when I saw that was that we need to put this on a planetarium dome,” Sloan says. The video reflected a turning point in microscopy imaging, when techniques such as Clarity, which enables high-resolution imaging of intact tissue, made it possible to image relatively large volumes of the brain and illustrate the nervous system’s complexity in all its glory. Inspired by the public engagement he saw at astronomy screenings at planetariums, Sloan wanted to employ these kinds of videos to kindle the same sense of awe toward the brain. He began learning 3D animation, eventually leaving academia and launching his own company to create sophisticated visualizations for scientists. But, he says, it was all in service of his goal to make an immersive brain movie for the public. More than a decade after the idea took root, the project has finally borne fruit: Sloan’s planetarium film premiered during the weeklong BrainFest event in Seattle in March. Other showings are in the works, including at Neuroscience Academy Denmark’s annual meeting in November. Sloan says he plans to make the film freely available and hopes it will eventually be shown at planetariums around the world. Tyler Sloan: We can do a better job of inspiring people with a sense of awe. I went to a national park in Canada with an observatory over spring break with my family. Their outreach is really elaborate; they have an emcee and what they call the cosmic jockey, the technician operating the computer in the background and throwing up images throughout the entire presentation. I was amazed at the level of questions coming from school-aged kids. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 30345 - Posted: 07.29.2026

Stephani Sutherland One night in 2000, Allan Basbaum was at the Pierre Hotel on Central Park, wearing a tuxedo after presenting a neuroscience award to one of his colleagues before a roomful of scientists, Nobel laureates among them. His wife, Carol, a cancer biologist, had accompanied him from San Francisco, where they both ran laboratories at the University of California. Late that night, he was struck by agonising stomach pain. Alarmed, they went to the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital, where the waiting area was jammed and hours passed before anyone could see him. ‘So I’m out in the waiting room; I’m periodically screaming,’ Basbaum says. After two hours, Carol went to the bathroom, leaving him alone. Finally, a man came over and began speaking to him, gently prodding him. ‘He checks my pulse, he asks: “Does this hurt?”’ Basbaum says. As the man attended to him, ‘the pain really started to get much better,’ and Basbaum relaxed. When Carol returned, he told her about the long-awaited treatment. ‘She says: “Allan, he’s one of the patients. He’s been doing that to everybody here.” But finally, someone was taking care of me.’ And that brought relief. By then, Basbaum had spent three decades studying the physiology of pain, mapping the neural circuits that carry signals from the body toward the brain. He wanted to understand how those signals become pain. His experience brought to life the questions he’d been marvelling at for years: how do fear, context and expectation shape the body’s most urgent alarm? How do placebos work? And how could someone relieve his pain, just by paying attention? Basbaum understood the Gordian knot at the heart of pain: the brain could influence pain before a person consciously felt it. His work over the past 50 years has been to untangle that loop, following signals through the spinal cord to the brain and back again. © Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012-2026.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Attention
Link ID: 30344 - Posted: 07.25.2026

By Kristen French Psychedelics get humans high. On this point, there is no question. For centuries, Indigenous shamans, the mystically inclined, and the neuro-curious have been ingesting the trippy stuff to incur strange visions and otherworldly flights. But why psychedelics evolved is less clear and remains the subject of strenuous debate. Tiny amounts of DMT are naturally produced in the brains of humans and other mammals, which has led some neuroscientists and ethnobotanists to argue that hallucination may have some direct evolutionary or therapeutic benefit to humans, that the DMT is there to serve a special visionary or consciousness-related function, and that psychedelic plants may have co-evolved for human spiritual use. But the authors of a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argue that human hallucination is more likely just a side effect, and that psychedelics probably evolved as ecological tools, allowing various animals and plants to defend against predators and herbivores or to help manage symbiotic relationships. After all, hallucinogens like psilocybin, mescaline, and DMT are extremely common in the animal kingdom, appearing independently in numerous unrelated organisms such as mushrooms, cacti, toads, and sponges. “Understanding why evolution produced these molecules doesn’t diminish their therapeutic value,” wrote study author Yibo Wang, a chemist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in an email. “Instead, it provides a deeper biological framework for discovering better medicines while promoting conservation and sustainable production.” Wang and his team propose that humans hallucinate when we ingest psychedelics because we share ancient brain chemistry with the creatures who were the original targets of the compounds, such as slugs, insects, and sea urchins. The receptors these compounds mess with—serotonin, opioid, and GABA receptors—are also found all over the animal kingdom. So the chemicals that scramble human perception may also deter snails from eating certain plants, the researchers suggest. © Copyright 2026

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30343 - Posted: 07.25.2026

By Julia Vaz Kelly Jaakkola spends her time getting dolphins to tell her things. In her observations as a cognitive psychologist at the Dolphin Research Center in Grassy Key, Florida, she’s discovered that the marine mammals cooperate to solve problems, and that they respond to complex human gestures such as pointing. Her colleague Jason Bruck, a biologist at Stephen F. Austin State University, has even shown that dolphins seem to have names for one another, just like humans do. Studies have started to pile up showing that other animals might be able to do the same. But Jaakkola is skeptical. In an opinion piece published today in Cell Press, she, Bruck, and biologist Stephanie King at the University of Bristol argue there is little evidence that other cognitively complex animals such as marmosets and elephants use names. Names, Jaakkola and her co-authors propose, must be learned, they must be shared among members of the community, and they must act as a symbolic representation of a specific individual. Showing that animal calls fulfill all those requirements is more challenging than it seems. Science chatted with Jaakkola about how researchers can test whether animals really use names—and why that matters. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Q: Names seem simple to us, but they’re actually quite hard to define. Is that right? A: When we talk about names, what we’re talking about is a shared symbolic label that [picks] out a particular individual. So, if you say something is a name, you’re talking about a symbol for something in the world. The way that I typically talk about it is the difference between “Hey, you” and “Hey, Julia.” In both cases, I’m picking out somebody, but only in one case does it actually mean that person. Also, by this definition, names have to be learned, because you can’t be born knowing the names of everybody you’re ever going to meet. © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30342 - Posted: 07.25.2026

By Sujata Gupta Some 7,500 languages are spoken or signed around the world today. Though that might sound like a lot, the number could have been up to 10 times higher a few thousand years ago, researchers report July 23 in Science. “That was the golden age of linguistic diversity,” says Claire Bowern, a linguist at Yale University. The finding comes as scientists are racing to document, or ideally preserve, languages nearing extinction. Half of today’s languages are now endangered, and roughly four languages disappear every year. Linguists and cognitive scientists have long sought to identify features of language, whether unique to a given culture or universal, to generate theories about how humans reason about the world. Any underestimate of linguistic diversity would mean those theories are missing a lot of what is possible. But ancient languages are challenging to study. They don’t leave a fossil record. And writing emerged relatively recently — in the past 6,000 years — and among only a subset of languages. So Bowern’s team developed a model to try to quantify what might have happened to language diversity over the past several thousand years, including pinning down when it started to shrink. The team first looked at more than 170 contemporary hunting and gathering groups worldwide as a proxy for past populations. Though such groups have changed across time, many key aspects of their social structure have remained stable, research elsewhere suggests. Chiefly, foraging groups vary in size but typically include several hundred people to more than a thousand. And, broadly speaking, each group speaks a single language. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 30341 - Posted: 07.25.2026

By Hannah Docter-Loeb At the otolaryngology department at the Ohio State University, Kai Zhao is on a quest to solve smell loss. While cochlear implants or hearing aids can be used to treat auditory impairments and lenses or surgery can tackle vision loss, there is no equivalent go-to treatment for a weakened sense of smell. Among all the senses, smell is perhaps the least well understood. Scientists are only just beginning to get to grips with how smell is organized in the brain and body. And exactly why and how some people lose their sense of smell is unclear at best. “Smell loss is a really underrecognized problem and medical condition, and currently there [is] no treatment at all,” Zhao says. Some researchers have experimented with bionic noses and implants that pulse electrical signals into the olfactory system to try and restore smell. But Zhao is trying a different method: wearable devices that help redirect airflow in the nose to the olfactory region. Only a fraction of the air we breathe in through our noses reaches the olfactory cleft—that’s the place inside our noses where the olfactory bulb, a structure in the forebrain that processes smell signals, resides. Zhao theorized that perhaps it would be possible to increase the airflow to the olfactory system. He likens the idea to hearing aids, which amplify sound signals in the ears. “You’re amplifying the smell signal instead of the sound,” he says. In March 2025 Zhao and his colleagues published the results of their first prototypes in BMC Medicine. They developed a nasal foam plug and a clip similar to those used by synchronized swimmers. Both work to enhance the odor delivery to the olfactory region. The plug helps open the odor flow to the nose. Meanwhile, according to Zhao, the clip is a bit more counterintuitive: it pinches the nasal valve to enhance narrowing, which can improve function. © 2026 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN INC.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 30340 - Posted: 07.25.2026