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

Keyword: Biomechanics
Link ID: 30296 - Posted: 06.24.2026

By Jackie Rocheleau The cerebellum, the wizened “little brain” nestled in the base of the skull, may help keep us sharp as we age. Regions at the back of the cerebellum that resisted shrinkage with age were tied to better mental functioning, or cognition, even in people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, researchers report June 10 in Nature Neuroscience. Though traditionally thought of as a movement control center, scientists now know the cerebellum is a key player in cognition. Researchers also know that parts of the cerebellum don’t age in unison, but the aging cerebellum is a relatively new area of research. In the new study, the team first analyzed brain scans and cognitive test scores from more than 700 U.S. adults whose data was collected as part of the Human Connectome Project, a brain mapping initiative. The test measured abilities including short-term memory, attention, language and visualizing 3-D objects. A clear trend emerged: The cerebellum tended to be smaller with increasing age, but the bigger the cerebellum, particularly in regions in the rear of the little brain, the higher the score on cognitive tests. The trend held even after adjusting for the different levels of education among participants, Princeton University neuroscientist Frederick d’Oleire Uquillas and colleagues report. The researchers found the same link in more than 35,000 adults in the U.K. Biobank, a biomedical database. The findings point to a larger cerebellum preserving cognition with greater age, says d’Oleire Uquillas. The researchers confirmed that scans of the larger cerebellums showed more brain tissue and connections between nerve cells, a © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 30295 - Posted: 06.24.2026

Zoe Beketova When Adam Douglass began to study the tiny, transparent fish in the Danionella genus about 10 years ago, he had to get his animals from an out-of-state fish shop, where they were sold as an exotic pet breed. “The only information at all about trying to grow them in captivity came from online,” says Douglass, a neurobiologist at the University of Utah. Compared with zebrafish, which by that point had been a model species for biology research for decades, Danionella was little known to scientists. How things have changed. Last week, the Janelia Research Campus, the in-house research arm of the behemoth Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), announced a 10-year, roughly $1 billion research effort focused on using Danionella as a model for how brain cells and circuits drive complex behaviors in vertebrates. The effort will also draw on cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) tools to make sense of all the new data on the fish. “I think this is one of the most exciting opportunities that we’ve faced in the entire history of Janelia,” says neuroscientist Nelson Spruston, Janelia’s vice president and executive director. “There are a lot of structures in the brain and the rest of the body of fish that are identifiably similar to those of humans,” he adds, and there’s a long history of simple model organisms “leading to important insights that eventually result in cures and treatments for devastating diseases.” Danionella’s growing popularity comes from one (literally) clear advantage: Unlike zebrafish, which are transparent only for the first few weeks of their 3- to 4-year lives, Danionella remain so, meaning their brain is still visible—and easier to image—when they reach adulthood and engage in behaviors such as schooling, navigation, and courtship. The fish, only about the size of a grain of rice, never grow scales, develop pigmentation, or form a complete, bony skull. “All of these features that stand in the way of being able to get photons into and out of your skull [for imaging] are not there,” says Douglass, who has watched Danionella become a focus of dozens of labs worldwide

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain imaging
Link ID: 30294 - Posted: 06.24.2026

By Simon Makin A new tool makes it possible to probe brain circuit function without the kind of external stimulation required in optogenetics and chemogenetics. The method uses engineered electrical synapses to edit brain circuits. These designer synapses function in living mice, altering activity in cells, circuits and networks, with corresponding effects on behavior. In contrast to tools that involve external stimulation, the result is autonomous. “Here, all the information is completely natural; it’s only how the brain manipulates this information that’s being altered,” says Ithai Rabinowitch, assistant professor of neurobiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who was not involved in the work. “This is really important, in my view.” The technique, called LinCx (long-term integration of circuits using connexins) could be used to investigate relationships between circuit structure and function, as well as the duties of natural electrical synapses. “It’s potentially a useful tool if it’s used intelligently and thoughtfully to ask questions about the role of electrical synapses in brain circuits,” says Eve Marder, professor of biology at Brandeis University, who was not involved in the study. Electrical synapses consist of gap junctions that, in vertebrates, are composed of connexin proteins, of which there are 21 isoforms in humans. These proteins sit in the membranes of touching cells, docked together to create channels that ions pass through, coupling the cells’ activity. Gap junctions in invertebrates are composed of innexins, which don’t interact with connexins, so expressing a mammalian connexin in Caenorhabditis elegans enabled researchers to rewire an olfactory circuit and flip the worms’ behavior from odor attraction to avoidance, according to a 2014 study. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Brain imaging
Link ID: 30293 - Posted: 06.24.2026

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

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

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

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 30291 - Posted: 06.20.2026

By Jennie Erin Smith Like a stadium full of sports fans doing the wave, neurons coordinate their electrical signals in rhythmic patterns that sweep across the cortex, the brain’s outermost layer. Recent studies in humans and animals have shown these patterns, called traveling waves, can take on complex shapes, among them a rotating spiral that has been observed during deep sleep, memory retrieval, and other brain processes. A new study has now captured the fast-spinning waves spanning whole brains, offering clues to how they’re organized and what they might do. The study, published today in Science, examined the brains of mice using multiple recording and imaging methods to reveal brainwide patterns that unite disparate regions from the cortex to the deep brain. The research suggests rotating waves have a key role in coordinating the flow of information across the brain to support perception and behavior. It also offers an explanation for the waves’ spiral pattern by showing that they move along a circular path laid by axons—the long projections of neurons. “This is very exciting work,” says neuroscientist Earl Miller of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose team recently reported that rotating waves in the prefrontal cortex appeared to help monkeys regain their focus after a distraction. The new paper shows the waves are “highly organized across the [mouse] cortex and amazingly, across the hemispheres. When you see this kind of organization, it means something fundamental to function.” It’s been hard to see brainwide patterns of rotating waves because most previous studies have captured them with grids of electrodes that sit on the cortex and gauge signals from nearby neurons. Neuroscientists Nick Steinmetz and Zhiwen Ye of the University of Washington got a broader and more precise sense of the waves’ timing and structure by combining two approaches: rapid widefield calcium imaging, which can record the activity of large populations of neurons in the cortex, and Neuropixels probes, ultrathin microelectrodes that can penetrate brain layers, to record deeper regions such as the thalamus and striatum. © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Attention
Link ID: 30290 - Posted: 06.20.2026

By Victoria Clayton About 14 years ago, Chrissi Kelly lost her sense of smell. She had traveled to the Czech Republic to visit family and caught some virus. Months later, when she still couldn’t smell, she made the rounds to doctors, including her general practitioner and an ear, nose and throat specialist, trying to find answers. She was diagnosed with anosmia (smell loss), and like many patients with her condition, was told she’d have to learn to live with it. But for her, the loss was catastrophic. “After about six months of complete loss, I was just climbing the walls, and I did not feel like myself anymore,” she says. Researchers estimate that up to 22 percent of the population lives with smell impairments, like hyposmia (partial smell loss) or anosmia (complete smell loss). And many others live with smell disorders like phantosmia, in which a person picks up phantom smells, or parosmia, where typically pleasant scents like coffee or shampoo begin to register as highly unpleasant (think feces or vomit). Yet the conditions have been poorly understood, underdiagnosed and often minimized by clinicians. Photos of shampoo, coffee, trees and logs. A world without scents or with warped ones can feel deeply unfamiliar. When our sense of smell goes awry, normally pleasant scents such as shampoo or coffee may be perceived as disgusting, or strong, unmistakable odors such as pine trees in a forest or fresh-cut lumber may fail to be registered at all. The pandemic changed that. Covid brought unprecedented attention — and research interest — to the sense of smell. There have been 780 million reported cases of Covid-19 since December 2019 (and many more unreported), according to the World Health Organization, and smell loss is a well-known symptom. In one 2023 survey published in the journal Laryngoscope, 60 percent of individuals with Covid experienced smell loss, most temporarily, but some over the longer term.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Emotions
Link ID: 30289 - Posted: 06.20.2026

By Kathryn Hulick Emma Lembke joined Instagram at age 12. Soon, she found herself “scrolling mindlessly for hours, addicted to gaining a certain number of likes, a certain number of comments.” She often wanted to stop — but couldn’t. She’s not alone. Most of us these days know the feeling of mindlessly scrolling through low-quality content. We call this sensation “brain rot.” The term can also refer to the content being consumed. Tung Tung Tung Sahur, a personified wooden drum (illustrated above), is one in a slew of silly AI-generated characters deemed “Italian brain rot” because many of them have Italian-sounding names. Trendy among middle schoolers, these absurdist characters show up in memes, videos, Roblox games and more. Brain rot is kind of a joke, but it also really isn’t. A growing number of young people and their parents claim that spending too much time on social media, the spawning ground for brain rot, can mess with mental health. Thousands of cases accusing social media companies of harming young users with addictive features are now making their way through U.S. courts. In May, the U.S. government released a Surgeon General’s warning about the harms of screen use for young people, calling out social media as well as gaming, chatbots and more. “Policy makers and tech companies need to acknowledge the potential for harm and create frameworks to protect children to allow for healthy and joyful use,” states the warning, which includes a disclaimer that the document was edited using the AI tool ChatGPT. But the term “brain rot” evokes something more pernicious. Could browsing through stupid content actually make us stupid? This fear isn’t new. Back in 2009, the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, voiced concerns about how digital media was impacting young people’s intelligence: “I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information … is in fact affecting cognition,” he said in an interview with talk show host Charlie Rose. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30288 - Posted: 06.20.2026

By Lauren Schenkman Many animals can solve novel problems, often in a single go. For humans, that could be writing the first line of a poem, tackling a complex equation or improvising a jazz solo. For a macaque monkey, it might mean climbing a new tree to snag a delectable fruit. A new study, published in May in Nature, adds support to the long-standing idea that the brain accomplishes these feats by piecing together bits of existing knowledge (words, mathematical functions, riffs or tree-climbing moves, for example)—a process called compositional generalization. Single-neuron recordings in macaques locate the knowledge blocks, according to the study. The brain activity patterns that occur in the ventral premotor cortex when monkeys learn to draw simple symbols recur in concert when the animals are later prompted to draw complex shapes made up of those symbols. “We have quite a lot of behavioral evidence for compositional generalization across a wide array of different tasks,” says Charlie Wilson, a tenured researcher at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) and the Stem Cell and Brain Research Institute in Lyon, who was not involved in the new research. “The interesting element here is the step towards showing a neural basis for that.” The new work is part of a growing effort in the field to “bring modern techniques and modern understanding back to bear on this kind of question,” says Tim Buschman, professor of neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University. Buschman was not involved in the study but co-authored a 2025 Nature paper showing how macaques use compositional generalization to respond with specific eye movements to different types of images. “I think it’s really wonderful seeing evidence for these types of components.” © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30287 - Posted: 06.20.2026

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

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

By Michael Howerton When something goes wrong in the brain of people with dementia, often it’s more than one thing. But it can be hard to tease apart multiple brain diseases, especially in the early stages, or even determine if more than one disease is at play. An experimental new blood test may change that. The test measures the levels of 15 proteins in the blood to help diagnose four major neurodegenerative diseases — Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, frontotemporal dementia and dementia with Lewy bodies. And it can determine if a person has more than one of those diseases with 92.3 percent accuracy, researchers report in the May Alzheimer’s & Dementia. Dementia affects more than 6 million people in the United States and is the seventh leading cause of death worldwide. “These diseases are more complex than we initially thought, and there is more overlap than we thought,” says Carlos Cruchaga, a human genomicist at Washington University in St. Louis. “In order to really address and understand the biology of the disease of any of these, we need to study all of these diseases together.” Different dementias require different kinds of care, he says, even if the symptoms seem similar. Knowing the combination of diseases can help point toward more tailored precision treatment. Last year the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first blood test for Alzheimer’s disease. A number of other Alzheimer’s tests that do not have FDA backing are on the market. But those tests can’t detect anything more than Alzheimer’s. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 30285 - Posted: 06.17.2026

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

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

Hannah Harris Green A range of other medications could serve as alternatives to powerful opioids for pain relief in emergency departments, according to a new study. The review paper examined non-opioid medications available in the emergency department at San Francisco general hospital and examined existing medical literature to figure out which ones might provide pain relief. Opioids have a strong track record of reducing pain effectively, but loose prescriptions with insufficient care towards their addictive properties led to the first wave of the US opioid crisis, which began in the 90s. Akash Shanmugam, a medical student at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and first author on the study, said the goal of the study was to “create a very targeted list for specific pain conditions”, to help add to the “toolboxes” physicians use to treat patients. The study provides recommendations for the most common types of pain that patients experience in emergency departments; abdominal pain, back pain, chest pain, fracture pain and headache. Shanmugam and Dr Kathy LeSaint, an associate professor of emergency medicine at UCSF and another of the paper’s authors, agree that opioids still have a place in medicine. “The desire to reduce opioids shouldn’t come at the expense of under-treating pain,” Shanmugam said. However, alternatives can also have an important role as physicians have become increasingly aware of possible long-term consequences. LeSaint also pointed out that beyond concerns about opioid addiction and overdose, it’s important to have a variety of medications for pain available because what will work best varies from person to person. This variation is often genetic; for example “the enzymes that are responsible for metabolizing opioids can have different strengths in people”, LeSaint explained. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30283 - Posted: 06.17.2026

Jon Hamilton One of the world's top centers for brain science is taking a huge gamble on a tiny, transparent fish. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus near Washington, D.C., has announced an effort to use artificial intelligence and an unusual fish called Danionella to understand how the brain controls complex behaviors like social interaction. "It's a big, risky bet," says Gerry Rubin, Janelia's founding executive director and head of biology. "But that's what makes it interesting." Janelia plans to triple the space dedicated to fish to 6,000 square feet, which will make room for thousands of new tanks. Leaders expect that the number of scientists working on Danionella is likely to rise from about 10 to 100 or more. The payoff, they say, will be worth it — because by watching an entire fish brain function in real time, researchers at Janelia hope to learn about exactly how the brain drives behavior in other species, including humans. "We all evolved from fish, and our brains share many features of the brains of fish," says Nelson Spruston, Janelia's executive director. The brain as a black box © 2026 npr

Keyword: Brain imaging; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30282 - Posted: 06.17.2026

By Kenneth P. Vogel and Christina Jewett For years, federal health officials have warned about the risks associated with a supplement derived from the leaves of kratom trees that adherents say can kill pain or boost energy. Sold in gas stations across America, kratom has been linked to liver toxicity, seizures and thousands of deaths. Powerful figures close to President Trump, including Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, pushed to downplay those concerns. Mr. Mullin, until recently a Republican senator from Oklahoma, played a key role in a sprawling influence campaign spearheaded by the kratom industry that courted Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Vice President JD Vance, among others in the Trump administration, an investigation by The New York Times found. Only when he was nominated by Mr. Trump in March to lead the Homeland Security Department did it become clear that Mr. Mullin had a financial connection to the supplement. In a disclosure statement, he listed an investment worth as much as $1 million in a kratom company, Botanic Tonics, that could benefit from the changes he has sought. The company’s founder, Jerry W. Ross — who had been an energy executive in Mr. Mullin’s home state before pleading guilty to a financial crime — is a leading player in the influence campaign that was devised to benefit kratom at the expense of its rivals in the marketplace. The kratom campaign underscores how corporations in the growing wellness industry can gain traction in Mr. Trump’s government by casting risky products as aligned with the administration’s Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, agenda championed by Mr. Kennedy, who has sometimes prioritized unproven remedies over science. In July, while still a senator, Mr. Mullin showed up at a Food and Drug Administration news conference and endorsed proposed federal restrictions on more powerful synthetic supplements that compete with kratom for shelf space. In explaining his position, Mr. Mullin pointed to a history of addiction in his family, though health experts say kratom products have also been shown to be addictive. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30281 - Posted: 06.17.2026

Jon Hamilton The most powerful factors affecting a child's brain development involve socioeconomic opportunities, according to a study in the journal Science. The analysis of more than 2,300 9- and 10-year-olds found that environmental factors ranging from household income to education to neighborhood quality are associated with brain differences that can clearly be seen in MRI scans. The researchers also found that preteens who'd grown up in neighborhoods with lower incomes and limited social support had brain differences associated with less sleep and more stress. "Something is going on in these neighborhoods," says Scott Marek, the study's first author and an assistant professor of radiology at WashU School of Medicine. "We need to find out how socioeconomics is becoming biologically embedded." The research "highlights the fact that the environment in which we grow up and live has powerful impacts on our brain," says Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at Stanford University who was not involved in the study. It also challenges earlier research that focused on links between brain development and factors like IQ and mental health. Those factors do appear to have a small influence on brain development, says Dr. Nico Dosenbach, an author of the new study and a professor at WashU Medicine in St. Louis. "But socioeconomics was, by a wide margin, absolutely the dominant variable," Dosenbach says. © 2026 npr

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 30280 - Posted: 06.13.2026

By Natalia Mesa IQ is one of the most-studied traits in brain imaging studies. And yet it has a weaker relationship with brain structure and function in children than socioeconomic status does, according to a study published today in Science. The apparent link between IQ and brain differences largely disappears once socioeconomic status is controlled for, the findings suggest. The results point to the importance of factoring in socioeconomic status in analyses of brain imaging datasets, the researchers say. “If you’re not properly taking into account [socioeconomic status]” in brain imaging experiments, “you’re going to fool yourself,” says study investigator Nico Dosenbach, professor of neurology at Washington University in St. Louis. Dosenbach and his colleagues analyzed MRI scans and behavioral data from roughly 12,000 children aged 9 to 10 in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, looking for correlations between measures of brain structure and function and 649 psychological, health, social and environmental factors. Socioeconomic variables—such as household income and where the child lives—were the most strongly associated with functional connectivity and cortical thickness. Differences in socioeconomics account for 16 percent of the variance in functional connectivity across the participants, the study found, which is among “the largest effects that are seen in these kinds of studies,” says Russ Poldrack, professor of psychology at Stanford University, who was not involved in the study. Socioeconomic status accounted for roughly 13 percent of the variance in cortical thickness. Sleep and screen time are also strongly linked to these brain features, although not as strongly as socioeconomics. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 30279 - Posted: 06.13.2026

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

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

By Amber Dance Motherhood creates a broad swath of long-term gene-expression changes in the brains of mice, according to a new study. This is accomplished by dopamine attaching to the histones of neuronal DNA and regulating gene expression, particularly in the hippocampus. The findings suggest that “pregnancy fundamentally changes the body and brain,” says study investigator Jennifer O’Chan, instructor in neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “And these are long-lasting effects.” Similar patterns of gene regulation appeared in postmortem samples from five women of varying ages who had all given birth in their past, O’Chan and her colleagues found. The work thus adds to a small but growing body of research on neurological changes linked to pregnancy, birth and parenting. “The maternal brain is woefully understudied, and so the molecular profiling that they do … it’s really an enormous resource,” says Catherine Peña, assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, who was not involved with the paper. Of 11 brain regions linked to maternal behaviors in mice that the group studied, the dorsal hippocampus and associated subiculum—together called the dorsal hippocampal formation—exhibited the greatest differences in gene expression between virgin mice and those that experienced the full spectrum of motherhood, from mating to weaning. This region doesn’t usually top the list of brain areas linked with maternity, says Robert Froemke, professor of neuroscience at New York University Langone Health, who wasn’t involved in the study. But hippocampal functions such as temporal sequencing and synthesizing different memory streams could certainly apply to pup-rearing, he says. “It’s not a total surprise, but it’s fair to say this paper makes me consider its importance more strongly.” © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 30277 - Posted: 06.13.2026