By Christina Caron When most people think of obsessive-compulsive disorder, they may picture behaviors they’ve seen on TV — like repetitive hand-washing, flicking light switches on and off and meticulously arranging small items over and over. But the disorder manifests in many other ways. Some patients obsess over thoughts that they might hurt someone, while others fixate on certain aspects of their personal relationships. The comedian Maria Bamford, for example, has called her O.C.D. “unwanted thoughts syndrome.” On “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” she shared a story about how she couldn’t stop thinking horrific thoughts about her family members. On social media, people describe many types of obsessions and compulsions: “relationship O.C.D.,” “sexual orientation O.C.D.” or “emotional contamination O.C.D.” These aren’t separate diagnoses, but rather they are different expressions of the same disorder — much like how people with phobias can suffer from different fears, said Dr. Carolyn Rodriguez, an O.C.D. expert and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford Medicine. Understanding these distinctions can help clinicians tailor a precise treatment plan, she added. And they’re important for the public to grasp as well. Otherwise, people who experience the disorder might not even recognize they have it, Dr. Rodriguez said. People who are fearful of harming others might think, “Maybe I am a murderer,” she added. “If I tell anybody these things, I’m going to be put in jail.” © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 29793 - Posted: 05.17.2025

By Sheila Hale On the night before the accident, John and I and our son Jay, who was then 26, lingered in the garden drinking wine and enjoying the mid-summer scent of jasmine and lilies. We talked about the Manet exhibition we had just seen at the National Gallery. We probably talked about how the end of the cold war might affect the chances of Bill Clinton winning the presidential election against George HW Bush in November. I know what John thought about that. I only wish I could recall his words. The next morning, 30 July 1992, John got up before me as he always did. In the kitchen I found the contents of the dishwasher – knives, forks, spoons, plates, mugs – jumbled together on the table. This was odd because unloading the dishwasher was the one domestic ritual he willingly performed. It would be years before I learned the reason. At the time I put it down to absent-mindedness. It was a month since he had delivered a book to the publisher and he was already preoccupied by the next one, about art in the European Renaissance. Before I had time to be annoyed, I heard a crash from his study at the top of the house. I ran upstairs and found him lying on the floor next to his desk. He looked up at me with the radiant, witless smile of a baby. And he said: “Da walls.” The ambulance took us to the local hospital where they said that my husband had had cerebral accident – a stroke. The cause was probably years of uncontrolled high blood pressure, about which no doctor had warned him. They said he needed rest and reassurance. Unfortunately, because of the so-called efficiency savings introduced by John Major’s government, there was a shortage of beds and of nurses in all London hospitals. I was so grateful when they found a bed for him in a geriatric ward later in the day that I didn’t at first notice how filthy it was and how hot. The floor was covered in urine, blood and dust balls. (Later I brought in a mop to clean around John’s bed.) The plateglass window could not be opened: to prevent suicides, a passing nurse told me. It was a week before I managed to track down the doctor whose name was printed on a grimy card at the head of John’s bed. The doctor informed me that my husband’s case was hopeless. He would never walk again and must never be allowed to try to stand because the hospital insurance wouldn’t cover a fall. Physiotherapy, which the doctor considered “about as useful as peanut butter”, was out of the question. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 29792 - Posted: 05.17.2025

Gemma Conroy Researchers have identified a genetic dial in the human brain that, when inserted in mice, boosts their brain size by about 6.5%.Credit: Sergey Bezgodov/Shutterstock Taking a snippet of genetic code that is unique to humans and inserting it into mice helps the animals to grow bigger brains than usual, according to a report out in Nature today1. The slice of code — a stretch of DNA that acts like a dial to turn up the expression of certain genes — expanded the outer layer of the mouse brain by increasing the production of cells that become neurons. The finding could partially explain how humans evolved such large brains compared with their primate relatives. This study goes deeper than previous work that attempted to unpick the genetic mechanisms behind human brain development, says Katherine Pollard, a bioinformatics researcher at the Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology in San Francisco, California. “The story is much more complete and convincing,” she says. How the human brain grew to be so big and complex remains a mystery, says Gabriel Santpere Baró, a neuroscientist who studies genomics at the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain. “We still do not have a definitive answer to how the human brain has tripled in size since our split from chimpanzees” during evolution, he says. Previous studies2,3 have hinted that human accelerated regions (HARs) — short snippets of the genome that are conserved across mammals, but which underwent rapid change in humans after they evolutionarily diverged from chimpanzees — could be key contributors to brain development and size. But the exact mechanisms that underlie the brain-building effects of HARs are yet to be uncovered, says study co-author Debra Silver, a developmental neurobiologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Evolution
Link ID: 29791 - Posted: 05.17.2025

By Sydney Wyatt The red nucleus—a pale pink brainstem structure that coordinates limb movements in quadruped animals—also projects to brain areas that shape reward-motivated and action-based movements in people, according to a new functional imaging study. The finding suggests the region, like the cerebral cortex, took on a more complex role over the course of evolution. Many researchers had assumed that brainstem structures remained stuck in evolutionarily ancient roles, says Joan Baizer, professor of physiology and biophysics at the University at Buffalo. Activity in the red nucleus, a structure that emerged once animals began to use limbs for walking, coordinates the speed and accuracy of those movements in rats and helps to control posture in monkeys, previous electrophysiological recordings have shown. And in nonhuman primates, neurons in the red nucleus project to the motor cortex and spinal cord, anatomical studies have demonstrated, seemingly confirming the area’s role in motor function. By contrast, the human red nucleus primarily connects to cortical and subcortical regions involved in action control, reward and motivated behavior, the new work reveals. “If this is such a motor structure, why isn’t it projecting to the spinal cord? That doesn’t really fit with our notion of what this structure is supposed to be doing,” says study investigator Samuel Krimmel, a postdoctoral fellow in Nico Dosenbach’s lab. The new imaging suggests that, at least in people, the neural underpinnings of motivated movement—previously considered to be the role of higher-order brain areas—reach “all the way down into the brainstem,” says Dosenbach, professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine, who led the work. The findings were published last month in Nature Communications. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 29790 - Posted: 05.17.2025

By Christina Caron Tasha Hedges took Xanax for 20 years to treat her anxiety and panic attacks, exactly as a psychiatrist had prescribed it. Then in 2022, that doctor unexpectedly died. A general practitioner continued her prescription but retired shortly afterward. The next doctor moved to Canada. Finally, Ms. Hedges found a new psychiatrist. “The first thing he did was start yelling at me that I had been on Xanax too long,” said Ms. Hedges, 41, who lives in Falling Waters, W.Va. “He ripped me off my meds.” Discontinuing the drug typically requires decreasing the dose slowly over months or even years, a process called tapering. Ms. Hedges stopped cold turkey. Debilitating withdrawal symptoms followed: hot flashes, cold sweats, restless legs, the shakes and teeth grinding. “It was a nightmare,” she said. Two years after discontinuing the medication, she is still dealing with the fallout. “My brain has not been the same.” In social media groups and websites such as BenzoBuddies, people like Ms. Hedges say they have become physically dependent on benzodiazepines. Many then get cut off from their medication or taper too quickly, and face dangerous and potentially life-threatening withdrawal symptoms that can linger long after the drugs are discontinued. Some doctors, fearful of the risks and stigma associated with these drugs, refuse to prescribe them at all. “Benzos generate as much anxiety in the prescriber as they do in the patient,” said Dr. Ronald M. Winchel, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. “Do I start it? Is it the right context? Is it safe? Is my patient going to abuse it? What will my colleagues think/ © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stress
Link ID: 29789 - Posted: 05.17.2025

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre Can a robot arm wave hello to a cuttlefish—and get a hello back? Could a dolphin’s whistle actually mean “Where are you?” And are monkeys quietly naming each other while we fail to notice? These are just a few of the questions tackled by the finalists for this year’s Dolittle prize, a $100,000 award recognizing early breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI)-powered interspecies communication. The winning project—announced today—explores how dolphins use shared, learned whistles that may carry specific meanings—possibly even warning each other about danger, or just expressing confusion. The other contending teams—working with marmosets, cuttlefish, and nightingales—are also pushing the boundaries of what human-animal communication might look like. The prize marks an important milestone in the Coller Dolittle Challenge, a 5-year competition offering up to $10 million to the first team that can achieve genuine two-way communication with animals. “Part of how this initiative was born came from my skepticism,” says Yossi Yovel, a neuroecologist at Tel Aviv University and one of the prize’s organizers. “But we really have much better tools now. So this is the time to revisit a lot of our previous assumptions about two-way communication within the animal’s own world.” Science caught up with the four finalists to hear how close we really are to cracking the animal code. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis and S. bandensis) lack ears and voices, but they apparently make up for this with a kind of sign language. When shown videos of comrades waving their arms, they wave back.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 29788 - Posted: 05.17.2025

By Mac Shine The brain is an endlessly dynamic machine; it can wake you from sleep, focus your attention, spark a memory or help you slam on the brakes while driving. But what makes this precision possible? How can the brain dial up just the right amount of alertness or inhibition, and only when it’s needed? A new study, out today in Nature, may have found part of the answer in an unlikely place: a cluster of small, largely overlooked inhibitory neurons nestled next to one of the brain’s most powerful arousal hubs, the locus coeruleus (LC). Led by Michael R. Bruchas, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington, the study is a tour de force in neural sleuthing, employing methods ranging from viral tracing and electrophysiology to imaging and behavior to map an elusive cell population known as the pericoeruleus. In a world where we’re constantly being pinged, alerted, nudged and notified, the ability to not react—to gate our arousal and filter our responses—may be one of the brain’s most underappreciated superpowers. Here I discuss the results with Bruchas—and what he and his team found is remarkable. Far from being a passive neighbor to the LC, the pericoeruleus appears to act as a kind of micromanager of arousal, selectively inhibiting different subgroups of LC neurons depending on the behavioral context. If the LC is like a floodlight that bathes the brain in noradrenaline—raising alertness, sharpening perception and mobilizing attention—then the pericoeruleus may be the finely-tuned lens that directs where and when that light shines. It’s a subtle but powerful form of control, and one that challenges traditional views of how the LC operates. For decades, the LC has been thought of primarily as a global broadcaster: When it fires, it releases norepinephrine widely across the cortex, preparing the brain for action. But this new work is the latest in a recent line of inquiry that has challenged this simplicity—suggesting that the system is more complex and nuanced than previously thought. “We’re beginning to see that the locus coeruleus doesn’t just flood the brain with arousal – it targets specific outputs, and the pericoeruleus plays a key role in gating that process,” said Li Li, one of the co-first authors of the paper and a former postdoctoral researcher in Bruchas’ lab, now assistant professor of anesthesiology at Seattle Children’s Hospital. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 29787 - Posted: 05.14.2025

Anna Bawden in Málaga and agency Giving obese children weight loss jabs works and could help avoid arguments over mealtimes, according to research. Clinicians treating very obese children at a hospital in Sweden analysed whether liraglutide injections could be used as well as diet and lifestyle changes to increase weight loss. In real-life analysis of 1,000 children under 16 with severe obesity over a number of years, about a quarter of patients in 2023 were given the weight loss drug liraglutide in addition to receiving intensive health behaviour and lifestyle treatment at the National Childhood Obesity Centre in Stockholm. The clinicians found that nearly a third of these children dropped enough weight to improve their health, compared with about 27% in earlier treated groups with no access to the drugs. Patients starting the programme in 2024 have been given semaglutide but results from these children are not yet available. Semaglutide, better known as Wegovy, and liraglutide, sold as Saxenda, are both GLP-1 receptor agonists, which help curb appetite. In the UK they are available on the NHS only for adults with a BMI above 35 with a weight-related condition, although in certain circumstances specialist paediatric clinics can prescribe them. Dr Annika Janson, of Karolinska university hospital in Sweden, the lead author of the study, whose findings were presented at the European Congress on Obesity, said the beneficial impact of weight loss jabs on children’s weight could accelerate in future years. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 29786 - Posted: 05.14.2025

Nicola Davis Science correspondent Birds of a feather flock together, so the saying goes. But scientists studying the behaviour of starlings have found their ability to give and take makes their relationships closer to human friendships than previously thought. About 10% of bird species and 5% of mammal species breed “cooperatively”, meaning some individuals refrain from breeding to help others care for their offspring. Some species even help those they are unrelated to. Now researchers studying superb starlings have found the support cuts both ways, with birds that received help in feeding or guarding their chicks returning the favour when the “helper” bird has offspring of its own. Prof Dustin Rubenstein, a co-author of the study from the University of Colombia, said such behaviour was probably necessary for superb starlings as they live in a harsh environment where drought is common and food is limited. “Two birds probably can’t feed their offspring on their own, so they need these helpers to help them,” he said, adding that as each breeding pair produces few offspring, birds must be recruited from outside the family group to help the young survive. “What happens is the non-relatives come into the group, and they breed pretty quickly, usually in the first year, maybe the second year, and then they take some time off and some of the other birds breed – and we never understood why,” said Rubenstein. “But they’re forming these pairwise reciprocal relationships, in the sense that I might help you this year, and then you’ll help me in the future.” The results chime with previous work from Rubenstein and colleagues that found superb starlings living in larger groups have a greater chance of survival and of producing offspring, with the new work suggesting the give-and-take approach helps to stabilise these groups. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 29785 - Posted: 05.14.2025

By Ajdina Halilovic When Todd Sacktor (opens a new tab) was about to turn 3, his 4-year-old sister died of leukemia. “An empty bedroom next to mine. A swing set with two seats instead of one,” he said, recalling the lingering traces of her presence in the house. “There was this missing person — never spoken of — for which I had only one memory.” That memory, faint but enduring, was set in the downstairs den of their home. A young Sacktor asked his sister to read him a book, and she brushed him off: “Go ask your mother.” Sacktor glumly trudged up the stairs to the kitchen. It’s remarkable that, more than 60 years later, Sacktor remembers this fleeting childhood moment at all. The astonishing nature of memory is that every recollection is a physical trace, imprinted into brain tissue by the molecular machinery of neurons. How the essence of a lived moment is encoded and later retrieved remains one of the central unanswered questions in neuroscience. Sacktor became a neuroscientist in pursuit of an answer. At the State University of New York Downstate in Brooklyn, he studies the molecules involved in maintaining the neuronal connections underlying memory. The question that has always held his attention was first articulated in 1984 (opens a new tab) by the famed biologist Francis Crick: How can memories persist for years, even decades, when the body’s molecules degrade and are replaced in a matter of days, weeks or, at most, months? In 2024, working alongside a team that included his longtime collaborator André Fenton (opens a new tab), a neuroscientist at New York University, Sacktor offered a potential explanation in a paper published in Science Advances. The researchers discovered that a persistent bond between two proteins (opens a new tab) is associated with the strengthening of synapses, which are the connections between neurons. Synaptic strengthening is thought to be fundamental to memory formation. As these proteins degrade, new ones take their place in a connected molecular swap that maintains the bond’s integrity and, therefore, the memory. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29784 - Posted: 05.11.2025

By Katharine Gammon Picture this: You’re sitting down, engrossed in a meal, when an unfamiliar person walks by. There’s something about them—Hair? Smile? Vibes?—that instantly draws you in and makes you want to strike up a friendship. A new study suggests that it could be the scent they exude that attracts you to them. Not just the way their skin or hair smells, but the deodorant and shampoo they use, the foods they consume, even their laundry detergent. Our sense of smell tends to operate below the level of conscious awareness, says Jessica Gaby, a psychology researcher at Middle Tennessee State University and an author of the study, so our responses to it are often hidden from us. “But at the same time, it’s inescapable,” she says. “You can’t fake it.” Gaby and her colleagues, who were at Cornell University when the study was conducted, brought 40 women aged 18-30 together in a Cornell dining hall, a large, refurbished barn with café tables that doubles as a beer hall at night. The scent of popcorn, beer, and leftover dinner wafted over the room: The idea was to have a complex olfactory environment. The women all identified as heterosexual, so the researchers could focus on the type of attraction that might lead to friendship. In the first phase of the study, the participants received cotton T-shirts and were instructed to wear them for 12 hours straight without altering their daily routines, and to keep notes about their activities. One participant used spray paint in an art project, another had sex, another said she spilled a small amount of black beans on her shirt. In the second phase of the study, the participants were instructed to view photographs of different individual women, some of whom they would later meet. They then each sniffed the worn T-shirts, then had four-minute meetings, speed-dating style, with the other individual women, then sniffed their T-shirts again. After each step, they judged their friendship potential with the other women on a scale of 1 to 7. © 2025 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Emotions
Link ID: 29783 - Posted: 05.11.2025

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 Jake Buehler Grunts, barks, screams and pants ring through Taï National Park in Cȏte d’Ivoire. Chimpanzees there combine these different calls like linguistic Legos to relay complex meanings when communicating, researchers report May 9 in Science Advances. Chimps can combine and flexibly rearrange pairs of sounds to convey different ideas or meanings, an ability that investigators have not documented in other nonhuman animals. This system may represent a key evolutionary transition between vocal communication strategies of other animals and the syntax rules that structure human languages. “The difference between human language and how other animals communicate is really about how we combine sounds to form words, and how we combine words to form sentences,” says Cédric Girard-Buttoz, an evolutionary biologist at CNRS in Lyon, France. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) were known to have a particularly complicated vocal repertoire, with about a dozen single sounds that they can combine into hundreds of sequences. But it was unclear if the apes used multiple approaches when combining sounds to make new meanings, like in human language. In 2019 and 2020, Girard-Buttoz and his colleagues recorded 53 different adult chimpanzees living in the Taï forest. In all, the team analyzed over 4,300 sounds and described 16 different “bigrams” — short sequences of two sounds, like a grunt followed by a bark, or a panted hoo followed by a scream. The team then used statistical analyses to map those bigrams to behaviors to reveal some of the bigrams’ meanings. The result? Chimpanzees don’t combine sounds in a single, consistent way. They have at least four different methods — a first seen outside of humans. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 29781 - Posted: 05.11.2025

By Asher Elbein True friends, most people would agree, are there for each other. Sometimes that means offering emotional support. Sometimes it means helping each other move. And if you’re a superb starling — a flamboyant, chattering songbird native to the African savanna — it means stuffing bugs down the throats of your friends’ offspring, secure in the expectation that they’ll eventually do the same for yours. Scientists have long known that social animals usually put blood relatives first. But for a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers crunched two decades of field data to show that unrelated members of a superb starling flock often help each other raise chicks, trading assistance to one another over years in a behavior that was not previously known. “We think that these reciprocal helping relationships are a way to build ties,” said Dustin Rubenstein, a professor of ecology at Columbia University and an author of the paper. Superb starlings are distinctive among animals that breed cooperatively, said Alexis Earl, a biologist at Cornell University and an author of the paper. Their flocks mix family groups with immigrants from other groups. New parents rely on up to 16 helpers, which bring chicks extra food and help run off predators. Dr. Rubenstein’s lab has maintained a 20-year field study of the species that included 40 breeding seasons. It has recorded thousands of interactions between hundreds of the chattering birds and collected DNA to examine their genetic relationships. When Dr. Earl, then a graduate student in the lab, began crunching the data, she and her colleagues weren’t shocked to see that birds largely helped relatives, the way an aunt or uncle may swoop in to babysit and give parents a break. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Emotions
Link ID: 29780 - Posted: 05.10.2025

Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon A new scientific study has found no evidence of a mystery brain disease in New Brunswick, says a report published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, known as JAMA. Instead, an independent reassessment of 25 of 222 patients diagnosed by Moncton neurologist Alier Marrero as having a "neurological syndrome of unknown cause" concluded that all of the cases were attributable to well-known conditions. These include common neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, functional neurological disorder, traumatic brain injury, and metastatic cancer, says the report. Despite the small sample size, "when we did the statistics … the chances of any of those other individuals having a mystery disease was less than one in a million," said Dr. Anthony Lang, a senior neurologist and neuroscientist in Toronto, and one of the 13 co-authors. The researchers, affiliated with the University of Toronto, New Brunswick's Horizon Health Network and other Canadian institutions, do not believe exposure to something in the environment, such as the herbicide glyphosate or heavy metals, made the patients ill either, said Lang, director of the Edmund J Safra Program in Parkinson's Disease at the University Health Network. "The neurological problems varied a great deal. Some had neurodegenerative diseases, but others had other neurological problems and therefore a single environmental toxin … could never have explained this broad variety of neurological abnormalities." Lang, who got involved in the study because he started hearing about a mystery disease but wasn't seeing any publications in medical literature, is not surprised by the results. ©2025 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Movement Disorders; Alzheimers
Link ID: 29779 - Posted: 05.10.2025

Freda Kreier Some people can function well on little sleep.Credit: Oleg Breslavtsev/Getty Most people need around eight hours of sleep each night to function, but a rare genetic condition allows some to thrive on as little as three hours. In a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1, scientists identified a genetic mutation that probably contributes to some people’s limited sleep needs. Understanding genetic changes in naturally short sleepers — people who sleep for three to six hours every night without negative effects — could help to develop treatments for sleep disorders, says co-author Ying-Hui Fu, a neuroscientist and geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco. “Our bodies continue to work when we go to bed”, detoxifying themselves and repairing damage, she says. “These people, all these functions our bodies are doing while we are sleeping, they can just perform at a higher level than we can.” In the 2000s, Fu and her colleagues were approached by people who slept six hours or less each night. After analysing the genomes of a mother and daughter, the team identified a rare mutation in a gene that helps to regulate humans’ circadian rhythm, the internal clock responsible for our sleep–wake cycle. The researchers suggested that this variation contributed to the duo’s short sleep needs. That discovery prompted others with similar sleeping habits to contact the laboratory for DNA testing. The team now knows several hundred naturally short sleepers. Fu and her colleagues have so far identified five mutations in four genes that can contribute to the trait — although different families tend to have different mutations. Short sleeper In the latest study, the researchers searched for new mutations in the DNA of a naturally short sleeper. They found one in SIK3, a gene encoding an enzyme that, among other things, is active in the space between neurons. Researchers in Japan had previously found another mutation in Sik3 that caused mice to be unusually sleepy2. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Sleep; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 29778 - Posted: 05.07.2025

By Giorgia Guglielmi Newly formed memories change over the course of a night’s sleep, a new study in rats suggests. The results reveal that memory processing and consolidation is more complex and prolonged than previously understood, says study investigator Jozsef Csicsvari, professor of systems neuroscience at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. Sleep has long been known to help consolidate memories, though most studies have tracked only a few hours of this process. The new work monitored memory-related brain activity patterns across almost an entire day—representing a significant step forward, says Lisa Genzel, associate professor of neuroscience at Radboud University, who wasn’t involved in the research. That’s “a heroic effort,” she says. Csicsvari and his team implanted wireless electrodes into the hippocampus of three rats and recorded neuronal activity as the animals learned to navigate a maze in search of hidden pieces of food, rested or slept for 16 to 20 hours after, and then revisited the same food locations the following day. The neurons that fired during learning became active again throughout the rest period, especially during sleep, the team found. This reactivation is a key part of memory consolidation, and it doesn’t just happen immediately after learning; instead, it continues for hours, the study shows. And while the animals slept, their brain activity patterns gradually shifted to resemble the post-sleep recall patterns—a change known as “representational drift” that likely helps the brain weave new information into what it already knows, Csicsvari says. Some neuron groups may be more involved than others in updating memories, the work showed. Some cell types remained stable, whereas others changed their activity. For example, hippocampal neurons called CA1 pyramidal cells showed distinct firing patterns during memory reactivation. And interneurons, too, appeared to play a supporting role, mirroring the changes in pyramidal cells. The team published their findings in Neuron in March. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29777 - Posted: 05.07.2025

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 Lizzie Wade As John Rick excavated one of the many underground chambers at the ancient Peruvian site of Chavín de Huántar in 2017 his trowel hit something intriguing, and exceedingly delicate. It was a cigarette-size tube made of animal bone and packed full of sediment. The following year, his team found almost two dozen more. Rick, an archaeologist at Stanford University, suspected these bone tubes were pieces of ancient drug paraphernalia. Now, a chemical analysis of plant material preserved inside the bone tubes confirms ancient people used them to inhale snuffs made of tobacco and a hallucinogenic plant known as vilca. Rick and colleagues say the rituals involving these drugs may have helped the people of Chavín consolidate their power and influence some 2500 years ago, a time when complex social and political hierarchies were first taking shape in Peru. Although researchers have long suspected rituals at Chavín involved hallucinogenic drugs, “What’s exciting about this paper is that, for first time, we have actual evidence,” says José Capriles, an archaeologist at Pennsylvania State University who wasn’t involved in the research but has studied psychoactive drugs used by ancient people. Chavín de Huántar, which was occupied in the first millennium B.C.E., is renowned for its intricate stone carvings, often depicting animal-human hybrids or transformations of human into beast, and an extensive network of underground chambers. It also had a broad cultural reach. The site in Peru’s north-central highlands abounds with seashells and obsidian, neither found locally, and Chavín-style art shows up in many places throughout the Andes and on the Peruvian coast. “Chavín was part of the first big moment in Andean prehistory when people, ideas, and goods were circulating quite extensively,” says Dan Contreras, an archaeologist at the University of Florida and a co-author of the new paper.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29775 - Posted: 05.07.2025

By Susan Milius Here’s a great case of real life turning out to be stranger than fiction. From baby’s first storybook to sly adult graphic novels, the story we’re told is the same: Male frogs croak with the bottom of their mouths ballooning out in one fat, rounded bubble. Yet “that’s actually only half the species of frogs,” says herpetologist Agustín Elías-Costa of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Science Museum in Buenos Aires. The diversity of body parts for ribbitting is astounding. Some males serenade with a pair of separate puff-out disks like padded headphones that slipped down the frog’s neck, throbbing in brilliant blue. Some have sacs that look like balloon Mickey Mouse ears in khaki. Others ribbit with a single upright like a fat horn stub on some inflatable swimming pool toy rhino. All together, 20 basic forms for vocal sacs have evolved among frogs and toads, Elías-Costa and herpetologist Julián Faivovich report in March in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. Still, about 18 percent of the 4,358 species examined didn’t have vocal sacs at all. The team studied 777 specimens over 10 years of visiting museums around the world, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. “Libraries of nature,” Faivovich calls them. Just drawing a picture of something doesn’t authenticate details the way a preserved specimen does. These collections for biodiversity studies are “what makes them a science,” he says. The survey showed that vocal sacs disappeared between 146 and 196 times across the very twiggy evolutionary branchings of the frog and toad family tree. That’s “an astounding number considering their biological importance,” Elías-Costa says. Even without sacs, the animals still emit sounds because, like human speech, frog and toad ribbits originate from the larynx. Vocal sacs amplify the sound and could convey nuances of male quality and sexiness, but can also tip off eavesdropping predators. Females in a few species vocalize too, but it’s mostly a male endeavor. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hearing
Link ID: 29774 - Posted: 05.07.2025