By Azeen Ghorayshi Academic research labs across the country are working to find biological markers that can predict whether a child is at risk of developing autism. And companies are rushing to turn the findings into commercial tests, despite limited evidence to back their validity, raising concerns that their results could mislead desperate parents. They include one test that examines a strand of hair to rule out an autism diagnosis in babies as young as one month old. Two other tests just entered the market. One promises to predict autism risk based on skin cells collected as early as days after birth. Another looks for the presence of certain antibodies in a mother’s blood to determine whether her children, or babies that she might have in the future, are at risk of developing autism. For decades, clinicians and parents have hoped for a biological test that could help determine if a child has autism. The push to commercialize investigators’ early research has accelerated as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has elevated the neurodevelopmental disorder into a national political priority, creating new funding for autism research and reviving long-discredited theories about autism and vaccines. But the new tests, largely aimed as a screening tool for the general population, are not yet reliable enough to be offered commercially, outside scientists familiar with the tests say, especially in a landscape where families are already inundated with incorrect or unverified information about autism. None of the tests has gone through large experimental trials or had its validity evaluated by a regulatory agency. “All of these tests are interesting hypotheses,” said Joseph Buxbaum, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who studies the genetics of autism. But they are “absolutely not at a point for any kind of clinical use,” he said. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 30076 - Posted: 01.10.2026

Nell Greenfieldboyce If you've ever had to spell out words like W-A-L-K or T-R-E-A-T around a dog, you know that some dogs listen in to humans' chitchat and can pick out certain key words. Well, it turns out that some genius dogs can learn a brand new word, like the name of an unfamiliar toy, by just overhearing brief interactions between two people. Your dog is a good boy, but that's not necessarily because of its breed Animals Your dog is a good boy, but that's not necessarily because of its breed What's more, these "gifted" dogs can learn the name of a new toy even if they first hear this word when the toy is out of sight — as long as their favorite human is looking at the spot where the toy is hidden. That's according to a new study in the journal Science. "What we found in this study is that the dogs are using social communication. They're using these social cues to understand what the owners are talking about," says cognitive scientist Shany Dror of Eötvös Loránd University and the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna. Sponsor Message "This tells us that the ability to use social information is actually something that humans probably had before they had language," she says, "and language was kind of hitchhiking on these social abilities." Fetch the ball — or the frisbee? © 2026 npr

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 30075 - Posted: 01.10.2026

Ian Sample Science editor New therapies for Alzheimer’s disease should target a particular gene linked to the condition, according to researchers who said most cases would never arise if its harmful effects were neutralised. The call to action follows the arrival of the first wave of drugs that aim to treat Alzheimer’s patients by removing toxic proteins from the brain. While the drugs slow the disease down, the benefits are minor, and they have been rejected for widespread use by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice). In searching for alternative therapies, scientists at UCL say drug developers should focus on two risk-raising variants of a gene named Apoe. Therapies designed to block the variants’ impact have “vast potential” for preventing the disease, they claim. Dr Dylan Williams, a genetic epidemiologist at UCL, said: “Most Alzheimer’s disease cases would not arise without the contribution of just this single gene: Apoe. We need to think about it as a direct target. Almost all potential Alzheimer’s cases could benefit from Apoe-related interventions.” More than half a million people in the UK, and more than 40 million worldwide, are living with Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia. Several genes contribute to Alzheimer’s risk and lifestyle is important too: smoking, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol all make the disease more likely. Williams and his colleagues analysed medical records from more than 450,000 people of European ancestry to calculate how much Alzheimer’s disease arose due to different variants of the Apoe gene. People inherit two copies of the gene – one from each parent – and there are three main variants: Apoe2, 3 and 4. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 30074 - Posted: 01.10.2026

By Natalia Mesa Nestled in the ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus lies a cluster of neurons that can make otherwise mild-mannered mice fly into a rage. Stimulating these neurons, as if flipping a switch, prompts male mice to attack their cagemates. The optogenetic manipulation of these and other specialized hypothalamic neurons, starting in the early 2010s, supported the long-standing idea that distinct cell types act as an “on” switch for different innate behaviors. But it has proved challenging to disentangle the neural signals that underlie those innate behaviors from ones that drive an animal’s internal state—such as anger, hunger or sexual arousal. Mounting evidence suggests that the hypothalamus also gives rise to these internal states, which can shape innate perceptions and behaviors. Rather than triggering an innate behavior, a specific pattern of population activity encodes the intensity and duration of anger and sexual arousal, according to four studies published within the past three years. This work is “revolutionary for the hypothalamus community,” says Tatiana Engel, associate professor of computational neuroscience at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, who was not involved in the studies. It upends the notion that the neurons in the hypothalamus merely act as a simple switchboard, Engel says. Instead, local computations in the hypothalamus keep track of the animal’s internal state and influence its behavior, the studies suggest. The hypothalamic signals that encode the intensity and duration of aggression and sexual arousal can be represented by a mathematical model called a line attractor, the four studies show. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 30073 - Posted: 01.10.2026

By Sachin Rawat One can spend hours looking at a calm sunset or a clear night sky. These scenes are not only effortless on the eyes — they may also be easy on the brain. People tend to like visual stimuli that require little cognitive effort to process, researchers report in the December PNAS Nexus. The brain is the most energy-guzzling organ in the body, and visual processing alone accounts for nearly half of its energy use. Researchers have long studied how the visual system conserves energy. But the new study addresses the question from a different perspective. “Not only is the visual system optimized for efficiency, but we might have aesthetic preferences for stimuli that are efficient to process,” says Mick Bonner, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the study. Neuroscientist Dirk Bernhardt-Walther of the University of Toronto and his colleagues suspected that such preferences could have evolved as cognitive shortcuts, helping organisms avoid excessive effort as they navigate their environment. To probe the energy consumed in visual processing, the researchers turned to an existing functional MRI dataset, in which four individuals viewed 5,000 images while their brain activity was monitored. Measurements of oxygen consumption in different parts of the brain provided an indicator of metabolic activity. The team also ran these images through an artificial neural network trained on object and scene recognition, using the proportion of activated “neurons” as a proxy for metabolic expense. The researchers then compared these metabolic cost estimates — both human and artificial — to the images’ aesthetic ratings, gathered from more than 1,000 online survey respondents who scored each picture on a five-point scale. In both cases, the metabolic effort required to process the images was inversely proportional to their aesthetic ratings. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Vision; Emotions
Link ID: 30072 - Posted: 01.10.2026

By Carl Zimmer If you live in the United States, chances are you’re familiar with the game rock-paper-scissors. You put out your hand in one of three gestures: clenching it in a fist (rock), holding it out flat (paper) or holding up two fingers in a “V” (scissors). Rock beats scissors, scissors beat paper and paper beats rock. Americans by no means have a monopoly on the game. People play it around the world in many variations, and under many names. In Japan, where the game has existed for thousands of years, it’s known as janken. In Indonesia, it’s known as earwig-man-elephant: The elephant kills the man, the man kills the earwig and the earwig crawls up through the elephant’s trunk and eats its brain. The game is so common that it exists beyond our own species. Over millions of years, animals have evolved their own version of rock-paper-scissors. For them, winning the game means passing down their genes to future generations. A study published on Thursday in the journal Science reveals the hidden biology that makes the game possible — and shows how it may be an important source of nature’s diversity. The first clues that nature also played rock-paper-scissors emerged three decades ago in the dry hills outside Merced, Calif. Barry Sinervo, a biologist then at Indiana University, studied the common side-blotched lizard there. He would mark the lizards — named for the dark blue or black spot on their side, just behind the front leg — release them into the tall grass and catch the survivors to check up on them in later years. Dr. Sinervo, who later joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and who died in 2021, grew fascinated by the strange mating habits of the lizards. At the start of every breeding season, the males developed one of three colors on their throats: blue, orange or yellow. And depending on their color, the males behaved differently. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Animal Communication
Link ID: 30071 - Posted: 01.07.2026

By Jack Tamisiea You don’t need a brain to benefit from a good night of sleep. Despite lacking a central nervous system, jellyfish and sea anemones have sleep patterns remarkably similar to those of humans, researchers report today in Nature Communications. The work supports the idea that sleep arose early in animal evolution to help the first neurons repair themselves, says Cheryl Van Buskirk, a geneticist at California State University, Northridge who was not involved with the research. “This study is another nail in the coffin of the idea that sleep evolved to manage complex, powerful brains.” In nature, sleep is risky: Snoozing organisms are vulnerable to predators. Yet species across the animal kingdom spend multiple hours a day dozing off—even ancient groups including cnidarians, which include jellyfish, anemones, and corals—all among the earliest animals to develop neurons. Researchers have recorded sleeplike behavior in upside-down jellyfish in the genus Cassiopea and small freshwater relatives of jellyfish known as hydra. To learn more about why these simple animals sleep, researchers in Israel studied the starlet sea anemone (Nematostella vectensis) and an upside-down jellyfish (Cassiopea andromeda). Both species reside along the bottoms of shallow lagoons with their tentacles hovering in the water to snag prey. In the lab, the team housed several jellyfish in an aquarium and exposed them to 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness over multiple days. They used infrared cameras to monitor how often the critters pulsed their umbrellalike bells, a sign of wakefulness. © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 30070 - Posted: 01.07.2026

By Holly Barker In early life, astrocytes help to mold neural pathways in response to the environment. In adulthood, however, those cells curb plasticity by secreting a protein that stabilizes circuits, according to a mouse study published last month in Nature. “It’s a new and unique take on the field,” says Ciaran Murphy-Royal, assistant professor of neuroscience at Montreal University, who was not involved in the study. Most research focuses on how glial cells drive plasticity but “not how they apply the brakes,” he says. Astrocytes promote synaptic remodeling during the development of sensory circuits by secreting factors and exerting physical control—in humans, a single astrocyte can clamp onto 2 million synapses, previous studies suggest. But the glial cells are also responsible for shutting down critical periods for vision and motor circuits in mice and fruit flies, respectively. It has been unclear whether this loss of plasticity can be reversed. Some evidence hints that modifying the neuronal environment—through matrix degradation or transplantation of young neurons—can rekindle flexibility in adult brains. The new findings confirm that in adulthood, plasticity is only dormant, rather than lost entirely, says Nicola Allen, professor of molecular neurobiology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and an investigator on the new paper. “Neurons don’t lose an intrinsic ability to remodel, but that process is controlled by secreted factors in the environment,” she says. Specifically, astrocytes orchestrate that dormancy by releasing CCN1, a protein that stabilizes circuits by prompting the maturation of inhibitory neurons and glial cells, Allen’s team found. The findings suggest that astrocytes have an active role in stabilizing adult brain circuits. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Glia
Link ID: 30069 - Posted: 01.07.2026

By Rachel Barr Philosophers and scientists have always kept close company. Look back far enough, and it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Before we had instruments to measure reality, we had to reason our way into it, but that intellectual lineage is what eventually gave us the scientific method. As technology advanced and the scope for observation expanded, specializations splintered off from philosophy to reconstitute as the sciences. Astronomy cleared the sky of deities and showed us a universe governed by gravity, not gods. Geography mapped a not-so-flat Earth, then geology dated it, stratifying earthly time in isotopes and sedimentary layers. Physics folded time into space, and with it, reimagined us not as beings apart from nature, but as a continuation of its energy and mass. We are not, as Pink Floyd suggested, “lost souls swimming in a fishbowl.” We are matter, muddling our way through life in relativistic motion. Now, in the 21st century, science is tracing a map through the other great unknown: the mind. Advances in biophotonics and neuroimaging have brought us closer than ever to a material picture of the mind, but the questions we’re now brushing up against aren’t melting away under empirical gaze. Instead, neuroscience has wandered back to philosophy’s front door, testing the limits of its most durable questions. 1. Free will In the early 19th century, French physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined the Universe as clockwork, each gear turning in obedience to natural law. He conceived of a demon who, knowing the position and momentum of every particle, could predict the future with perfect accuracy. This thought experiment crystallizes classical determinism: a world where there is no freedom, only inevitability.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 30068 - Posted: 01.07.2026

By Diana Kwon edited by Jeanna Bryner By the time Maggie May, an Arkansas resident in her 30s, was admitted to a psychiatric clinic in 2024, she had been struggling for years with atypical anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder that leads to severe food restriction and profound disturbances in body image. (Her name has been changed for privacy.) She had already tried traditional interventions with a psychotherapist and a dietitian, but they had failed to improve her condition. So when May heard about a trial of a new and unconventional therapy, she jumped at the opportunity. The treatment was unusual in that alongside talk therapy, May underwent several sessions in a sensory-deprivation chamber: a dark, soundproof room where she floated in a shallow pool of water heated to match the temperature of her skin and saturated with Epsom salts to make her more buoyant. The goal was to blunt May’s external senses, enabling her to feel from within—focusing on the steady thudding of her heart, the gentle flow of air in and out of her lungs, and other internal bodily signals. The ability to connect with the body’s inner signals is called interoception. Some people are better at it than others, and one’s aptitude for it may change. Life events can also bolster or damage a person’s interoceptive skills. Sahib Khalsa, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues think a disrupted interoception system might be one of the driving forces behind anorexia nervosa. So they decided to repurpose a decades-old therapy called flotation-REST (for “reduced environmental stimulation therapy”) and launched a trial with it in 2018. They hypothesized that in people with anorexia and some other disorders, an underreliance on internal signals may lead to an overreliance on external ones, such as how one looks in the mirror, that ultimately causes distorted body image, one of the key factors underlying these conditions. “When they’re in the float environment, they experience internal signals more strongly,” Khalsa says. “And having that experience may then confer a different understanding of the brain-body relationship that they have.” © 2025 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 30067 - Posted: 01.03.2026

Luiz Pessoa When thousands of starlings swoop and swirl in the evening sky, creating patterns called murmurations, no single bird is choreographing this aerial ballet. Each bird follows simple rules of interaction with its closest neighbours, yet out of these local interactions emerges a complex, coordinated dance that can respond swiftly to predators and environmental changes. This same principle of emergence – where sophisticated behaviours arise not from central control but from the interactions themselves – appears across nature and human society. Consider how market prices emerge from countless individual trading decisions, none of which alone contains the ‘right’ price. Each trader acts on partial information and personal strategies, yet their collective interaction produces a dynamic system that integrates information from across the globe. Human language evolves through a similar process of emergence. No individual or committee decides that ‘LOL’ should enter common usage or that the meaning of ‘cool’ should expand beyond temperature (even in French-speaking countries). Instead, these changes result from millions of daily linguistic interactions, with new patterns of speech bubbling up from the collective behaviour of speakers. These examples highlight a key characteristic of highly interconnected systems: the rich interplay of constituent parts generates properties that defy reductive analysis. This principle of emergence, evident across seemingly unrelated fields, provides a powerful lens for examining one of our era’s most elusive mysteries: how the brain works. The core idea of emergence inspired me to develop the concept I call the entangled brain: the need to understand the brain as an interactionally complex system where functions emerge from distributed, overlapping networks of regions rather than being localised to specific areas. Though the framework described here is still a minority view in neuroscience, we’re witnessing a gradual paradigm transition (rather than a revolution), with increasing numbers of researchers acknowledging the limitations of more traditional ways of thinking. © Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012-2026.

Keyword: Consciousness; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30066 - Posted: 01.03.2026

Jon Hamilton Research on conditions like autism, schizophrenia and even brain cancer increasingly relies on clusters of human cells called brain organoids. These pea-size bits of neural tissue model aspects of human brain development as they grow for months and even years in a lab. They also make many people uneasy, in part because the brain is so closely tied to our sense of self. A group of scientists, ethicists, patient advocates and journalists met for two days in Northern California this fall to discuss how scientists, and society, should proceed. Among the questions: Is it okay to place human organoids in an animal's brain? Can organoids feel pain? Can they become conscious? Who, if anyone, should regulate this research? "We are talking about an organ that is at the seat of human consciousness. It's the seat of personality and who we are," says Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist at the Museum of Science, Boston, who attended the meeting. "So it's reasonable to be especially careful with the kind of experiments we're doing," he says. Societal issues by the sea The event was hosted by Dr. Sergiu Pașca, a prominent organoid researcher whose lab at Stanford University used the technology to develop a potential treatment for a rare cause of autism and epilepsy. © 2026 npr

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30065 - Posted: 01.03.2026

By The Transmitter The neuroscience field is fueled by its people. Check out The Transmitter’s stories from the past year about some of the scientists driving neuroscience forward, including one investigating prosocial behavior in rodents, and another recording—for the first time—individual neural signals in bats in the wild. And explore our remembrances for neuroscientists lost in 2025, such as a trailblazer in the memory field and a leader in the neural basis for hearing. Take a look at a growing challenge to the neuroscientist pipeline, and the work of two determined collaborators who shattered the perception that the octopus brain can’t be studied. Finally, we recognize some of the brightest young talents the field has to offer. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 30064 - Posted: 01.03.2026

Jon Hamilton SCOTT SIMON, HOST: And it has been a banner year in brain science. We've learned that lifestyle changes really can keep your brain young and that electrical pulses can help with rheumatoid arthritis, and that LSD can relieve anxiety and depression. Scientists even managed to replicate a human brain network that carries pain signals. NPR science correspondent Jon Hamilton joins us. Jon, thanks so much for being with us. JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: Hi, Scott. SIMON: Well, let's start with that brain network. What does it do? HAMILTON: Well, it recreates the pathway that carries brain signals from, say, your fingertip to the part of the brain that says, you know, ouch, that hurts. And that pathway has several sort of relay stations along the way. So a team at Stanford decided to recreate those stations using brain organoids, which are these pea-sized clumps of human brain cells that can mimic different types of brain tissue. In this case, the scientists used four different organoids representing the four types of nerve cells that relay pain signals. And when they put these organoids together in a dish, they spontaneously wired up to form the entire pain pathway. SIMON: That sounds extraordinary, but I have to ask - can you tell if the organoids in a dish felt anything? HAMILTON: You can, and the way you can tell is with red hot chile peppers. The scientists took the organoid that was acting like a nerve ending, and they exposed it to chemicals like the ones in hot chile peppers, you know, that burn your mouth. Here is Dr. Sergiu Pasca explaining what happened. SERGIU PASCA: We discovered that if you start adding some of these compounds that are inducing inflammatory responses of pain, then you start seeing that information traveling. The neurons that sends these signals get activated. And they transmit that information to the next station and the next station, all the way to the cortex. HAMILTON: There's good reason for this research, too. It's part of an effort to help people with chronic pain. SIMON: Let's move on to the whole question of trying to keep your brain young. Like, can you really do that? HAMILTON: Why, yes, you can. At least according to a really big study funded by the Alzheimer's Association. This study involved about 2,000 people in their 60s and 70s, and they were all pretty sedentary, at least at the beginning. Half of these people spent two years getting aerobic exercise at the gym, eating a Mediterranean diet, watching their blood pressure and taking part in this really demanding cognitive training program. The other people - they were just told to eat better and exercise more. At the end of the study, the people in the hardcore program did better on tests of thinking and memory. And their scores were actually as good as those from people a year or two younger than they were. © 2025 npr

Keyword: Miscellaneous; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30063 - Posted: 12.31.2025

By Lauren Schenkman In pursuit of the brain’s secrets, neuroscientist Paul-Antoine Libourel has traveled to the ends of the earth. But during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, he worked closer to home—in his own darkened garage in Lyon, filming a sleeping chameleon. Libourel, a researcher at the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology in Montpelier, had heard that chameleons lose their ability to camouflage during sleep. But as the hours passed in his garage, he observed something extraordinary: The chameleon’s skin fluctuated from bright to dark to bright again every few minutes. This strobing skin display, Libourel and his colleagues have since discovered, reflects an inner rhythm. The chameleon’s brain activity alternates between waves of higher and lower amplitude, synchronized with increased and decreased eye movements, plus changes in the animal’s heart rate and breathing rate. Six other species of lizard, including bearded dragons—along with rats, mice, pigeons and humans—show the same “infraslow fluctuations” in EEG activity during non-REM sleep, according to a study Libourel’s team published today in Nature Neuroscience. Because reptiles and mammals diverged about 320 million years ago, the findings mean these cycles “are a central thing, maybe a core building block of sleep,” says study investigator Antoine Bergel, research director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. They also raise the question of why these rhythms are so conserved, Bergel and Libourel say, and hint at how sleep has evolved. The sleep field, which tends to focus on mice and humans, needed this type of comparative study, says Philippe Mourrain, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, who studies sleep in zebrafish but was not involved in the new work. “It’s a tour de force to do science on nonconventional species.” © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 30062 - Posted: 12.31.2025

By Ivan Amato The standard sperm-meets-egg story posits that sperm cells are hardly more than bundles of shrink-wrapped DNA with tails. Their mission is simple: Deliver a father’s genes into a mother’s egg for sexual reproduction. Just about all other aspects of a developing embryo, including its cellular and environmental components, have nothing to do with dad. Those all come from mom. But nearly two decades of studies from multiple independent labs threaten to rewrite that story. They suggest that dad’s gametes shuttle more than DNA: Within a sperm’s minuscule head are stowaway molecules, which enter the egg and convey information about the father’s fitness, such as diet, exercise habits and stress levels, to his offspring. These non-DNA transfers may influence genomic activity that boots up during and after fertilization, exerting some control over the embryo’s development and influencing the adult they will become. The findings, so far largely described in mouse models, could end up changing the way we think about heredity. They suggest “that what we do in this life affects the next generation,” said Qi Chen (opens a new tab), a reproductive and developmental biologist at the University of Utah Medical School who is among the pioneers of this research. In other words: What a father eats, drinks, inhales, is stressed by or otherwise experiences in the weeks and months before he conceives a child might be encoded in molecules, packaged into his sperm cells and transmitted to his future kid. The researchers have largely zeroed in on RNA molecules, those short-lived copies of DNA that reflect genetic activity at a given time. It’s a tantalizing notion. But the mechanistic details — how experience is encoded, how it’s transferred from sperm to egg, and whether and how it affects a developing embryo — are not easy to unpack, especially given the challenges of conducting research in human subjects. For this reason, and because of the potentially textbook-rewriting implications of the findings, researchers, including those spearheading the work, are cautious about overselling their results. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Epigenetics; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30061 - Posted: 12.31.2025

By Susan Dominus After years of a marriage that had little sex in it, Greg Carter had largely accepted that his wife no longer had any interest. The last thing he expected was that right around the time that they both were nearing 50, his wife would have a complete change of heart. “She was pouncing on me,” he said. His wife had recently started taking testosterone to manage her menopausal symptoms — at a dose so high that it brought her testosterone levels higher than is typical even for women in their 20s. The difference in her desire was almost immediate. “I had the experience of feeling like a teenage boy,” she told me. The shift vastly improved Greg’s own happiness, so much so that he sometimes felt pangs of regret about the years they spent together without a sex life. “I realized, later in life, all that we had missed out on,” he says. Earlier this year, I published an article on how women are increasingly — with widely varying results — seeking out testosterone to help them with energy or their sex lives. Some women who take testosterone at relatively low doses approved by major medical societies feel little change in their bodies, while others see an increase in their desire. Women who take high doses — doses that exceed levels approved by major medical societies — often report sharp upticks in their interest in sex. Franny’s doctor prescribed her testosterone (along with estrogen and progesterone) in what’s known as a pellet, a small medical product the size of a grain of rice that is inserted beneath the skin. Often those pellets, which release hormones over the course of several months, provide doses of testosterone that bring their levels much higher than those that women would have naturally — which was true in Franny’s case. “I feel like I want it sometimes more than my husband,” Franny told me when I was reporting my original article. There was a hint of nervousness in her tone of voice — that dynamic was a shift from their norm and one that made me realize it wasn’t just Franny’s life that had changed, but also Greg’s. And that made me wonder what it would be like to be the partner of someone who was undergoing such a radical shift. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 30060 - Posted: 12.31.2025

Jon Hamilton Scientists are updating their view of how drugs like Adderall and Ritalin help children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder stay on task. The latest evidence is a study of thousands of brain scans of adolescents that confirms earlier hints that stimulant drugs have little direct impact on brain networks that control attention. Instead, the drugs appear to activate networks involved in alertness and the anticipation of pleasure, scientists report in the journal Cell. "We think it's a combination of both arousal and reward, that kind of one-two punch, that really helps kids with ADHD when they take this medication," says Dr. Benjamin Kay, a pediatric neurologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the study's lead author. The results, along with those of smaller studies, support a "mindset shift about what stimulants are doing for people," says Peter Manza, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the research. The new research analyzed data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, a federally funded effort that includes brain scans of nearly 12,000 children. About 4% of these kids had ADHD when they entered the study, and nearly half of those were on a prescription stimulant. About 3.5 million children in the U.S. take an ADHD medication, and the number is rising. © 2025 npr

Keyword: ADHD; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30059 - Posted: 12.31.2025

Andrew Gregory Health editor Scientists have discovered two new subtypes of multiple sclerosis with the aid of artificial intelligence, paving the way for personalised treatments and better outcomes for patients. Millions of people have the disease globally – but treatments are mostly selected on the basis of symptoms, and may not be effective because they don’t target the underlying biology of the patient. Now, scientists have detected two new biological strands of MS using AI, a simple blood test and MRI scans. Experts said the “exciting” breakthrough could revolutionise treatment of the disease worldwide. In research involving 600 patients, led by University College London (UCL) and Queen Square Analytics, researchers looked at blood levels of a special protein called serum neurofilament light chain (sNfL). The protein can help indicate levels of nerve cell damage and signal how active the disease is. The sNfL results and scans of the patients’ brains were interpreted by a machine learning model, called SuStaIn. The results, published in medical journal Brain, revealed two distinct types of MS: early sNfL and late sNfL. In the first subtype, patients had high levels of sNfL early on in the disease, with visible damage in a part of the brain called the corpus callosum. They also developed brain lesions quickly. This type appears to be more aggressive and active, scientists said. In the second subtype, patients showed brain shrinkage in areas like the limbic cortex and deep grey matter before sNfL levels went up. This type seems to be slower, with overt damage occurring later. Researchers say the breakthrough will enable doctors to more precisely understand which patients are at higher risk of different complications, paving the way for more personalised care. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 30058 - Posted: 12.31.2025

Amelia Hill One in 10 people in the UK aged 70 and older could have Alzheimer’s-like changes in their brain, according to the clearest, real-world picture of how common the disease’s brain changes are in ordinary, older people. The detection of the proteins linked with the disease is not a diagnosis. But the findings indicate that more than 1 million over-70s would meet Nice’s clinical criteria for anti-amyloid therapy – a stark contrast to the 70,000 people the NHS has estimated could be eligible if funding were available. Experts, including those from Alzheimer’s Research UK, have said the findings from the first-ever population-based research into the disease have huge potential for early and accurate diagnosis. “High-quality studies like this are crucial to enhancing our understanding of how blood tests for Alzheimer’s could be used in clinical practice,” said David Thomas, the head of policy and public affairs at Alzheimer’s Research UK. “We need to generate more evidence so we can use these tests in the NHS.” The lead author of the research, conducted by King’s College London, Stavanger University hospital and the University of Gothenburg, said the findings could be a “gamechanger in the understanding of the disease”. The findings also challenge some long-held assumptions about dementia, including the idea that it is mainly a disease that mainly affects women. Dag Aarsland, a professor of old age psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London and the study’s lead author, said: “In an ageing global population, the assessment and treatment of dementia presents a significant challenge. Our study used a simple blood test to establish changes that contribute to cognitive impairment in those with dementia.” © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Alzheimers; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30057 - Posted: 12.20.2025