By Michael Howerton Healthy brains may be built through a process of controlled damage and rapid repair. The most dangerous type of DNA damage is a regular feature of healthy early brain development, experiments in mice show. As newborn neurons squeeze through the cramped, narrow spaces of developing brain tissue, they break both strands of their DNA, researchers report June 17 in Nature. The breaks are repaired once neurons reach their destination, usually within a day. It’s a paradox of vulnerability and resilience. Newborn neurons routinely sustain a kind of damage that kills most cells, yet they repair it and emerge intact, the researchers found. The speed of the repair surprised the team. “Somehow neurons can repair [the damage] very quickly without any sign of mutations or bad effect,” says neurobiologist Mineko Kengaku of Kyoto University in Japan. “It seems to be a normal developmental event.” The breaks appear in areas of the genome that aren’t crucial, the team found, which in most cases allows neurons to survive and grow without lasting damage. “It is surprising that, during evolution, the mammalian brain acquires such a clever strategy,” Kengaku says. More research is needed to understand the implications beyond mice, but Kengaku says the effect might even be more pronounced in humans. “During development, neurons have to migrate, and if the brain size is larger, then neurons have to migrate longer distances,” she says. “It is quite likely that neurons in human brains probably generate more DNA damage during development” than neurons in mice brains do. But a flawless break-and-repair cycle is not always guaranteed, Kengaku says. When it fails or is incomplete, the damage could persist. These instances, she says, could help explain some neurological conditions later in life. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 30302 - Posted: 06.27.2026

Ian Sample Science editor A scientist who decoded the vocalisations that a bird uses to communicate has won a $100,000 prize for making progress towards a world in which humans can talk to the animals – without being met with a blank response. Dr Julie Elie at the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded the 2026 Coller-Dolittle prize for two-way interspecies communication after working out the 11 core calls in the zebra finch vocabulary and their meanings. Her work revealed how the birds announce who they are and what they are doing, and recognise one another regardless of what they are saying by using individual signatures. She also found that at times, the birds confused calls with similar meanings more than those that sounded the same. “I’m really super-honoured,” Elie said on winning the prize, adding that she hoped the work was a step forwards in the “great endeavour” to communicate with animals. Prof Yossi Yovel, a zoologist at Tel Aviv University and chair of the panel of judges, said the work marked “a key moment in the field”. The prize was launched in 2024 by the Jeremy Coller Foundation, which promotes awareness of animal welfare and animal sentience, in partnership with Tel Aviv University. Beyond the annual prizes for progress, the foundation has established a $10m grand prize for cracking the problem of two-way human-animal communication. Elie decided to study zebra finches because they are so vocal – meaning they produce plenty of data. “The question I asked myself when hearing these chatty songbirds was what are they saying?” she said. For more than a decade, Elie observed and recorded the sounds the birds made and classified the calls according to the situation and the bird that made them. She then used machine learning to analyse what and how information was encoded in the calls. Finally, she ran tests that showed the birds agreed with her classification. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30301 - Posted: 06.27.2026

By K. R. Callaway In the flatwoods of South Florida, tiny brown birds emerge from the underbrush to sing from the branches of pine trees. To human ears, their songs sound nearly identical, but any given population of these birds — Bachman’s sparrows — uses as many as 120 different song types to communicate. Like human language, birdsong is dynamic. Every avian generation makes choices about which songs to continue singing, which to improve upon and which to drop altogether. A single Bachman’s sparrow might learn only 48 of the songs used by its community, and for decades researchers have been trying to figure out how baby sparrows choose which songs to adopt. Previous studies have focused on social and cultural factors. During their critical song-learning phase of development, young songbirds imitate the adult males in their group who are successful in courtship or have elaborately ornamented plumage. Now, a new study of Bachman’s sparrows reveals another possible part of the equation: the physical environment. Trees, dense shrubs and even wind can scatter or block the transmission of some sound waves, and researchers suspect that young sparrows are less likely to latch onto degraded songs, leading in turn to some songs becoming rarer than others. “The rarer song types don’t propagate quite as well over distance than the common ones do,” said Rindy Anderson, a behavioral ecologist at Florida Atlantic University and an author of the study, which appeared on March 24 in the journal Bioacoustics. All the Bachman’s sparrow song types have a similar form, with a buzzing or whistling note followed by a trill. Some trills are faster or slower than others, and some complex songs contain trills of several frequencies. Researchers recorded a variety of rare and common sparrow songs and then rerecorded them playing in different environments — among dense trees, windy plains and other places that Bachman’s sparrows frequent but that could distort audio signals. Under these conditions, the researchers found that rarer songs did not propagate as well as common songs. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 30300 - Posted: 06.27.2026

By Phie Jacobs When Charles Darwin visited Ascension Island in 1836, he was perplexed by the vast numbers of green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) nesting on its beaches. Every mating season, these intrepid reptiles leave their feeding grounds along the coast of Brazil and journey more than 2000 kilometers across the sea to lay their eggs on this tiny, remote island. How, Darwin later mused in a letter to Nature, did the animals find their way to a “speck of land in the midst of the great Atlantic Ocean?” Since then, scientists have uncovered convincing evidence that sea turtles can sense components of Earth’s geomagnetic field. Now, data collected using a new kind of tracking device lend further support to the idea that these animals use magnetic maps to navigate during their transoceanic voyages. But the system is far from perfect, researchers report today in Science Advances, which means migrating turtles must periodically reorient themselves after veering off course. The findings fit “very comfortably with what we know about turtle navigation,” says Kenneth Lohmann, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who wasn’t involved in the research. His team previously conducted laboratory studies demonstrating turtles can sense the strength of geomagnetic fields as well as their angle relative to the surface of Earth—potentially providing migrating turtles with a “bicoordinate” geomagnetic map of their surroundings. Exactly how good they are at using those coordinates in the open ocean, however, has been less clear. Graeme Hays, a marine ecologist at Deakin University, paid his own visit to Ascension Island back in the 1990s. While there, he and Paolo Luschi—now a biologist at the University of Pisa—worked to outfit green sea turtles with satellite tracking devices. Early on, Hays recalls, the pair recognized a significant limitation: Although these tags can accurately track a turtle’s path across the ocean, those data don’t necessarily reflect “where the animal is trying to go.” © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Migration; Evolution
Link ID: 30299 - Posted: 06.27.2026

By Emily Anthes Humor is deeply personal. A punchline or a pratfall that leaves one person doubled over in delight might elicit blank stares from another. But laughter is universal, an innate instinct shared by humans everywhere. And not just humans. Chimps chuckle, gorillas guffaw, bonobos bust a gut. All the planet’s great apes laugh, and they often do so in the same kind of regular, repeating rhythm that humans do, scientists found in a small new study. The research sheds light on how laughter evolved with and among great apes, becoming faster and more variable in humans than in these other primate species. While nonhuman apes appeared to laugh in ways that were largely fixed, humans were more flexible in their expressions of mirth, changing up the tempo of their chuckles depending on the circumstance, the scientists found. “I think we can say we are the masters of laughter,” said Chiara De Gregorio, a research fellow at the University of Warwick in Britain and an author of the study. “We can have a small, polite laugh in front of the Queen of England, and then we are in the pub with our friends, and we laugh so much in a different way. We can even laugh in a way that communicates to the other person that we actually didn’t find the joke they said funny.” This wide-ranging repertoire requires significant vocal flexibility and control — the same skills that humans would have needed for spoken language. The study demonstrates the “uniqueness of human laughter,” said Greg Bryant, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the new research. “It provides a window into human vocal evolution.” In the new study, which was published on Thursday in the journal Communications Biology, the researchers analyzed the recorded laughter of four children and 13 young, captive apes: four orangutans, two gorillas, three bonobos and four chimpanzees. Some of the recordings featured laughter produced during play, while others captured laughter elicited by tickling. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 30298 - Posted: 06.27.2026

By Calli McMurray Kanga the marmoset places her hand on the lever and looks at Dodson, a fellow marmoset working with her on a task. As it becomes apparent that Dodson is ready to pull his own lever, neurons in Kanga’s dorsomedial prefrontal cortex ramp up their firing. The activity reaches its peak as Kanga decides to pull the lever, in sync with her partner. As a reward for their coordinated effort, both marmosets earn a sip of liquid marshmallow fluff. This type of neuronal computation underlies the “evidence accumulation model,” a major theory of how perceptual decisions are made: The brain gathers evidence and executes a decision once the evidence reaches a certain threshold. The marmoset study, which was published last month in Neuron, demonstrates that the model also applies to social decisions. This result wasn’t a given; making a social decision relies on the changing behavior of another animal, and the actions of the decider can influence what the other animal does, says study investigator Monika Jadi, associate professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Yale University. “It’s a very recurrent system,” she says. Support for the evidence accumulation model has come largely from highly controlled experiments; the fact that the same activity pattern appears in a social and less constrained task “implies that this is a generalizable computation,” says Timothy Hanks, associate professor of neurology at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the work. Social, perceptual, foraging and other decisions are “categories we’ve created,” but there may not be anything “acutely different” about them, says Cory Miller, professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study. “I love this line of work; I think it’s super powerful.” © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Emotions
Link ID: 30297 - Posted: 06.27.2026

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