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

By Bethany Brookshir Women of reproductive age are more likely than other people to report gut problems like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and can feel dismissed by doctors, as clinicians often put the pain down to diet, stress or hormones. It was never just “in their heads.” A complex interplay between an important hormone, chemical signals, rare populations of gut cells and the output of gut bacteria could explain why, researchers report December 18 in Science. While the findings are in mice, they suggest new opportunities for treatment. Gut pain is a visceral experience — literally, pain in the viscera, from nerves that spread throughout the torso and abdomen. “It can be bloating, it can be a sharp pain or it can be just sort of a constant, dull pain,” says David Julius, a neurophysiologist at University of California, San Francisco. About 10 percent of the global population — mostly women —suffers symptoms of IBS, which can occur with diarrhea, constipation or a mix between the two. “What makes this so bad is that these women are feeling this pain, they go into the physician … and they were just ignored,” says Holly Ingraham, a physiologist also at the University of California, San Francisco. Ingraham and Julius knew that the hormone estrogen played a role in this type of pain, which can fluctuate with the menstrual cycle and pregnancy. In a 2023 paper, they showed that female mice are more sensitive to this visceral pain than males. Without estrogen, that extra sensitivity disappeared. The researchers immediately went looking for cells that might sense estrogen in the gut. To affect a given organ, its cells must have proteins called receptors that recognize estrogen and set off signals in response. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 30056 - Posted: 12.20.2025

By Calli McMurray For the past two and a half years, a team of five labs in the San Francisco Bay Area have endeavored to nail down how psilocybin affects the way mice behave. Psilocybin and other psychedelic drugs have been shown to improve anxiety and depression symptoms in people, but results in mouse studies are less consistent. Those inconsistencies spell trouble for researchers trying to unpack the drug’s mechanism, because if behavioral changes in mice don’t mirror those in humans, the underlying biological changes might be irrelevant, says team member Boris Heifets, associate professor of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine at Stanford University. So, to establish a behavioral ground truth, the five labs gave about 200 mice the same dose of psilocybin and measured how the drug affected the animals’ performance on a range of simple behavioral assays, including the elevated plus maze and open field, tail suspension and forced swim tests, while taking the drug as well as 24 hours later. While on psilocybin, the mice showed a temporary increase in anxiety-like behaviors, including spending less time than usual exploring new objects and open areas, the team reported in April. But, unlike in people, the drug had no lasting effects once it wore off. The issue, some behavioral neuroscientists argue, is not replication between labs—it’s the assays themselves. “I love the idea of these multisite experiments in animal models, but the models—the behavioral models—still have to be the right ones,” says Jennifer Mitchell, professor of neurology and psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. “The tests themselves—I’m not sure how much they tell us about what a psychedelic is actually doing.” © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30055 - Posted: 12.20.2025

By Allison Parshall The human brain has 86 billion neurons connected by roughly 100 trillion synapses, making it one of the most complex objects in the known universe. Each year neuroscientists make fascinating, important and downright strange discoveries about how this resilient structure works, and 2025 didn’t disappoint. Here are 10 of the most fascinating brain discoveries of this year for your own brain to noodle on. Brain scans of thousands of people revealed that the human brain has five distinct eras, with turning points in the way it is organized occurring at age nine, 32, 66 and 83. Across each of these stages—for example, the “adolescent” period between age nine and 32—people’s brains tend to experience the same types of changes. You don’t remember being a newborn or even a toddler. Adults’ earliest memories tend to start around preschool and no earlier. But recent research suggests that your brain was making memories back then; you just don’t have access to them now. A study of the infant hippocampus, a deep-brain structure crucial for memory formation, found that it can store memories once babies are around one year old—though it’s not clear why we can’t recall them once we grow up. Untangling Alzheimer’s Researchers also discovered another oddity of newborn babies’ brain: they have very high levels of a protein that, in adults, indicates Alzheimer’s disease. Tau proteins help to stabilize brain cells’ structure, but they can undergo chemical changes that lead them to become tangled up, a process linked to Alzheimer’s. The fact that healthy newborn brains have high levels of these proteins, which later decrease, suggests that these detrimental changes in adults could be avoided or reversed. Fluorescence light micrograph of neural progenitor cells. Astrocytes have been stained orange and neural progenitor cells green. Cell nuclei are blue © 2025 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Brain imaging; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30054 - Posted: 12.20.2025

By Jan Hoffman Around 2 a.m., Joseph felt the withdrawal coming on, sudden and hard. He fell to the floor convulsing, vomiting ferociously. The delirium and hallucinations were starting. He shook awake his friend, who had let him in earlier to shower, wash his clothes and grab some sleep. “Do you have a few dollars?” he pleaded. “I have to get right.” The friend, a community outreach worker who had been trying for years to get him into treatment, looked up at him standing over her raving and unfocused. “Either leave or let me call an ambulance,” she demanded. At 34, Joseph (who, with his friend, recounted the evening in interviews with The New York Times) had been through opioid withdrawals many times — on Philadelphia streets, in jail, in rehab. But he had never experienced anything as terrifyingly all-consuming as this. A new drug has been saturating the fentanyl supply in Philadelphia and moving to other cities throughout the East and Midwestern United States: medetomidine, a powerful veterinary sedative that causes almost instantaneous blackouts and, if not used every few hours, brings on life-threatening withdrawal symptoms. It has created a new type of drug crisis — one that is occasioned not by overdosing on the drug, but by withdrawing from it. Since the middle of last year, Philadelphia’s hospitals have been strained by patients coming in with what doctors have identified as medetomidine withdrawal. Although the heart rate slows drastically right after use, in withdrawal the opposite occurs: The heart rate and blood pressure become catastrophically high. Patients experience tremors and unstoppable vomiting. Many require intensive care. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30053 - Posted: 12.17.2025

By Mattha Busby Bruce Damer had the audience under his Gandalf spell. He was giving a keynote speech in a grand hall at Breaking Convention, a psychedelic-consciousness conference in Exeter, England, in April 2025. Tall and slender, very much bearded, and sporting two large gold hoop earrings, one on either side, Damer looked exactly like you would expect a sexagenarian psychedelic professor to look. A boyishly enthusiastic speaker, he said a psychedelic trip had transported him through time to face a deep trauma. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . “If you believe in a ‘mother ayahuasca’ or a healing force, I was allowed to experience my conception and birth and be in my mother’s belly,” Damer said. His birth mother had given him up because she and his father were too poor to raise him. Ayahuasca had released him from the pain. “Being in the belly, I could feel her love, and it healed,” he said. “As a result of the clarity and the opening of the blockage that had been this sort of knot in my belly, my whole system opened wide,” Damer continued. “And I thought for a moment, I could potentially travel through time to a place where I’ve been working on the question of how life began, the birth of us all.” In psychedelic science, a field dominated by scientists who are loath to be pigeon-holed as too woo-woo, Damer, 63, has become a cult figure by wearing his woo on his sleeve. His adoptive mother described him as “in his own world” when his new parents brought him home. And he has been his own thinker ever since. His science cred is sound: a Ph.D. in computer science from University College Dublin in Ireland, former relationships with Xerox and NASA, and papers published in journals like Astrobiology. Currently he is a research associate in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. © 2025 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30052 - Posted: 12.17.2025

By Alex Kwan Despite decades of basic research, many neurological and psychiatric conditions lack effective treatments, or at least treatments that work for everyone. For that reason, when I talk with colleagues about the value of research, I often hear the same negative refrain: “Basic neuroscience has not produced new drugs.” Their argument carries some weight; many of today’s medications trace their origins to long-standing human use or to chance discoveries. The opium poppy, used for thousands of years to ease pain, paved the way for morphine and other opioids that are widely used as analgesics. Ketamine was designed as an anesthetic but was later unexpectedly revealed to be an antidepressant at low doses. Yet this narrative is incomplete. It overlooks a growing list of medications—including zuranolone for postpartum depression, suzetrigine for pain, and the gepants class of migraine medicines—that exist only because of insights from basic research. These drugs were not stumbled upon or borrowed from traditional remedies. They were born out of a long arc of studies in the lab. These success stories matter, because they demonstrate that neuroscience research can deliver new medicines. Acknowledging and publicizing such successes is especially important now, as public funding for basic research in the United States faces growing cuts and restrictions. The development of zuranolone stemmed from an observation about allopregnanolone, a steroid our bodies naturally produce. It has little interaction with steroid receptors and instead acts on GABA receptors in the brain, making neurons less excitable. In the late 1990s, researchers reported that allopregnanolone levels in the rat brain rise dramatically during pregnancy, reaching concentrations of up to three times higher than normal. Just before giving birth, however, the level drops precipitously. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Depression; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 30051 - Posted: 12.17.2025

David Shariatmadari In 1973, an American psychologist called David Rosenhan published the results of a bold experiment. He’d arranged for eight “pseudo-patients” to attend appointments at psychiatric institutions, where they complained to doctors about hearing voices that said “empty”, “hollow” and “thud”. All were admitted, diagnosed with either schizophrenia or manic-depressive psychosis. They immediately stopped displaying any “symptoms” and started saying they felt fine. The first got out after seven days; the last after 52. Told of these findings, psychiatrists at a major teaching hospital found it hard to believe that they’d make the same mistake, so Rosenhan devised another experiment: over the next three months, he informed them, one or more pseudopatients would go undercover and, at the end, staff would be asked to decide who had been faking it. Of 193 patients admitted, 20% were deemed suspicious. It was then that Rosenhan revealed this had been a ruse as well: no pseudopatients had been sent to the hospital at all. Not only had doctors failed to spot sane people in their midst; they couldn’t reliably recognise the actually insane. Rosenhan’s gambit seized the public imagination. Were the men in white suits just quacks? Was mental illness even real? Two years later, the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest added to the sense of reputational meltdown, and the psychiatric establishment responded with a major tightening up of diagnostic criteria, squeezing disparate symptoms into even tighter boxes. A freewheeling challenge to psychiatry ended up provoking a kind of counter-reformation, making the profession more medicalised than it had been for decades. The whole affair is a neat example of the ideological switchbacks Edward Bullmore maps in his fascinating, personally inflected history of psychiatric ideas. It is all the more mind-boggling – pun intended – when you find out Rosenhan’s paper was largely made up. Research by journalist Susannah Cahalan in 2019 concluded that most of the pseudopatients were invented; one colleague remembered the psychologist as a “bullshitter”. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 30050 - Posted: 12.17.2025

Lynne Peeples Near the end of his first series of chess matches against IBM’s Deep Blue computer in 1996, the Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov lamented what he saw as an unfair disadvantage: “I’m really tired. These games took a lot of energy. But if I play a normal human match, my opponent would also be exhausted.” Why thinking hard makes us feel tired Whereas machine intelligence can keep running as long as it has a power supply, a human brain will become fatigued — and you don’t have to be a chess grandmaster to understand the feeling. Anyone can end up drained after a long day of work, at school or juggling the countless decisions of daily life. This mental exhaustion can sap motivation, dull focus and erode judgement. It can raise the odds of careless mistakes. Especially when combined with sleep loss or circadian disruption, cognitive fatigue can also contribute to deadly medical errors and road traffic accidents. It was partly Kasparov’s weary comments that inspired Mathias Pessiglione, a cognitive neuroscientist and research director at the Paris Brain Institute, to study the tired brain. He wanted to know: “Why is this cognitive system prone to fatigue?” Researchers and clinicians have long struggled to define, measure and treat cognitive fatigue — relying mostly on self-reports of how tired someone says they feel. Now, however, scientists from across disciplines are enlisting innovative experimental approaches and biological markers to probe the metabolic roots and consequences of cognitive fatigue. The efforts are getting a boost in attention and funding in large part because of long COVID, which afflicts roughly 6 in every 100 people after infection with the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, says Vikram Chib, a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “The primary symptom of long COVID is fatigue,” says Chib. “I think that has opened a lot of people’s eyes.” © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Attention
Link ID: 30049 - Posted: 12.13.2025

By Sara Talpos It’s been more than a decade since scientists first started publishing papers on neural organoids, the small clusters of cells grown in labs and designed to mimic various parts of the human brain. Since then, organoids have been used to study everything from bipolar disorder and Alzheimer’s disease, to tumors and parasitic infections. Because these new tools have the potential to reduce the use of animals in research — a goal of the current Trump administration — the field’s future may be more financially secure than other areas of scientific research. In September, for example, the federal government announced an $87 million investment into organoid research broadly. Matthew Owen brings a unique perspective to this emerging field. As a philosopher of mind, he focuses on trying to understand both what the mind is and how it relates to the body and the brain. He draws on the work of historical philosophers and applies some of their ideas to modern-day science. In 2020, as a visiting scholar in a neuroscience lab at McGill University, he was introduced to researchers working with organoids. Owen, who also does research in bioethics, wanted to help them address a perhaps unsettling question: Could these miniature cell clusters ever develop consciousness? Some experts believe that organoid consciousness is not likely to happen anytime in the near future, if at all. Still, certain experiments are prompting the question. In 2022, for example, researchers, including Brett Kagan of the Australian start-up Cortical Labs, published a paper explaining how they had taught their lab-grown brain cells to play a ping-pong-like video game. (Because the cells were placed in a single layer, the structures were not technically organoids, though they are expected to have similar capabilities.) In the process, the authors wrote, the tiny cell clusters displayed “sentience.” Undark recently spoke with Owen about this particular experiment and about his own writing on organoids.

Keyword: Consciousness; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30048 - Posted: 12.13.2025

By Christina Caron When Marjorie Isaacson first started taking medication for depression in her late 20s, she considered it lifesaving. At the time, she had been dealing with a rocky marriage and struggling to eat. The drug, she found, helped her gain equilibrium. “I was really grateful just to be able to function,” she said. But recently, Ms. Isaacson, 69, has been considering whether she wants to stay on antidepressants for the rest of her life. Specifically, Ms. Isaacson wonders about the long-term effects of her medication, a serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor that is known to raise blood pressure. And she feels unsettled by the emerging backlash against psychiatric drugs that has condemned their side effects and difficult withdrawal symptoms. “As the years have passed, things have changed from ‘Take it and see how it goes, no need now to be concerned’ to ‘Well, it’s turning out things might be kinda complicated,’” she said. “That is worrisome.” Antidepressants are among the most prescribed and easily accessible drugs in the United States, and many people take them for years. But even though modern-day antidepressants have been around for decades — the Food and Drug Administration approved Prozac for depression treatment in 1987 — there is very little information about long-term use. The F.D.A. approved the drugs based on trials that lasted, at most, a few months, and randomized controlled trials of antidepressants have typically spanned only two years or less. Current clinical guidelines do not specify the optimal amount of time they should be taken for. The lack of data can make it hard for people to know when — or whether — to quit. So we asked psychiatrists: How long should someone stay on antidepressants? © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 30047 - Posted: 12.13.2025

By Kelly Servick In the past 20 years, mice with glowing cables sprouting from their heads have become a staple of neuroscience. They reflect the rise of optogenetics, in which neurons are engineered to contain light-sensitive proteins called opsins, allowing pulses of light to turn them on or off. The method has powered thousands of basic experiments into the brain circuits that drive behavior and underlie disease. As this research tool matured, hopes arose for using it as a treatment, too. Compared with the electrical or magnetic brain stimulation approaches already in use, optogenetics offers a way to more precisely target and manipulate the exact cell types underlying brain disorders. So far only one optogenetic application—addressing certain kinds of vision loss by introducing opsins into cells in the eye—has made it into human trials. But its promising early results, along with the discovery of more sensitive and sophisticated opsins, are inspiring researchers to look beyond the eye, developing treatments that would act on peripheral nerves or deep in the brain. Initial tests of these strategies in animal models of epilepsy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and other neurological disorders have been encouraging, researchers reported last month at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) in San Diego. One company is hoping to launch a human trial for an optogenetic pain treatment by 2027. “We definitely don’t want to oversell the idea of using optogenetics [on human brains] any time soon, but we also are firmly convinced that this is now the right moment to be thinking about this seriously,” University of Geneva neurologist and neuroscientist Christian Lüscher told an SfN session he chaired, in which participants presented a newly published road map for bringing optogenetics to the clinic. Still, the presenters acknowledged major remaining challenges, including possible risks of inserting genes for opsins—many of which are derived from algae or other microbes—into a person’s nerves or brain cells. © 2025 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Epilepsy
Link ID: 30046 - Posted: 12.13.2025

By Jan Hoffman To treat their pain, anxiety and sleep problems, millions of Americans turn to cannabis, which is now legal in 40 states for medical use. But a new review of 15 years of research concludes that the evidence of its benefits is often weak or inconclusive, and that nearly 30 percent of medical cannabis patients meet criteria for cannabis use disorder. “The evidence does not support the use of cannabis or cannabinoids at this point for most of the indications that folks are using it for,” said Dr. Michael Hsu, an addiction psychiatrist and clinical instructor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the lead author of the review, which was published last month in the medical journal JAMA. (Cannabis refers to the entire plant; cannabinoids are its many compounds.) The analysis arrives amid a surging acceptance and normalization of cannabis products, a $32 billion industry. For the review, addiction experts at academic medical centers across the country studied more than 2,500 clinical trials, guidelines and surveys conducted mostly in the United States and Canada. They found a wide gulf between the health purposes for which the public seeks out cannabis and what gold-standard science shows about its effectiveness. The researchers distinguished between medical cannabis, sold at dispensaries, and pharmaceutical-grade cannabinoids — the handful of medicines approved by the Food and Drug Administration with formulations containing either low-grade THC, a psychoactive compound, or CBD, a nonintoxicating compound. Those medicines, including Marinol, Syndros and Cesamet, are available by prescription at conventional pharmacies and have had good results in easing chemotherapy-related nausea, stimulating the appetite of patients with debilitating illnesses like H.I.V./AIDS, and easing some pediatric seizure disorders. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 30045 - Posted: 12.13.2025

By Claudia López Lloreda A new commentary calls into question a 2024 paper that described a universal pattern of cortical brain oscillations. But that team has provided a more expansive analysis in response and stands by its original conclusions. Both articles were published today in “Matters Arising” in Nature Neuroscience. Ultimately, the back-and-forth suggests that a frequency “motif” may exist, but it may not be as general as the original study proposed, says Aitor Morales-Gregorio, a postdoctoral researcher at Charles University, who was not involved with any of the work. “The [2024] conclusions are way too optimistic about how general and how universal this principle might be.” The 2024 study identified a brain-wave motif in 14 cortical areas in macaques: Alpha and beta rhythms predominated in the deeper layers, whereas gamma bands appeared in the more superficial layers. Because this motif also showed up in marmosets and humans, the researchers speculated that it may be a universal mechanism for cortical computation in primates. “Results typically come with a level of variability, of noise, of uncertainty,” says 2024 study investigator Diego Mendoza-Halliday, assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh. But this pattern “was just there the whole time, at all times, in many, many of the recordings.” The team leveraged the findings to create an algorithm that detects Layer 4 of the cortex. But the pattern is “by no means universal,” according to the new commentary, which found the motif in about 60 percent of the recordings in an independent monkey dataset. Further, the algorithm trained to identify Layer 4 of the cortex is unreliable, the commentary shows. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 30044 - Posted: 12.13.2025

By John Pavlus Even in a world where large language models (LLMs) and AI chatbots are commonplace, it can be hard to fully accept that fluent writing can come from an unthinking machine. That’s because, to many of us, finding the right words is a crucial part of thought — not the outcome of some separate process. But what if our neurobiological reality includes a system that behaves something like an LLM? Long before the rise of ChatGPT, the cognitive neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko (opens a new tab) began studying how language works in the adult human brain. The specialized system she has described, which she calls “the language network,” maps the correspondences between words and their meanings. Her research suggests that, in some ways, we do carry around a biological version of an LLM — that is, a mindless language processor — inside our own brains. “You can think of the language network as a set of pointers,” Fedorenko said. “It’s like a map, and it tells you where in the brain you can find different kinds of meaning. It’s basically a glorified parser that helps us put the pieces together — and then all the thinking and interesting stuff happens outside of [its] boundaries.” Fedorenko has been gathering biological evidence of this language network for the past 15 years in her lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Unlike a large language model, the human language network doesn’t string words into plausible-sounding patterns with nobody home; instead, it acts as a translator between external perceptions (such as speech, writing and sign language) and representations of meaning encoded in other parts of the brain (including episodic memory and social cognition, which LLMs don’t possess). Nor is the human language network particularly large: If all of its tissue were clumped together, it would be about the size of a strawberry (opens a new tab). But when it is damaged, the effect is profound. An injured language network can result in forms of aphasia (opens a new tab) in which sophisticated cognition remains intact but trapped within a brain unable to express it or distinguish incoming words from others. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 30043 - Posted: 12.06.2025

By Siddhant Pusdekar A single dose of psilocybin leads to widespread network-specific changes to cortical circuitry in mice, according to a new study published today in Cell. The results help explain how psilocybin can bring about lasting changes in behavior, and they pinpoint “the neurons that are most affected,” says Andrea Gomez, assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study. Specifically, the psychedelic strengthens cortical inputs from sensory brain areas and weakens inputs into cortico-cortical recurrent loops. Overall, these network changes suggest that psychedelics reroute information in a way that enhances responses to the outside world and reduces rumination, says study investigator Alex Kwan, professor of biomedical engineering at Cornell University. “This study provides some more mechanistic insight for why the drug may be a good antidepressant.” And the rewiring itself is not static, Kwan adds: “It can be influenced by manipulating neural activity” during psychedelic treatment. With this locus of psychedelic-induced changes identified, researchers can unpack how these neuronal ensembles coordinate “to create particular percepts or particular cognitions,” Gomez says. Kwan’s team focused on the mouse dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), which includes the anterior cingulate cortex—an important hub for the serotonin receptors that psilocybin targets. One dose of psilocybin increases dendritic spine growth in the medial prefrontal cortex of mice, an effect that lasts for at least a month, according to a 2021 study by Kwan’s team. And the treatment reduces the animals’ learned stress-related behaviors, but only if pyramidal tract neurons—one of the major types of excitatory neurons in the dmPFC—are active, Kwan’s group reported in April. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 30042 - Posted: 12.06.2025

By Emily Anthes In just a few short years, new diabetes and weight loss drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro have taken the world by storm. In the United States, one in eight adults say they’ve tried one of these medications, which are known as GLP-1 drugs, and that number seems sure to rise as prices fall and new oral formulations hit the market. Fluffy and Fido could be next. On Tuesday, Okava Pharmaceuticals, a biopharmaceutical company based in San Francisco, is set to announce that it has officially begun a pilot study of a GLP-1 drug for cats with obesity. The company is testing a novel approach: Instead of receiving weekly injections of the drugs, as has been common in human patients, the cats will get small, injectable implants, slightly larger than a microchip, that will slowly release the drug for as long as six months. “You insert that capsule under the skin, and then you come back six months later, and the cat has lost the weight,” said Dr. Chen Gilor, a veterinarian at the University of Florida, who is leading the study. “It’s like magic.” Results are expected next summer. If they are promising, they could represent the next frontier for a class of drugs that has upended human medicine, and a potentially transformative treatment option for millions of pets. Some veterinarians have already begun administering human GLP-1 drugs, off label, to diabetic cats, and Okava is not the only company developing a product specifically for companion animals. “I think this is going to be the next big thing,” said Dr. Ernie Ward, a veterinarian and the founder of the Association for Pet Obesity Prevention. Veterinarians, he added, are “on the precipice of a complete new era in obesity medicine.” © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 30041 - Posted: 12.06.2025

By Emily Cataneo Imagine having a dream that you are trapped in a room with five rabid tigers. No matter how hard you try, you can’t escape. The tigers are screeching and thrashing and you’re terrified. Now imagine repurposing this dream. Imagine it from the perspective of one of the tigers. Now, you realize that the animals are panicking only because they want to escape. You open the door, inviting them to freedom, and they lie down, docile. Suddenly, the dream has become peaceful and calm, not terrifying and chaotic. BOOK REVIEW — “Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer’s Guide Through the Sleeping Mind,” by Michelle Carr (Henry Holt and Co., 272 pages). Freud might have had a field day with this dream, but thanks in part to psychoanalysis’ fall from grace over the last century, medical professionals no longer put much stock in our minds’ nighttime wanderings as markers of either physical or mental health. That’s what dream scientist Michelle Carr aims to change. Carr, who serves as director of the Dream Engineering Laboratory in the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine in Montreal, has spent two decades gathering data on people like the tiger dreamer: She’s spent countless nights in labs watching people sleep, probing why we dream, why we have bad dreams, and how studying and even manipulating dreams can improve mental and physical health. In “Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer’s Guide Through the Sleeping Mind,” Carr makes a passionate case for why the answers to these questions matter, deeply, especially for sufferers of trauma and suicidal ideation. What emerges is a passionate case for why dreams and nightmares are not just “random electrophysiological noise produced by the brain during sleep,” as scientists believed for many years, but rather a nightly exercise in “revising the shape of our autobiography.” In other words, Carr argues, our dreamscapes are essential pillars of who we are.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 30040 - Posted: 12.06.2025

Sara Protasi I love napping. I love napping in the summer, when rhythms are more relaxed and the guilt of taking a break less intense (if only slightly). But I also love napping in the winter, when it’s cold outside, and burying myself under a warm blanket makes me feel like I’m hibernating. No matter the season, when lying in bed, I luxuriate in the feeling of my body relaxing, waiting for the moment when odd images start forming somewhere in that space between my closed lids and my corneas – or, most likely, somewhere in my mind. I love drifting into unconsciousness without worrying about the next item on my to-do list. I’m not a sound sleeper or someone who falls asleep easily at night, but napping comes easily and sweetly. I treasure the days in which I can nap. And I treasure even more the nights in which I sleep long and well. Yet our culture prizes efficiency and productivity, often seeing sleep as a waste of time. ‘Tech bros’ boast about regularly working more than 70 hours a week, and aim to reduce their sleep time as much as possible. Elon Musk suggested even more intense work schedules for government workers during his time at the US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). His approach resonated with many adherents of the Silicon Valley grind culture, which has sought to ‘hack’ sleep for a long time. As one CEO of a cost-cutting firm told the news site Business Insider this year: ‘While a 120-hour workweek isn’t a practical or sustainable solution for most, the principle behind it resonates. Companies that prioritise efficiency, automation and proactive cost management will always outperform those weighed down by bureaucracy.’ This approach is mirrored in a seemingly contradictory trend in the tech industry: a number of years ago, tech companies such as Apple and Google started introducing nap time for their workers. However, this approach was less a gesture of care than a response to exhaustion and sleep deprivation induced by their grind mentality, providing ‘recharging time’ to boost creativity and sustain the long hours required for work. Workers in less high-paying careers, who need to work multiple jobs, rarely have time to nap, and often have to resort to drugs such as modafinil, a stimulant prescribed for narcolepsy and used, often illegally, by students cramming for exams. This substance has gained the attention of the military. The US defence research agency DARPA has funded pharmaceutical companies and researchers to reduce sleep deprivation, with the long-term ambitious goal of operating without any need for sleep in the field. And the US isn’t alone: militaries worldwide are exploring how to keep their soldiers awake and functioning when sleep is in short supply. © Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012-2025.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 30039 - Posted: 12.06.2025

Alison Abbott For decades, neuroscientists focused almost exclusively on only half of the cells in the brain. Neurons were the main players, they thought, and everything else was made up of uninteresting support systems. By the 2010s, memory researcher Inbal Goshen was beginning to question that assumption. She was inspired by innovative molecular tools that would allow her to investigate the contributions of another, more mysterious group of cells called astrocytes. What she discovered about their role in learning and memory excited her even more. At the beginning, she felt like an outsider, especially at conferences. She imagined colleagues thinking, “Oh, that’s the weird one who works on astrocytes,” says Goshen, whose laboratory is at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A lot of people were sceptical, she says. But not any more. A rush of studies from labs in many subfields are revealing just how important these cells are in shaping our behaviour, mood and memory. Long thought of as support cells, astrocytes are emerging as key players in health and disease. “Neurons and neural circuits are the main computing units of the brain, but it’s now clear just how much astrocytes shape that computation,” says neurobiologist Nicola Allen at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, who has spent her career researching astrocytes and other non-neuronal cells, collectively called glial cells. “Glial meetings are now consistently oversubscribed.” As far back as the nineteenth century, scientists could see with their simple microscopes that mammalian brains included two major types of cell — neurons and glia — in roughly equal numbers. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Glia
Link ID: 30038 - Posted: 12.03.2025