Miryam Naddaf By analysing more than a million brain cells, researchers have uncovered widespread differences in patterns of gene activity between male and female brains. The work, which defined sex on the basis of a person’s combination of sex chromosomes, could help to explain why the risk of developing some brain conditions — such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease — differs between males and females. Although the differences were subtle, the team identified more than 100 genes that showed consistent variation in their expression between males and females across several brain regions. The work was published on 16 April in Science1. “Having these gene-expression signatures provides a molecular handle to understanding the biology of how the brains of men and women might be functioning slightly differently in the context of the different hormonal environments that their bodies produce,” says Jessica Tollkuhn, a neuroscientist and molecular biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. She adds that “understanding sex differences in disease susceptibility could lead to better treatments to benefit everyone”. Subtle differences Previous studies2,3 have documented sex differences when it comes to a person’s risk of developing various neurological conditions. For example, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Parkinson’s disease are more common in biological males — who typically have XY sex chromosomes. By contrast, Alzheimer’s disease and mood disorders such as depression and anxiety tend to be more common in females, whose sex chromosomes are usually XX. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 30207 - Posted: 04.18.2026

By Pam Belluck Since the approval of new Alzheimer’s drugs in recent years, there has been a lingering question: While data indicated that they could modestly slow cognitive decline for some patients, would that effect be meaningful or too slight to make difference? A new review of research spanning a decade, published on Wednesday, concluded that the clinical benefit of these and similar drugs is negligible. But the way the review was conducted spurred heated criticism from many Alzheimer’s experts, including some who had been skeptical of some of them. The review, published by Cochrane, an international network of health researchers, evaluated studies that were conducted on seven monoclonal antibody drugs developed over the last two decades to target amyloids, proteins that form plaques in the brains of people who have Alzheimer’s disease. Some Alzheimer’s experts said the conclusions were meaningless because the review swept under one umbrella drugs that had shown very dissimilar results and worked differently. The experts noted that data from the two most recent drugs studied — Leqembi and Kisunla — showed they could slow cognitive decline, which led to approval from the Food and Drug Administration and made them the only anti-amyloid drugs available to patients. But a vast majority of the studies analyzed in the review involved four earlier drugs that had failed clinical trials or were never approved and a fifth drug that was pulled from the market. “The problem with the review is the mix of ingredients,” said Dr. Jason Karlawish, a director of the Penn Memory Center at the University of Pennsylvania, who has been skeptical or cautious toward some of the drugs over the years. “They took some of the rotten ingredients and mixed it in with the fresh food, and the result is a stinky stew.” © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 30206 - Posted: 04.18.2026

By Angie Voyles Askham When Shan Siddiqi arrived in Australia in February to speak at the 2026 Noosa Brain Workshop, he was still thinking about a paper published in Nature Neuroscience three weeks prior. The work had criticized lesion network mapping (LNM), a neuroimaging method that Siddiqi uses as the basis for much of his work. LNM uses the location of brain lesions in various health conditions to infer information about networks of brain activity altered in those conditions. But the January paper claimed the approach produces biased results, and points to largely the same brain networks no matter the condition. After reading the full paper, however, Siddiqi, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, decided the authors’ criticism was toothless—it highlighted issues that he and his colleagues were aware of, and had already developed methods to address. Yet to his dismay, in the following days and weeks the criticism kept coming, both on social media and in news articles, including one by The Transmitter. The issue hung over the conference, too. During a social event on the first night of the Noosa meeting, other attendees asked Siddiqi, as a leading proponent of the method, for his thoughts, and he decided he needed to address the criticism in his talk the following day. The next afternoon, he told the audience of senior neuroimaging researchers that he took the challenge raised in the paper seriously, and said it had caused him and his co-author Michael D. Fox to reanalyze their data in collaboration with neuroimaging statisticians. He then presented the two competing hypotheses to the audience—LNM findings are disease specific versus LNM is mathematically flawed—and explained how he and Fox tested both with real data. The results seemed to validate LNM, Siddiqi said, leading him to conclude that the critique rested on incorrect assumptions about how the method is implemented. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 30205 - Posted: 04.18.2026

Nicholas Humphrey In his novel Penguin Island (1908), Anatole France spins a wonderful tale about a blind old monk who sets off from Brittany on a mission to the Hebrides and lands on an island inhabited only by penguins. Though the birds speak a strange language, he assumes they must be human beings. So he proceeds to baptise them. When the news of this reaches heaven, it causes a major stir. God himself is embarrassed. He gathers an assembly of clerics and doctors, and asks them for an opinion on the delicate question of whether the birds must now be given souls. It is a matter of more than theoretical importance. ‘The Christian state,’ St Cornelius points out, ‘is not without serious inconveniences for a penguin … The habits of birds are, in many points, contrary to the commandments of the Church …’ After lengthy discussion, they settle on a compromise. The baptised penguins are indeed to be granted souls – but, on St Catherine’s recommendation, their souls are to be of small size. For the penguins, souls were an unexpected bonus. As René Descartes, the philosopher-scientist of the 17th century, had explained, nonhuman animals in general, in a state of nature, are mere soulless machines. Here’s a sketch of a Cartesian penguin, without even a smidgen of a soul. Descartes believed that humans too are machines of a kind. But he held that, with humans, thankfully, God has arranged the addition of a soul as standard practice. Early in infancy, the material substance of the human brain is put into communication via the pineal gland with the separate substance of the mind: res extensa (extended stuff) is joined by res cogitans (thinking stuff). The consciousness that results lays the foundation for the soul. © Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012-2026

Keyword: Consciousness; Language
Link ID: 30204 - Posted: 04.18.2026

By Ellen Barry Edna Foa, an Israeli American psychologist who pressed her field — and her patients — to more directly confront fear and anxiety, revolutionizing the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, died on March 24 at a hospital in Philadelphia. She was 88. Her death, from complications of pneumonia, was confirmed by her daughter Yael Foa. Dr. Foa completed her training in the late 1960s, when clinicians tended to treat people with severe anxiety disorders cautiously and gradually. One of her first patients, a woman with an intense fear of objects related to death, had been prescribed a course of “systematic desensitization.” Dr. Foa was instructed to visit her every day carrying a small stone from a cemetery, bringing the stone a little closer each time until at long last the patient would be able to hold it. “We started to feel that she will never get better at that rate,” Dr. Foa recalled in a 2018 podcast interview. Dr. Foa decided to move faster, driving the patient to a funeral home and bringing her inside so that the woman was forced to deal with her distress. Avoiding those feelings, Dr. Foa posited, was actually holding the patient back. This theory culminated, about a decade later, in Dr. Foa’s landmark innovation. In the 1980s, she developed prolonged exposure therapy, a structured protocol of eight to 12 90-minute sessions in which the patient recounts a traumatic event in the present tense, lingering on the most vivid and upsetting elements. Then the patient undertakes real life exposure to reminders of the event. These sessions could be uncomfortable, Dr. Foa acknowledged. But they served to ease the patient’s sensitivity and correct flawed thinking, demonstrating that there was no harm in confronting the feared object, place or event. Over the years that followed, a series of studies supported the approach’s effectiveness. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 30203 - Posted: 04.18.2026

By Katie Engelhart The doctor told her that her husband was just a vegetable now. “And he’s always just going to be a vegetable.” Did he really say it like that? Vegetable? And, just? Well, that’s how she remembers it. In his notes, the doctor wrote that his patient’s prognosis was “Poor/Grave.” A few weeks earlier, on Oct. 4, 2024, while on a trip out of town, Aaron Williams said that his stomach hurt. Then he started vomiting and couldn’t stop, and then he started screaming. His wife, Tabitha, tried to drive him back home to Aiken, S.C. — and she was almost there, maybe 30 minutes away, when Aaron’s body stiffened and his limbs flung out and he went quiet. At the hospital, Aaron, who was 30, was found to be in cardiac arrest. Doctors performed CPR, and when it did not work, they did it again and again; Aaron’s small, lithe body — just 5-foot-8, 135 pounds — heaved under the force of it, until after five rounds of compressions his heart started beating again. Doctors inserted a breathing tube and attached it to a ventilator next to Aaron’s bed. Sitting at her comatose husband’s side, Tabitha could hear its quiet mechanical hiss. As it turned out, Aaron, who has Type 1 diabetes, had not been taking his insulin. Part of it, maybe, was hubris; he had been a diabetic since forever, and he thought he knew his body well enough to know when his glucose levels were really off-kilter. Also, he didn’t have a prescription; Aaron and Tabitha had recently moved, with five of their children, and he still hadn’t found a new family doctor who would take Medicaid. Doctors did a CT scan, an electroencephalogram (EEG) and later an M.R.I., and they saw evidence of a global anoxic brain injury and “severe cortical dysfunction.” There was cerebral swelling too: so much that his brain pushed outward against his skull, partly flattening the folds and ridges that covered its surface. When he was examined, Aaron had no blink reflex, and he didn’t respond to sound. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 30202 - Posted: 04.15.2026

Oliver Milman We may appear to have little in common with sperm whales – enormous, ocean-dwelling animals that last shared a common ancestor with humans more than 90 million years ago. But the whales’ vocalized communications are remarkably similar to our own, researchers have discovered. Not only do sperm whale have a form of “alphabet” and form vowels within their vocalizations but the structure of these vowels behaves in the same way as human speech, the new study has found. Sperm whales communicate in a series of short clicks called codas. Analysis of these clicks shows that the whales can differentiate vowels through the short or elongated clicks or through rising or falling tones, using patterns similar to languages such as Mandarin, Latin and Slovenian. The structure of the whales’ communication has “close parallels in the phonetics and phonology of human languages, suggesting independent evolution”, the paper, published in the Proceedings B journal, states. Sperm whale coda vocalizations are “highly complex and represent one of the closest parallels to human phonology of any analyzed animal communication system”, it added. The findings are the latest discovery about the lives of sperm whales by Project Ceti (standing for Cetacean Translation Initiative), an organization that has studied whales off the coast of Dominica in an attempt to find out what they are saying. Last month, the project released video of a sperm whale giving birth while other whales supported it. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30201 - Posted: 04.15.2026

By Elie Dolgin Two U.S. states and more than a dozen cities and counties have moved in the past year to stop adding fluoride to community drinking water, citing research suggesting the mineral could harm children’s brain development. But a new analysis of cognitive outcomes tracked over decades finds no evidence that water fluoridation is associated with lower adolescent IQ or diminished mental abilities later in life, researchers report April 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The results, based on standardized intelligence testing of more than 10,000 people in Wisconsin followed since their senior year of high school in 1957, challenge the idea that typical fluoridation levels in public drinking water pose a neurodevelopmental risk, a central point of contention in ongoing policy debates. “It’s very strong data,” says Steven Levy, a dentist and public health researcher at the University of Iowa in Iowa City who was not involved in the research. “There’s no strong signal at all coming through that should give us concern.” However, given the politically charged nature of water fluoridation and continued differences in how researchers interpret the available evidence, the findings are unlikely to be the last word on the issue. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026

Keyword: Intelligence; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 30200 - Posted: 04.15.2026

Brian Mann Earlier this year, Naida Rutherford, the coroner in Richland County, South Carolina, was helping investigate what appeared to be a mysterious overdose. The case had many of the hallmarks of a typical fentanyl death. "Every sort of physical manifestation, like the foam coming from the mouth and nose, as if they had an overdose," Rutherford said. "Their blood tested negative for any substance, which was very odd." Her team was stumped, so Rutherford expanded the testing, looking for new compounds. "That's where we found the cychlorphine," she told NPR, referring to one of the incredibly potent synthetic opioids spreading fast in the U.S. street drug supply. Sponsor Message The state of Virginia has seen drug overdose deaths plunge by more than 40% in a single year. Many other states are seeing improvements above 30%. Why is this happening? Researchers say it may be a combination of factors, some hopeful and some painful. "This is the first time we've seen it in South Carolina, which is very scary because none of us knew to test for it." Experts say the U.S. addiction crisis is evolving fast, in ways that appear both hopeful and incredibly dangerous. The peril comes from a street drug supply that chemists now describe as a "synthetic soup." Where once most drug users mostly consumed plant-based substances such as cocaine and heroin, drug gangs and cartels have shifted to producing and selling synthetic substances made from industrial chemicals. © 2026 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30199 - Posted: 04.15.2026

By Michael S. Rosenwald Thomas S. Langner, a sociologist who helped lead a landmark study of New Yorkers that revealed striking insights about the social, cultural and economic forces that shape mental illness, died on March 16 at his home in Sandy Hook, Conn. He was 102. His wife, Susan Kassirer, confirmed the death. When “Mental Health in the Metropolis: The Midtown Manhattan Study” was published in 1962, headline writers had a field day with the top-line finding: that only 18.5 percent of Manhattan residents could be considered psychologically well adjusted, while 23 percent showed significant impairment in daily functioning. “City Gets Mental Test, Results Are Real Crazy,” Newsday declared. The Daytona Beach Morning Journal wondered: “New York Living for ‘Nuts’ Only?” The actual substance of the two-part study — the second installment appeared in 1963 — was the challenge it posed to the widely held view in psychiatry that biological and individual factors are the primary drivers of mental illness. Professor Langner, along with a team of psychiatrists, anthropologists and social workers at Cornell University Medical College (now Weill Cornell Medicine), spent more than a decade studying 1,660 people who lived on the East Side of Manhattan, between 59th and 96th Streets. The researchers concluded that developing mental illness didn’t simply come down to a genetic lottery. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 30198 - Posted: 04.15.2026

By Jonathan Corum and Matt Richtel Illicit labs are creating new synthetic drugs at breakneck speed. Dangerous, untested compounds are reaching users long before health agencies know they exist. Older drugs are regularly modified to create novel threats. Ecstasy is a prime example. The party drug MDMA has been illegal since 1985. Its molecular structure can be drawn like this: But what if you could add one atom to this molecule to change both the experience of taking the drug and its legal status? You can. A single oxygen atom changes the molecule to methylone, which provides an Ecstasy-like euphoria. The discovery of what this simple change could do has had a profound consequence. When methylone reached the U.S. market in 2010 the drug could be sold legally in corner stores and smoke shops as “bath salts.” But methylone wasn’t the end of the story. Illicit chemists now use methylone’s structure as a template for modern-day alchemy. New drug laws push them to invent new variants, which emerge in the illicit drug market with untested potencies and effects — a vicious cycle that has been impossible to contain. These chemists are located in unregulated labs around the globe, from big enterprises in China and India that produce drugs and their precursor compounds in huge volumes, to single-person and small domestic operations that cut and package drugs for retail sale. Some of the most-used drugs, such as fentanyl, are mixed in Mexico and exported north. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30197 - Posted: 04.11.2026

By Siddhant Pusdekar Deer mice, common across North America, come in two varieties: One lives in prairies, whereas the other inhabits forests. The life of the forest mouse requires greater dexterity—a skill it possesses thanks to its higher number of corticospinal tract axons, according to a January preprint. The existence of “genetically tractable subspecies of deer mice with different behavioral niches” made the discovery possible, says Eiman Azim, associate professor of molecular neurobiology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, who wasn’t involved in the study. It enabled the researchers to link genetically driven changes in corticospinal abundance and morphology to dexterity. The new work reveals one way dexterous skill may emerge, while also suggesting neuroscience should investigate “behaviors that evolved for the natural niches” to discover fresh insights, says Ariel Levine, a senior investigator at the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, who wasn’t involved in the study. Dexterity in primates coevolved with direct connections between layer 5 cortical neurons and motor neurons in the spinal cord, Levine says. In rodents, cats and less dexterous monkeys, however, corticospinal neurons connect to motor neurons via interneurons. Direct cortical-motor neuron connections exist in juvenile mice, but they are pruned during development, a 2017 paper showed. Artificially stopping the pruning process created adult lab mice with greater skill at gathering food pellets.

Keyword: Evolution; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30196 - Posted: 04.11.2026

By Diana Kwon The ability to conjure pictures in the mind’s eye enables us to remember the past and imagine the future. It also allows us to plan, navigate and create works of art. In a study published April 9 in Science, researchers report that imagining an object reactivates some of the same neurons involved in seeing it in the first place, providing new insight into how mental imagery is produced in the brain. Previous research had hinted that the neurons involved in perceiving and imagining images overlapped. These studies used various methods, such as asking participants to view and then imagine pictures while lying in a functional MRI scanner, to show that the same brain regions were involved in these processes. But whether the same individual neurons were involved remained an open question, says Ueli Rutishauser, a neuroscientist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Because measuring neuronal activity requires electrodes in the brain, Rutishauser and colleagues studied 16 adults with epilepsy who had already had electrodes temporarily implanted into their brains to identify the origin of their seizures. Participants viewed hundreds of images from five categories — faces, text, plants, animals and everyday objects — while researchers recorded activity from over 700 neurons in the ventral temporal cortex, a region involved in representing visual objects. Of those, about 450 selectively responded to individual categories. Machine learning then revealed that 80 percent of those category-responsive neurons were selective to specific visual features within the images. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 30195 - Posted: 04.11.2026

Alison Abbott The development of the human brain, with its extraordinary range of cognitive abilities, is an awe-inspiring feat of evolution. Each of its tens of billions of cells must be born at precisely the right time, migrate to the correct locations, differentiate into as many as 3,000 distinct cell types, and form exquisitely specific synaptic connections with one another. Most of this happens before birth, but development continues for nearly three more decades. None of this is easy to study. Conventionally, scientists have relied on animal models and scarce human brain tissue. But the advent of tiny laboratory-grown models of human brains called organoids has transformed their options. First created more than a decade ago, these organoids started off as very simple models. But in the past few years, scientists have refined the technology to grow more-intricate systems that represent more brain regions. Research has snowballed as scientists have used organoids to probe brain development, model neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism and schizophrenia and test new treatments for brain diseases. These tiny spheres are helping researchers to get at difficult-to-answer questions such as why the human brain develops so much more slowly than other mammalian brains do. And this year, researchers are hoping to run the first clinical trial of a brain-disorder treatment developed entirely in organoids. “The field is at an inflection point,” says developmental biologist Jürgen Knoblich at the Institute for Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna. But organoids are not without their limitations. It’s hard to sustain them in the lab for more than a few months, for instance. And they lack complexity. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30194 - Posted: 04.08.2026

By Andrew Jacobs As researchers have sought to demonstrate the therapeutic benefits of mind-altering drugs like LSD and psilocybin “magic mushrooms,” many have struggled to explain exactly how these compounds work on the human brain. One way scientists have tried to show what these compounds do is by using functional M.R.I. machines to peer into the brains of research participants in the midst of a psychedelic experience. This has produced evocative color images that show a maelstrom of activity as the drugs disrupt patterns of connectivity between brain regions and networks. But the interpretations of those scans, published in scientific journals, have been inconsistent and even contradictory. Over the past five years, an international consortium of researchers has tried to make sense of the divergent results by bringing together the data from nearly a dozen brain imaging studies in five countries that have been published since 2012. The studies included more than 500 scans of 267 research participants on five substances: LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT and ayahuasca. Their findings, published on Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, suggest that psychedelics prompt a welter of activity between regions of the brain that normally operate somewhat independently: the areas that process sensory information like vision, hearing and touch, and those involved with abstract thinking and self-reflection. The research suggests that psychedelic compounds temporarily reduce the separation between how we think and how we perceive, which could explain the neurological mechanics behind the sensory distortions, mystical experiences and ego dissolution that patients report during sessions. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Consciousness
Link ID: 30193 - Posted: 04.08.2026

By Mac Shine The brain is arguably the most complex object in the known universe, and neuroscience—the discipline charged with understanding it—has grown to match that complexity. Today, the field spans everything from the molecular choreography of a single synapse to the large-scale network dynamics that give rise to conscious experience. It is simultaneously one of the most exciting and most disorienting fields to work in. The conceptual map that connects our different subfields hasn’t been written yet. But a new study published in Aperture Neuro in February takes a remarkable step toward drawing that map. Led by Mario Senden, a computational neuroscientist at Maastricht University, the work applies state-of-the-art text embedding and community detection algorithms to nearly half a million neuroscience abstracts published between 1999 and 2023. It carves the literature into 175 distinct research clusters, characterizing each one along dimensions ranging from spatial scale to theoretical orientation. What emerges is a portrait of a discipline that is, in many ways, healthier than it might appear from the inside. Despite its staggering diversity—clusters range from AMPA receptor trafficking to the neural underpinnings of consciousness—the field is remarkably well integrated; the vast majority of research communities actively draw on and feed into one another. The cluster of resting-state functional MRI dynamics and the molecular mechanisms of hippocampal plasticity emerge as some of the field’s great intellectual hubs, providing conceptual and methodological scaffolding for dozens of downstream communities. But the map also has its fault lines. Microscale and macroscale research communities operate in two largely separate epistemic worlds, divided by spatial scale and by the training trajectories that produce different kinds of neuroscientists. Temporal scales are integrated only pairwise, never holistically. And perhaps most provocatively: Not a single cluster in the entire 175-cluster solution is organized around a theoretical framework. The Bayesian brain, the free energy principle and predictive coding are common targets of empirical science, yet none of them anchor their own research community. Theory, it seems, is something neuroscience does around the edges of the phenomena it is really interested in. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 30192 - Posted: 04.08.2026

By Erin Garcia de Jesús My early days of nursing a newborn felt like I’d transformed into a 24-hour diner. A demanding yet adorable customer flagged me down with piercing cries to demand milk around the clock. Unfortunately, I was also on clean-up duty, wiping spit-ups and poopy butts. Breastfeeding is hard work. But after reading science journalist Elizabeth Preston’s book The Creatures’ Guide to Caring, I’m glad I’m not a burying beetle. The critters use mouth and anal secretions to knead small dead animals into slick balls of meat. Parent beetles then bury the smothered carcasses and lay their eggs nearby. Some species even feed their brood regurgitated bits of carcass, helping the young beetles grow to 200 times their original size in just six days. “A newborn human growing at that rate would be the size of a beluga whale in less than a week,” Preston writes. Suddenly my own kid doesn’t seem so heavy. The Creatures’ Guide to Caring was born out of Preston’s growing fascination with the biology of parenting after having her first child. “If so many people have done it before you, and are doing it right now — if so many animals are doing it without books or apps or advice to heed — why is it the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” she writes. Perhaps by finding kinship in the animal world, Preston could learn something about her new role as a parent. Each chapter dissects the benefits and drawbacks of parenting, piecing together how it evolved in humans and other creatures. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 30191 - Posted: 04.08.2026

By Claudia López Lloreda A previously unrecognized population of fibroblasts seals off the base of the choroid plexus—the network of blood vessels and cerebrospinal-fluid-producing epithelial cells that line the ventricles—from the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and the rest of the brain, a new study in mice shows. The newly identified barrier provides an added layer of protection that is distinct from the well-known blood-brain barrier and the one that the epithelial cells form between the blood and the CSF. The findings help settle a long-standing debate about whether there was a blind spot in the choroid plexus that gave the periphery access into the brain, says Britta Engelhardt, professor of immunobiology at the University of Bern, who was not involved in the work. “Some [scientists] speculated that there is a leak, like an opening, a secret window into the brain, and others said, ‘No, there must be a barrier that we have overlooked.’ And it’s very obvious now.” Fibroblasts at the base of the choroid plexus, connected by adherens and tight junction proteins, cluster together around blood vessels and form a sealed barrier in mice, the researchers found. This structure represents a crucial component of compartmentalization in the choroid plexus, Engelhardt says. The cells were also present in human postmortem brain samples. Similar to other barriers, the seal becomes leaky in response to inflammation triggered by lipopolysaccharide, a component of the bacterial cell wall, and it may coordinate immune cell crossing from the blood into the brain, the study also showed. The work was published in February in Nature Neuroscience. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Neuroimmunology; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30190 - Posted: 04.04.2026

Marielle Segarra When neurosurgeon and journalist Dr. Sanjay Gupta set out to write a book about pain, it wasn't because he felt like he had all the answers. It was because he was still so often mystified by it. "Most of my patients come to me for pain. Head pain, back pain, neck pain, whatever it might be," he says. "If that's what the majority of your professional life is, you should understand it as best you can." His 2025 book, It Doesn't Have to Hurt: Your Smart Guide to a Pain-Free Life, gathers the latest developments in pain science, based on his own experience with patients and conversations with researchers and doctors. What he found may challenge your own understanding of pain and even give you the tools to help you feel better. There's evidence, for example, that just learning about pain and how it works "seems to be pain relieving" for those with chronic pain conditions, he says. Gupta, who also serves as the chief medical correspondent for CNN, explains what we still don't know about pain and shares a few effective new treatments. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. In your book, you say that one of the most significant developments emerging in pain treatment is the fact that the brain is at the center of any pain experience. Can you tell us more about why that matters? What I think has become clear — and I'm not the first person to say this — is the idea that if the brain doesn't decide you have pain, then you don't have pain. © 2026 npr

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Attention
Link ID: 30189 - Posted: 04.04.2026

By Diana Kwon Human minds often wander. Whether we’re busy at work, doing chores or exercising, our thoughts frequently shift away from the task at hand. These spontaneous thoughts sometimes turn toward sensations in the body, such as our heartbeat or breath, and that could affect our immediate emotional state and long-term mental health, researchers report March 25 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many studies focus on thinking about memories, events and other people, what scientists consider the cognitive aspects of mind wandering, says Micah Allen, a neuroscientist at Aarhus University in Denmark. This research suggests that mind wandering plays an important role in planning, learning, creativity and other important mental processes. It has also been linked to negative emotions and some, such as obsessively ruminating on past mistakes, may contribute to depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and other mental illnesses. Do you share our vision for a healthier, happier world through science? But how the mind might drift to bodily sensations, what some researchers call “body wandering,” and its effects have largely been overlooked, Allen says. He and colleagues had 536 people lie still in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner and then complete a questionnaire about what was on their minds during that time. In addition to the typical content of daydreams, such as memories, plans or social interactions, participants reported paying attention to sensations in their body, such as their breathing, heartbeats and bladder. The team also found evidence of this in the MRI scans: Body wandering appeared to have a distinct brain signature from that of “cognitive” mind wandering. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Stress; Attention
Link ID: 30188 - Posted: 04.04.2026