Neuroscience News

Scientists Investigating Whether Neurons Can Transmit Light through Their Axons

Postigo et al. aim to see if neurons can transport light like fiber-optic communications channels. Image credit: Gemini AI.
Apr 30, 2025 by News Staff

Neurons communicate by firing electrical pulses, but scientists have found hints that neurons may transmit light as well. Researchers at the University of Rochester have begun an ambitious project to study if living neurons can transmit light through their axons. Postigo et al. aim to see if neurons can transport light like fiber-optic communications channels. Image credit: Gemini AI. The nervous system is one of the most complex expressions of biological...

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Babies are able to learn abstract relations before the first year of life. Image credit: Kang Heungbo.

Why Don’t We Remember Specific Events from Our First Years of Life?

Mar 24, 2025 by News Staff

Challenging assumptions about infant memory, a new Yale University-led study shows that infants as young as 12 months old can encode memories. The findings...

Klingons at San Diego Comic-Con 2014. Image credit: Chris Favero / CC BY-SA 2.0.

Klingon and Other Conlangs are Processed by Same Brain Mechanisms as Natural Languages: Study

Mar 18, 2025 by News Staff

What constitutes a language has been of interest to diverse disciplines — from philosophy and linguistics to psychology, anthropology, and sociology....

Positions of electrodes used to cover the superior auricular muscles. Image credit: Schroeer et al., doi: 10.3389/fnins.2024.1462507.

Auricular Muscles Scientists Thought We Didn’t Use Actually Activate When We Listen Hard

Jan 31, 2025 by News Staff

If you can wiggle your ears, you can use the auricular muscles, which helped our distant ancestors listen closely. These muscles helped change the shape...

An anatomical illustration from Johannes Sobotta’s Human Anatomy, 1908.

New Study Highlights Role of Gene Expression in Human Brain Evolution

Jan 2, 2025 by News Staff

University of California, Santa Barbara’s Professor Soojin Yi and colleagues aimed to determine how genes in different types of brain cells have evolved...

A Homo heidelbergensis, a Neanderthal and a Cro-Magnon. Image credit: SINC / José Antonio Peñas.

Increases in Brain Size Occurred within Human Lineages Comprising Single Species, New Study Reveals

Nov 29, 2024 by News Staff

New research by scientists from the University of Reading and the University of Durham shows that encephalization (i.e., relative brain size increase)...

The versatility of somatosensation arises from heterogeneous dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons. However, soma transcriptomes of individual human (h)DRG neurons -- critical information to decipher their functions -- are lacking due to technical difficulties. In their new study, Yu et al. isolated somata from individual hDRG neurons and conducted deep RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) to detect, on average, over 9,000 unique genes per neuron, and they identified 16 neuronal types.

Neuroscientists Identify 16 Neuronal Types Involved in Human Sense of Touch

Nov 6, 2024 by News Staff

New research led by scientists from the University of Pennsylvania, Karolinska Institute and Linköping University provides a landscape view of the human...

Kutter et al. discovered that individual nerve cells in the medial temporal lobe recognize zero as a numerical value and not as a separate category ‘nothing.’

New Research Sheds Light on How Human Brain Processes Number Zero

Sep 25, 2024 by News Staff

The number zero holds a special status among numbers, indispensable for developing a comprehensive number theory. Despite its importance in mathematics,...

To track the spatial tuning of neurons dynamically during offline states, Maboudi et al. used a new Bayesian learning approach based on the spike-triggered average decoded position in ensemble recordings from freely moving rats.

Some Dreams May, in Fact, Predict Future, Neuroscientists Say

Jun 12, 2024 by News Staff

University of Michigan anesthesiologist Kamran Diba and colleagues have found that during sleep, some neurons not only replay the recent past but also...

Chronic caffeine intake prompts compensatory and cumulative dopamine transporter downregulation, consistent with caffeine’s reported risk reduction in Parkinson’s disease. Image credit: Clinical Neurosciences, University of Turku.

Regular Caffeine Consumption Affects Brain Dopamine Function in Parkinson’s Patients, Study Says

May 28, 2024 by News Staff

In a new cross-sectional and longitudinal study, researchers from the University of Turku and Turku University Hospital investigated the effects of dietary...

The great kiskadee (Pitangus sulphuratus) in Beeville, Texas, the United States, in July 2011. Image credit: Tess Thornton / CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed.

Scientists Translate Vocal Muscle Activity of Birds during Sleep into Synthetic Songs

Apr 15, 2024 by News Staff

During sleep, sporadically, it is possible to find neural patterns of activity in areas of the avian brain that are activated during the generation of...

Formation and characterization of the connected organoids. Image credit: Osaki et al., doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-46787-7.

Neuroscientists Create Human Brain-Mimicking Tissues in Lab

Apr 11, 2024 by News Staff

The idea of growing a functioning human brain-like tissue in a dish has always sounded pretty far-fetched. Towards this goal, researchers at the University...

Chettih et al. propose that animals recall episodic memories by reactivating hippocampal barcodes. Image credit: Chettih et al., doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2024.02.032.

Chickadees Have Unique Neural Barcodes for Episodic Memories, Researchers Say

Apr 2, 2024 by News Staff

Black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus), small North American passerine birds that live in deciduous and mixed forests, have extraordinary memories...

GluK2 KO mice are defective in cold sensing. Image credit: Cai et al., 10.1038/s41593-024-01585-8.

Neuroscientists Identify Cold-Sensing Receptor in Mice

Mar 12, 2024 by News Staff

Neuroscientists at the University of Michigan have identified a thermoreceptor that mediates cold sensing in somatosensory neurons. GluK2 KO mice are defective...

The accumulation of metabolic waste is a leading cause of numerous neurological disorders, yet we still have only limited knowledge of how the brain performs self-cleansing. Jiang-Xie et al. demonstrate that neural networks synchronize individual action potentials to create large-amplitude, rhythmic and self-perpetuating ionic waves in the interstitial fluid of the brain. Image credit: Jiang-Xie et al., doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07108-6.

Brain Waves Help Flush Waste Out of Brain During Sleep, Say Neuroscientists

Mar 4, 2024 by News Staff

Individual neurons coordinate to produce rhythmic waves that propel fluid through dense brain tissue, washing the tissue in the process, according to new...

These images show adult sea lampreys (top and left) and a developing sea lamprey embryo. Image credit: Stowers Institute for Medical Research.

Study: Sea Lamprey’s Brain Development is Remarkably Similar to That of Humans

Feb 21, 2024 by News Staff

The hindbrain of both sea lampreys and humans is built using an extraordinarily similar molecular and genetic toolkit, according to new research led by...

Ghosh et al. suggest that retroviral endogenization played a prominent role in the emergence of vertebrate myelin. Image credit: Ghosh et al., doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2024.01.011.

Study: Ancient Retroviruses Shaped Vertebrate Brains

Feb 19, 2024 by News Staff

Biologists from Altos Labs-Cambridge Institute of Science, the University of Cambridge and elsewhere have found that a retrovirus-derived genetic element...

DeSilva et al. suggest that patterns of human brain evolution were influenced by collective intelligence, a convergent characteristic of diverse group-living animals. Image credit: Gerd Altmann.

Scientists Identify Mechanism that Governs Interaction between Perceptual and Memory Neural Systems

Jan 2, 2024 by News Staff

The classic understanding of brain organization is that perceptual regions of the brain represent the world ‘as it is,’ with the brain’s visual cortex...

The colored plots illustrate neural activity recorded in mouse visual cortex (V1); each row of tick marks represents the spikes of a different neuron; researchers can predict the target side from the neural activity with near perfect accuracy, animal subjects get many masked trials wrong due to how brain regions downstream of V1 process this information. Image credit: Gale et al.

New Animal Study Sheds Light on ‘Visual Masking’ Phenomenon

Dec 28, 2023 by News Staff

A strange phenomenon called visual masking can reveal the timescale of perception, but the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. The colored plots...

Transcriptomic cell-type taxonomy of the whole mouse brain. Image credit: Yao et al., doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-06812-z.

Researchers Create Comprehensive Map of Mouse Brain

Dec 18, 2023 by News Staff

The mouse is the most commonly used vertebrate experimental model in neuroscience research, and the new atlas paves the way for a greater understanding...

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