TL;DR: During Parkinson’s surgery, 19 people played a game where they accepted or rejected money splits. Dopamine-like neurons deep in their brains fired more when an offer beat what the person expected, and this signal was stronger when the offer seemed to come from a person rather than a computer. Key Findings Better or worse …
TL;DR: In mice with a painful, inflamed paw, two separate sets of neurons in a pain-and-emotion brain area seemed to drive different side effects. One set, wired to the amygdala, controlled anxiety-like behavior, while the other, wired to a reward hub, controlled loss of appetite. Key Findings Pain brought anxiety and poor appetite: Mice with …
TL;DR: In rats stressed with mild foot shocks, REM sleep, the dream stage, dropped. The insomnia drug suvorexant and two related experimental drugs partly brought it back, and suvorexant also helped the rats fall asleep faster, but this was a small study in 9 male rats. Key Findings Stress cut REM sleep: The share of …
TL;DR: Old mice given nicotine in their drinking water for 3 months had more cells carrying two key markers of brake-like neurons in the hearing part of the brain, reaching young-adult levels. The study did not test hearing, and it is no reason for anyone to take up nicotine. Key Findings Markers fell with age: …
TL;DR: Two research teams used different methods to map the brain’s wiring in the same 1,065 young adults, then checked for differences between men and women. They almost always agreed on the fiber-quality measures, clashing just once in 343 comparisons, but disagreed more often about the size of the wiring tracts. Key Findings Same scans, …
TL;DR: In 792 people with stable multiple sclerosis, a blood marker of nerve damage more often placed them in an older age band than their actual age, compared with 302 people without MS. The gap was larger in people with more disability or progressive MS, but it did not predict who got worse over about …
TL;DR: Old female mice given plasmalogens, a fat found in brain cell membranes, 5 days a week for 2 months did better on a memory maze than old mice given water. Their brains also showed more synapses and less inflammation, but this is a mouse study, not a human trial. Key Findings Better maze memory: …
TL;DR: In mice, two visual areas of the brain kept signals they agreed on going longer and let mismatched signals fade faster. The two-way wiring between the areas appears to be what makes this happen. Key Findings Two areas recorded at once: 194 neurons in the main visual area and 228 in a higher one, …
TL;DR: In mice, the bone marrow inside the skull holds small immune hubs that pick up proteins leaking out of the brain and react to them, including proteins from brain tumors. Boosting those hubs with a gel placed under the scalp helped mice with brain tumors live longer. Key Findings Lymph-node-like clusters in the skull: …
TL;DR: Stroke patients whose brain arteries showed tiny traveling clots on an ultrasound scan had nearly 3 times the odds of poor recovery than those without, across 13 studies. The signals may mark a more unstable stroke rather than cause the worse outcome. Key Findings 13 studies, 1,777 patients: About 1 in 5 (361) had …
