TL;DR: Thin nerve fibers in the mouse brain are not smooth tubes but look like strings of tiny pearls, a shape set by the physics of their outer membrane. Changing that shape with drugs or heavy activity sped up or slowed down nerve signals by roughly 14% to 28% in mouse brain slices. Key Findings …
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: 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: 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 …
TL;DR: When 35 adults got fake feedback saying they were making more mistakes, they slowed down slightly, and they slowed most when told the buttons were faulty. Errors blamed on the machine also triggered a stronger brain “alert” signal than errors blamed on themselves. Key Findings Slower with fake errors: 571 ms with true feedback, …
TL;DR: Healthy adults normally react a bit slower to a spot that recently caught their attention, a habit that helps attention move on. A single dose of a drug that boosts dopamine, and another that blocks it, both weakened this habit compared with placebo. Key Findings 28 healthy adults, each tested on three visits. Both …
