Topic
The study of nervous systems, from individual neurons to memory and behaviour in whole animals.
Yale researchers report that cortisol strengthens emotional memories by changing how brain networks communicate, measured in five-second fMRI trials. Each participant was scanned once on hydrocortisone and once on placebo.
Reality
Caltech neuroscientists traced male fruit flies' threat displays to four major neurons downstream of a cluster of five to seven cells per brain hemisphere. Activating the neurons in pairs reproduced the display's wing and leg movements.
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Neurons in the hippocampus of anesthetized epilepsy-surgery patients carried information about word types and upcoming words, Baylor researchers report in Nature. The result bears on whether language processing needs consciousness, though the recordings show what neurons encode and leave comprehension open.
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In 23 mice, Leibniz Institute researchers found learning reorganizes dendritic inhibitory synapses and stabilizes those at the axon start. The work is observation and modeling, so the idea that the split protects memory remains a hypothesis.
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Sami Kanaan's team at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center detected maternal cells in 26 of 37 children's brain samples, averaging 2.2 per 100,000 cells. A mosaic brain is a fair inference, but whether the cells affect function or disease is a separate question.
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EPFL researchers scanned thin mouse brain slices for lipids and assembled a 3D atlas of 539 zones they named lipizones. White matter, once thought fairly uniform, split into many of them.
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Peter Hegemann, Georg Nagel and Karl Deisseroth won this year's medicine Nobel for optogenetics, which uses light to switch on chosen neurons. With it, researchers can switch on one circuit and see whether a behavior follows, a direct test of cause.
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Karl Deisseroth, Georg Nagel and Peter Hegemann won the 2026 medicine Nobel for optogenetics, the control of cells with light and genetics. It goes to a laboratory method, unlike the discoveries and treatments Scientific American cites from the prize's 125-year record.
Perspective Coverage
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Tohoku University researchers found that stimulating the vagus nerve after each practice session gave mice stronger eye-movement learning on later days. The study adds brain blood vessels to the routes by which the stimulation might act, though so far that link rests only on a correlation.
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Two decades after Janelia proposed the project, the adult fly connectome is finished. The 1,000-fold efficiency gain credited with making it possible is measured against the institute's own 2008 forecast.
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Sergiu Pasca's Stanford group deleted most of the mouse cortex and hippocampus, then filled the space with human cells. The evidence in Nature that the graft contributes to cognition is a maze test.
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