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Click here for the index of all years
December 2025
November 2025
October 2025
September 2025
- Annie Kathuria's team at Johns Hopkins has created a "multi-region brain organoid" mimicking the brain of a 40-day-old human fetus. (paper)
- David Creswell at Carnegie Mellon University published a review of meditation apps and evaluated their efficacy. Meditation apps dominate the mental health app market, but 95% of participants who download a meditation app aren't using it after 30 days. (paper)
- Claudio Mirasso at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems (IFISC) in Spain and Santiago Canals at the Institute for Neurosciences in Spain showed that the brain employs two different routes to process novel or old information: feedforward inhibition leads to gamma-to-theta interactions, or feedback inhibition produces theta-to-gamma interactions. (paper)
- A team at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, in collaboration with the University of Magdeburg and the University of Tubingen, has discovered that the human brain ages in layers, each layer at a different rate. The brain gets smaller with age, a sign that neurons are being lost, but this happens at different rates in each layer. The neural region associated with the sense of touch seems to be the one that ages slowest. (paper)
- In 2019 Thomas Carmichael at UCLA discovered that the CCR5 gene is associated with stroke recovery and that the drug Maraviroc boosts neuroplasticity after brain injury for example after a stroke (Stroke is the leading cause of adult disability). CCR5 is a therapeutic target for recovery after stroke and traumatic brain injury. (paper) (The CCR5 receptor is also the portal that HIV binds to in order to enter cells). His team have now identified a potential "brain rehabilitation" drug. (paper)
August 2025
- Miles Wilkinson and Kun Tan at UC San Diego discovered that generic material called HAR123 (a transcriptional enhancer), which promotes the development of neural progenitor cells (the cells that then become either neurons or glial cells) and determines the ratio of neurons and glial cells, is different in human brain and chimp brain and could account for what makes our brain so special. (paper)
- Saul Villeda at UC San Francisco showed that a protein called FTL1 causes cognitive decline in mice. When removed, the mice's brains were rejuvinated. This could be a clue to the cause of brain aging. (paper)
July 2025
- Xianhua Piao at UC San Francisco showed that the receptor ADGRG1 helps microglia do their job of brain maintenance and that the loss of that receptor leads to rapid neurodegeneration. (paper)
- Xu Li at Johns Hopkins University measures brain's iron levels (which can predict cognitive decline) through a noninvasive MRI technique called "quantitative susceptibility mapping" (QSM). (paper)
- Surgeons at UC San Diego (Joseph Osorio's team) performed the first ever anterior cervical spine surgery using a personalized implant designed for a specific patient instead of the traditional one-size-fits-all device implant. (paper)
June 2025
- Kim Eunjoon's team at KAIST (in collaboration with KBSI, KISTI, Kyungpook National University, and Yonsei University) proved the key role played in early brain development by a tiny segment (just four aminoacids long) known as mini-exon B of a protein called PTPÎ that helps neurons form synapses. (paper)
- Roberto Cabeza's team at Duke University, in collaboration with Humboldt and Hamburg Universities in Germany, studied the creative process of "insight" (rapid knowledge reorganization) and discovered that it is associated with feedback between the visual cortex, the amygdala and the hippocampus, yielding an interconnected network. (paper)
May 2025
- Takaki Komiyama's team at UC San Diego showed that the thalamocortical pathway, the pathway between the thalamus and the cortex, is the crucial area involved in motor learning. During motor learning , the thalamus activates cortx neurons to encode the learned movement. (paper)
- Human language is unique because it provides for the generation of infinite meaning by combining phonemes into words and words into sentences. Catherine Crockford's team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, in collaboration with the Cognitive Neuroscience Center Marc Jeannerod and the Neuroscience Research Center in France, found that wild chimpanzees too have a linguistic compositional skill: they can create call combinations. There are at least four ways in which chimpanzees alter meanings by combining single calls into 16 different two-call combinations. (paper)
- The traditional paradigm of learning is that leaning consists in synapses between neurons to change. Thomas Papouin's team at Washington University in St Louis discovered that learning also happens involving astrocytes (another, less famous, kind of brain cell). Signaling between astrocytes is slower than signaling between neurons: they work on slower timescales. It is not know how much of the brain's wiring is orchestrated by astrocytes. The chemicals that rewire the brain are called "neuromodulators" and it was believed that they only operated on neurons, but this team has shown that in some cases they signal through astrocytes rather than directly onto neurons. (paper)
- James Monaghan's team at Northeastern University discovered that a chemical called retinoic acid (a form of vitamin A) is involved in the axolotl salamander's ability to regenerate its limbs after they are severed. Different concentrations of retinoic acid are different signals for the growth of limbs. The key protein that regulates the concentration of retinoic acid is CYP26b1. Retinoic acid is also secreted by humans and the genes involved in axolotl's limb regeneration are also present in human DNA, but somehow these genes don't get expressed in human adults. (paper)
April 2025
- Caroline Palmer at McGill University argues that the brain's circuits physically resonate with music, a theory called Neural Resonance Theory: musical experience arises from brain waves that sync with rhythm, melody and harmony. (paper)
- Leptin is a hormone that regulates metabolism by signaling the brain, particularly the hypothalamus, to control food intake. Heike Manzberg-Gruening's team at Pennington Biomedical Research Center discovered the pathways, chemicals and neurons involved in the process. The neurons involved, i.e. the "leptin receptors", are located in the dorsomedial hypothalamus, at the base of the brain, and communicate using either glutamate or GABA. They send signals of glutamate to a brain region called the "raphe pallidus", which controls metabolism, and send GABA signal to the arcuate nucleus, which regulates satiety. (paper)
- Sandra Siegert's team at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria has unveiled a new brain organoid that includes microglia, cells that are crucial for brain maintenance. (paper)
March 2025
- A team at Columbia University showed that dopamine in the basal ganglia guides reinforcement learning in the brain: it decreases when the outcome is not the one desired and it increases when it is the one desired. (paper)
- Shigeru Miyagawa at the MIT, based on genomic evidence, has calculated that the language capacity of humans originated at least 135,000 years ago That's assuming that all seven thousand human languages have a common origin. Miyagawa wrote that all languages are related to each other in his 2010 book, "Why Agree? Why Move?". (paper)
- Ngai Wong and Zhengwu Liu at the University of Hong Kong, in collaboration with teams at Tsinghua University and Tianjin University, have developed a brain-computer interfaces based on a 128K-cell memristor chip. This chip serves as an adaptive brain signal decoder. It is more energy-efficient than traditional brain-computer interfaces and is better at adapting the interface to natural changes in brain signals over time (paper)
- Yifat Merbl's team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel has discovered that a new part of the immune system the proteasome, a structure present in every cell of the body whose normal function is to recycles proteins, becomes a produceer of antibiotics when it detects that the cell has been infected by bacteria. De facto, this is an immune system that spreads throughout the body in all the cells that can generate a new class of antibiotics. (paper).
February 2025
- When in 1979 Francis Crick stated that it was impossible "to create an exact wiring diagram for a cubic millimeter of brain tissue and the way all its neurons are firing", he launched a challenge to the whole world of Biology. The Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) Project involves the Baylor College of Medicine, the Allen Institute and Princeton University. They photographed a one cubic millimeter portion of a mouse's visual cortex in 25,000 layers, each 1/400th the width of a human hair. Thus they built the most detailed wiring diagram of a mammalian brain to date: more than 200,000 cells, 4 kilometers of axons and 523 million synapses. (Article in nature)
- Gawon Cho at Yale has shown that deep sleep and REM sleep are important for brain health and dementia risk. Lower slow wave sleep and lower REM sleep are associated with brain atrophy. Those brains show signs of atrophy in MRI scans 13 to 17 years later.
(paper)
January 2025
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