neuroscience
12 stories tagged "neuroscience"
Your First Pregnancy Rewires the Brain for One Baby. Your Second Rewires It for the Chaos of Two.
Amsterdam researchers scanned 110 women and found each pregnancy leaves its own mark, and the brain changes tied to maternal depression showed up months earlier the second time around.
Brain & AgingA Brain Full of Plaques and a Mind That Held: The Cells That May Explain Alzheimer's Resilient Third
About a third of people whose brains show the full pathology of Alzheimer's never develop dementia. Dutch researchers say the difference may not be how many young neurons they have, but whether those cells switch on a survival program instead of dying.
Brain & AgingIn Mice, Early Stress-Drinking Corroded a Brain Region a Long Sobriety Couldn't Repair
In mice, pairing alcohol with stress in early adulthood damaged a tiny noradrenaline hub in the brainstem, and a prolonged stretch of abstinence didn't reverse it. The cognitive cost surfaced in middle age.
Brain & AgingLongevity Clinics Sell Growth Hormone by the Vial. In Deep Sleep, Your Brain Makes It Free.
The muscle-building, fat-burning hormone that anti-aging clinics inject at a premium is the same one your hypothalamus releases every night you reach deep sleep. Berkeley mapped how, in mice, and the headline is already running ahead of the biology.
Brain & AgingThe Box-and-Banana Test Was Built for Apes. A Bumble Bee Worked It Out on Its Own.
Researchers in Finland trained bumble bees on two unrelated facts, a flower with sugar and a ball that rolls. With the flower moved out of reach, the bees combined the two into a solution nobody had shown them, on a task built for apes.
Brain & AgingAlzheimer's Hitches a Ride on a Virus Your Neurons Tamed for Memory
In mice and in human Alzheimer's brains, toxic tau rides a protein called Arc, a virus your neurons domesticated for memory, from sick cells into healthy ones. Delete Arc and the spread nearly stops.
Brain & AgingYour Brain Has 170 Billion Cells and No Blueprint. Here's How One Cell Pulls It Off.
For fifty years the textbook said chemical gradients tell brain cells where to go. A new model says cells inherit their address from their family tree instead.
Brain & AgingYour Brain Files Speech Where You'd Least Expect: In Hearing and Touch, Not the Motor Cortex
A TMS study from McGill and Yale finds that newly learned speech is stored in the brain's hearing and touch regions, not the motor cortex long assumed to run the show.
Brain & AgingDisappointment, Not Reward, Is What Breaks a Habit. Half of Older Adults Are on Drugs That Blunt Acetylcholine.
An OIST team caught the mouse brain firing acetylcholine the moment an expected reward failed to land. That surge is what lets the animal switch strategy. Close to half of community-dwelling older adults are on drugs that block the same receptors.
Brain & AgingThe Alzheimer's Drug That Bets the Plaques Are a Symptom
An ETH Zurich team spent nearly twenty years tracing why Alzheimer's nerve cells run out of energy, and the answer points to a protein the amyloid-clearing drugs never touched.
Metabolic & WeightA gut hormone keeps showing up in the brain's reward circuit, and 600,000 veterans just gave us the biggest hint yet that it matters
A VA cohort of 606,000 diabetic veterans on GLP-1 drugs showed lower risks of new substance use disorders and large drops in overdose and drug-related death versus a peer diabetes drug. The mechanism story is where it gets interesting.
Brain & AgingHarvard Just Mapped How a Mouse Smells, and It Quietly Rewrites What Smell Loss Means
Harvard used MERFISH to image roughly 1,100 odorant receptors across the mouse nose at once and found tidy stripes, not chaos. The clinical stakes for smell loss just got harder to wave off.