It was sometime around the third failed replication that Yiyan Dong's team at Huazhong University of Science and Technology started questioning everything. The chronic restraint stress protocol they'd been using - the same one labs worldwide relied on to model depression in mice - kept spitting out...
In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Joel and Clementine erase painful memories to escape emotional suffering. It's a gorgeous, heartbreaking premise - and also wildly impractical (not to mention the ethical nightmare). But what if, instead of deleting memories entirely, you could just turn...
Sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your brain has been running a faulty sleep program since before you took your first breath. At least, that's the case if you're among the growing number of people identified with FOXP1 syndrome, a rare neurodevelopmental condition where the blueprint for...
Sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your gut has been sending hormonal text messages to your brain without your knowledge - and some of these messages appear to be quite literally saving you from feeling terrible. A new study from Lisa Beutler's lab at Northwestern has uncovered how a gut...
You used to think you were addicted to your phone. You'd said it yourself, casually, probably while scrolling Instagram at 1 a.m. on a work night - "I'm literally addicted to this thing." But then a neuroscientist came along and said, politely but firmly, that you probably aren't. Not clinically,...
A neutrophil is about 12 micrometers across. A microglia, the brain's resident immune cell, stretches its spindly arms to maybe 50 micrometers tip to tip. Together, these microscopic players - each invisible to the naked eye - can gang up and shut down your ability to walk. And according to a new...
Neuroscience has a long history of borrowing from nature and then nervously wondering if it went too far. We split the atom, we cloned a sheep, and now - in what feels like the opening scene of a sci-fi movie nobody asked for - we're growing miniature brain-like structures in petri dishes. They're...
It was supposed to be a straightforward collaboration task. Pairs of people, sitting together, taking turns solving problems. But when Yifan Wang and colleagues at the cognitive neuroscience lab looked at the brain data streaming in from their heroin-abstinent participants, the expected patterns of...
Somewhere around 2013, Madeline Lancaster was staring at a clump of stem cells that had done something no one asked them to do. Instead of growing into a flat, well-behaved sheet of neurons - the kind that fills textbooks and grant applications - the cells had self-organized into a...
Tucked into the surface of nearly every neuron in your brain sits a bustling neighbourhood of receptors - histamine H1, serotonin 5-HT2A, dopamine D2, noradrenergic alpha-1 - each one a tiny molecular doorbell waiting to be rung. Navigate past the blood-brain barrier, hang a left at the limbic...
If you're a neuron in the hippocampus, you have two choices: keep quietly filing away memories like the diligent librarian you are, or moonlight as an unwitting accomplice in one of biology's most elaborate heists. Because it turns out, cancer doesn't just grow - it networks. And your nervous...
If you're a neuron in the hippocampus, you have two choices: fire off your little electrical blip against a flat metal pad that barely hears you - like whispering into a pillow - or snuggle up to a microscopic vertical tower that catches every syllable of your electrochemical gossip. For decades,...
The problem with studying how the brain filters information is that everything happens at once, everywhere, all the time. It's like trying to figure out which security guard at a concert is keeping out the rowdy drunks versus which one is redirecting people to the right entrance - while the music...
The loneliness epidemic has officially graduated from think-piece fodder to clinical concern. A December 2025 AARP survey found that four in ten Americans over 45 are lonely - a number that's been climbing steadily for over a decade. But while the usual headlines fixate on the emotional toll, a new...
If you Google "amnesia," you'll find page after page telling you that memories get erased - wiped clean like a hard drive that took a magnet to the face. Turns out, most of those search results are selling you an outdated story. A massive new review in Psychological Review is making a pretty...
Tucked deep inside each temporal lobe, roughly behind your ears and a couple of inches inward, sit two almond-shaped clusters of neurons called the amygdalae. If your brain were a city, these would be the fire stations - small, always staffed, and responsible for pulling the alarm the instant...
Right at this moment, as your eyes scan these words, your brain cells are distinguishing "self" from "not self" in a molecular dance that would make a bouncer at an exclusive club look amateur. Your neurons, astrocytes, and microglia are all quietly monitoring their own genetic material, making...
A single Purkinje cell - one of roughly 30 million crammed into a structure the size of your fist - unfurls a dendritic tree so elaborate it looks like a coral reef designed by a maniac with a protractor. Each of these cells receives input from up to 200,000 other neurons simultaneously. And...
For over a century, scientists studying how plants send electrical signals kept wandering down the same dead-end road: trying to understand plant action potentials by borrowing the playbook from animal neuroscience. Wrong turns piled up. Terminology got confusing. And the Venus flytrap - that...
The suspects were lined up: twenty-five species of macaque, each with an alibi and a distinctly different attitude toward personal space. For decades, neuroscientists had been working the cold case of why some primate societies run like cooperative communes while others resemble a particularly...
