Zimmerman et al. show loss of behavioral inhibition correlated with attenuated theta activity in the primary visual cortex, hippocampus, and deficient top-down control from the prefrontal cortex in the Fmr1 KO mice. These findings shed light on circuit-level impairments underlying behavioral deficits in Fragile X syndrome for potential therapeutic interventions.
The universe has been having fewer and fewer stellar “babies.” Over the past 4.5 billion years, the rate of star birth has crashed to less than half of what it once was. But here’s the twist: the most essential “fuel” for making stars has barely decreased.
This finding comes from an international team led by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) project. They used China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) to make high-precision measurements of cosmic neutral atomic hydrogen over the past 4.5 billion years.
The study reveals that while cosmic star formation has declined dramatically over this period, neutral atomic hydrogen (HI)—a vital gas reservoir for galaxies—has decreased only slightly.
Antigen-specific T cells underpin immunity, cancer surveillance and autoimmunity, yet remain difficult to study. This Review describes the technologies and computational approaches that are helping to link T cell receptor specificity with function, revealing how intrinsic T cell properties shape immune outcomes across infection, vaccination and disease.
It is highly likely that a preventative cancer treatment, originally targeted at women, is now also protecting men.
The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is the first medicine in the world developed specifically to prevent cancer by targeting a virus.
It was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2006, but at first, it was only given to girls and women.
A New Era for SMA — Dr. Tracey Dawson, PhD, — SVP and U.S. Therapeutic Area Head of Neuroscience, Novartis.
Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) has undergone one of the most remarkable transformations in modern medicine. A disease that once carried devastating consequences, particularly in its most severe forms, can now be treated with therapies designed to dramatically alter its course — especially when treatment begins early.
But medical progress creates a fascinating new question. What happens when you don’t just change the disease — you change what’s possible for the person living with it?
Because today’s SMA community includes children treated before symptoms emerge, young adults who have grown up in this new treatment era, and adults who have lived with SMA for decades and carry the consequences of disease that occurred before these therapies existed.
And that’s where our conversation today gets particularly interesting. Because the next challenge may not simply be developing better medicines. It may be helping people take full advantage of the lives those medicines make possible.
The Hidden Organ Transplant Threat — CMV — Dr. Neil Inhaber, MD, FRCPC — Head, Marketed Products and Neuroscience, Global Medical Affairs, Takeda.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of people around the world receive life-saving organ transplants — new hearts, kidneys, lungs, and livers that offer patients a second chance at life.
But transplantation is only the beginning of the journey.
Because preventing organ rejection requires suppressing the immune system, transplant recipients become vulnerable to infections that most healthy people never even notice.
One of the most important — and least understood — is cytomegalovirus, or CMV.
Scientists discovered that human microglia, immune cells that help shape developing brain circuits, can take four to eight years to mature instead of just weeks as they do in mice. The unusually slow process may help explain how the human brain develops its remarkable complexity and cognitive abilities.
More than two kilometres beneath the surface of the Pacific, off the coast of Oregon, an active underwater volcano has been hiding one of the strangest landscapes ever mapped on the seafloor. Using robotic vehicles capable of withstanding crushing depths, scientists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute have spent more than two decades surveying Axial Seamount, a volcano along the Juan de Fuca Ridge that has erupted repeatedly since its discovery in the 1980s.
Science seems like a straightforward endeavor. You come up with a hypothesis, collect data to prove or disprove it, and analyze that data to see whether the hypothesis is right. But anyone who actually does science will tell you that it is often not that straightforward. One of the most common complexities is data analysis.