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Category: neuroscience – Page 12

Dog brains track consonant patterns in speech, a first outside humans

Dog brains segment speech into words in a way previously seen only in humans, a new study from Hungary finds. This suggests that efficient speech processing is not necessarily a consequence of humans’ unique language abilities: Regular exposure to speech alone can reshape how the brain functions, even in a mammalian species evolutionarily distant from humans. The discovery by the Neuroethology of Communication Lab at the ELTE Department of Ethology in Budapest is published in Science.

Humans and language have a unique relationship. No other species possesses language abilities as complex as ours, and the human brain is particularly sensitive to the characteristics of speech. But there is a longstanding mystery: Do we process speech so efficiently because our brains are inherently built this way, or because we are constantly exposed to speech?

“Words are made up of two main types of speech sounds: vowels and consonants. Although vowels are louder and more noticeable, consonants usually form the skeleton of words. In a continuous speech stream, it is easier to detect individual words when we focus on consonants. And from infancy onward, this is exactly what the human brain tends to do. This phenomenon is known as the consonant bias,” says Attila Andics, a cognitive neuroscientist, head of the Neuroethology of Communication Lab and corresponding author of the study.

Distinct subnetworks of the mouse anterior thalamic nuclei

A small region of the thalamus deep in the brain helps connect areas involved in memory, navigation, decision-making, and emotion.

UCLA researchers mapped this region & uncovered multiple pathways linking different parts of the brain. The findings show just how complex the brain’s communication networks can be.

Deep inside the brain lies a crucial communication hub known as the anterior thalamic nuclei (ATN). Think of the ATN as a central switchboard that connects brain regions responsible for thinking, memory, and emotion. While scientists know this hub is essential for learning, navigating our surroundings, and achieving our goals, they have historically struggled to fully map the diverse types of brain cells that make it up.

To solve this puzzle, researchers studied the brains of mice using cutting-edge 3D imaging, genetic tracing, and computer analysis to create a highly detailed, three-dimensional map of the ATN. They discovered that instead of functioning as a single, uniform network, the ATN is actually made up of multiple distinct, parallel subnetworks.

These specialized cellular pathways act like dedicated communication lines. They allow the brain’s centers for thought (the prefrontal cortex), memory (the hippocampus), and emotion (the amygdala) to interact in highly specific ways. Ultimately, this research provides a clearer picture of how the brain wires together our cognitive and emotional processes, allowing them to work in harmony to help us successfully plan and achieve our goals.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-60774-6

#neuroscience #thalamus #Computational Neuroscience #BrainMapping #3Dbrainimaging #papezcircuit

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Escape of the BC200 gene to a human poxvirus reveals its persistent transposition in primates

Scientists found a human genetic element in a poxvirus and discovered it was both an important gene for brain function and a jumping gene capable of moving and inserting itself in genomes.

A study published Sept. 24 in Science reports that the gene, called BC200, combines a mix of characteristics that have never been seen before.

For millions of years, some stretches of DNA known as transposable elements—often described as “jumping genes”—have been able to copy themselves and insert into new locations in a genome. Although nearly half of the human genome bears traces of these elements, most are no longer capable of moving.

A new study highlights an unusual exception: BC200, a small noncoding RNA gene that was incorporated into the genomes of anthropoid primates roughly 40 million years ago and later acquired a role in regulating protein production in neurons. Scientists had assumed that, after being “domesticated” by the genome, BC200 had essentially settled into its new biological role.

Instead, the researchers found evidence that BC200 never completely lost its ability to move.

By analyzing primate genomes, they found that BC200 had repeatedly generated new copies over evolutionary time, producing hundreds of lineage-specific insertions. They also identified BC200 insertion variants that exist in some humans but not others—including very recent, individual-specific insertions—suggesting that the element may still be capable of moving today.

The most striking discovery came from molluscum contagiosum virus (MCV), a human-specific poxvirus. The researchers found two copies of the human BC200 sequence inside the viral genome. Their analysis suggests that these copies were acquired through the activity of LINE-1, another mobile genetic element, probably during relatively recent human evolution, potentially within the last 160,000 years.

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Popular Supplement Increases Strength Even Without Exercise, Study Shows

Talk to any young athlete, and they’ll know about creatine.

It’s one of the most popular supplements for improving muscle recovery and preserving muscle mass – used by gym junkies around the world.

Now, new research adds to tentative evidence that creatine may benefit the body and brain even without exercise.

Experimental cancer vaccine makes its own oxygen and gives T cells a boost

When it comes to priorities in life, oxygen tops the list. Humans can go weeks without food and days without water. Take away the ability to breathe, however, and the clock starts ticking within minutes as the brain begins shutting down. But the life-giving gas does even more heavy lifting than you might think.

The immune system, which battles cancer with the help of specialized fighters, such as T cells, relies on oxygen to mount its attack.

Now, Bouvé College of Health Sciences professor and director of the pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences graduate program Stephen Hatfield and his colleagues are enlisting oxygen in the cancer fight with a new vaccine designed to give T cells a powerful edge.

Cosmic lockdown: How the environment can isolate quantum fields

A simplified cosmological model suggests that decoherence can suppress quantum tunneling, effectively locking fields into the vacuum state they have reached.

The vacuum is not always so empty. “When we talk about a vacuum in cosmology, we do not mean completely devoid of energy,” explains David Wands, Professor at the Institute of Cosmology & Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth. “A vacuum is rather a state in which a field sits at a minimum of its energy. The true vacuum is the lowest possible minimum, but there can also be local minima, which we call false vacua.” We can picture this as a landscape made up of valleys of different depths: the true vacuum is the deepest one, while the others are false vacua.

Something sitting in one of these depressions can remain “trapped” there even if, somewhere else, a lower-energy state exists. This is exactly what can happen to quantum fields, fundamental physical objects that permeate the universe. A classical field is something that has a value at every position in space, like a magnetic field, whose strength changes from point to point. Quantum fields behave in a similar way, and their excitations appear as particles.

Stanford Researchers Discover That the Human Brain May Be Two Separate Organs Fused Together

A split in early brain development helped researchers grow human hindbrain neurons that could shed light on SMA and ALS.

The human hindbrain, the region at the back of the brain that helps control breathing and swallowing, has been difficult to study in the laboratory. For decades, scientists have struggled to grow its neurons, leaving them without an important tool for investigating diseases that gradually take away those abilities.

Researchers led by Stanford Medicine have now grown functional human hindbrain motor neurons, the nerve cells that control muscles, by identifying a developmental split that begins as an embryo takes shape. Their work suggests that making these cells requires a different starting point from the one that produces the brain’s other major regions.

Spin waves inside a nano-oscillator imaged for the first time

For the first time, researchers have directly imaged the magnetization dynamics inside a spin Hall nano-oscillator—a nanoscale device that converts direct current into tunable microwave signals and is a promising building block for energy-efficient wireless communication and brain-inspired computing.

A Swedish–German team led by the University of Gothenburg and Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) achieved this using time-resolved scanning transmission X-ray microscopy at the MAXYMUS instrument at BESSY II. The results, published in Advanced Materials, reveal spin-wave features that had escaped previous indirect measurement techniques.

Spin Hall nano-oscillators (SHNOs) are among the most versatile devices in spintronics: A direct current driven through a nanometer-sized constriction sets the local magnetization into steady precession, turning a DC input into a tunable radio-frequency output.