Contrary to long-standing views based on mouse studies, bone marrow-derived cells infiltrate the aging human brain, paving the way for brain-targeted cell therapies.
Category: neuroscience – Page 12
Sad or afraid? Dogs may be able to read your face
Dogs may be even more attuned to people’s feelings than we think.
Man’s best friend has a knack for knowing what humans are thinking, reading signs as subtle as jangling keys or a dangling leash. But a new brain-imaging study suggests that dogs may even be able to distinguish between certain negative emotions without using clues like our body language, odor or words. Just looking at people’s faces may be enough, scientists report August 10 in iScience.
When it comes to predicting people’s preferences, it pays to consider ‘the power of three’
In his 1927 paper, “A law of comparative judgment,” the American psychologist L. L. Thurstone proposed that when people select one option among multiple alternatives, they are picking the one that has the highest value to them, even though they cannot assign a particular number to that choice.
Thurstone was a pioneer of “psychometrics”—a field built on the premise that mental processes, which we cannot see, can nevertheless be measured and quantified. His 1927 paper laid the groundwork for what are now called random utility models, which provide a mathematical framework for describing human preferences—information that can be relied on, in turn, to make predictions about various hypothetical situations.
Random utility models (RUMs) are so named because they assess the “utility,” or benefit, that can be obtained from a given choice—such as deciding which book to read first among the stack of novels you brought back from the library.
Schizophrenia’s Brain Damage May Start in One Key Region
Schizophrenia may leave a distinctive biological footprint across the brain’s communication network.
Using specialized PET imaging, researchers have mapped where synaptic connections are most reduced in people with schizophrenia and identified a possible region from which the damage begins to spread.
The study, which involved a Rutgers professor, was published in Molecular Psychiatry.
Semaglutide slows blood protein signature linked to future dementia risk
A post hoc analysis of 2,970 older SELECT participants found that semaglutide slowed worsening of a 25-protein blood signature that predicts future dementia risk. Over 104 weeks, semaglutide produced larger effects on modeled 5-year than 20-year dementia risk, but whether these biomarker changes translate into less cognitive decline or dementia remains unknown.
Could the Next Brain Interface Get Sprayed Up Your Nose?
A brain computer interface (BCI) is any technology that allows you to connect your 3 pounds of wetware to a computer. But instead of implanting electrodes via neurosurgery, might the next revolution in BCIs come from something very small, like nanoparticles? Would this allow us to spy on millions (or billions) of neurons talking at once — and could we do so without opening the skull? Will this allow BCI tech to become as common as smartphones? Join Eagleman as he talks with Tetiana Aleksandrova and Scott Meek from the company Subsense about why the next brain-computer interface might come from thinking small.
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The Extended Language Network: Language-Responsive Brain Areas Whose Contributions to Language Remain To Be Discovered
Despite ample evidence for functional specialization in the brains of humans (Kanwisher, 2010) and nonhuman animals (Tsao et al., 2006), some continue to argue against the idea of stable structure in the brain, emphasizing the distributed, dynamic, and interactive nature of cognitive processes, including language (Pessoa, 2022; Forkel and Hagoort, 2024; Drijvers et al., 2025). Deep engagement with this debate is beyond the scope of this article, but two points are worth clarifying. First, the fact that many areas—sometimes in distant parts of the brain—are engaged by language comprehension does not imply that the “entire brain” supports this function. Although the extended language network spans almost every major component of the brain, within each component, language regions occupy a small fraction of brain tissue. Second, linguistic inputs can unquestionably engage many brain regions beyond those that specifically support language processing: vivid descriptions of faces or scenes can engage category-selective visual areas, a story about a misunderstanding can engage the Theory of Mind network, and a horror story can engage the amygdala (see Casto, et al., 2025b for discussion). However, all these brain regions can also be engaged by nonlinguistic inputs. The ability of a brain region to be engaged by language does not make it a “language region” any more than its ability to be engaged by visual inputs makes it a “visual region.” Furthermore, the fact that the language network needs to interact with other brain areas does not undermine its functional distinctness from those areas and its special role in language processing. As long as different components within the language network interact more strongly with one another than with other networks—for which ample evidence exists (Blank et al., 2014; Braga et al., 2020; Du et al., 2024, 2025; Shain and Fedorenko, 2025)—the language network and other cognitive networks can be treated as meaningfully distinct objects of study (Simon, 1962).
For completeness and ease of comparison with past studies, we explored the possibility of using standard anatomical atlases to constrain individual fROIs (rather than the parcels derived from a group-level representation of brain activity; Fedorenko et al., 2010; Julian et al., 2012). Examining individual activation maps (or maps derived from functional connectivity patterns: Braga et al., 2020; Du et al., 2024, 2025; Shain and Fedorenko, 2025) against standardized brain parcellations reveals two issues. First, individual topographies often do not align with the boundaries of the atlas areas: a contiguous functional region may get broken up by a boundary or—for finer-grained atlases—may get assigned to different atlas areas across individuals because of interindividual topographic variability (see Fig. S5B for examples). For studies focusing on a particular functional network, we therefore recommend functional parcels over anatomical/multimodal atlases.
Atomic view of Alzheimer’s disease peptide could inform new drugs
One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease is the accumulation of a peptide in the brain known as amyloid beta. A new study published in Nature Communications on July 22 has uncovered the atomic structure of the peptide in its harmful form.
Amyloid beta is a naturally occurring peptide that exists in healthy brains. But in Alzheimer’s disease, these peptides clump together abnormally and form large plaques. Scientists have known about the association between these plaques and Alzheimer’s disease for over a century, but whether this buildup is actually damaging the brain or simply a byproduct of the disease has been hotly debated.
There is also an intermediate state of amyloid beta that exists between the healthy peptides and the large plaques. Emerging evidence suggests that it is these intermediates—so-called “oligomeric” amyloid beta—that drive damage to the brain, but their structure has remained unknown. Now, a team of researchers at Yale School of Medicine has characterized this intermediate form for the first time.