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Category: neuroscience – Page 16

Turning MRI into a quantitative microscope to detect white matter injury

Early diagnosis and noninvasive monitoring of neurological disorders require sensitivity to elusive cellular-level alterations that emerge much earlier than volumetric changes observable with millimeter-resolution medical imaging.

Morphological changes in axons—the tube-like projections of neurons that transmit electrical signals and constitute the bulk of the brain’s white matter—are a common hallmark of a wide range of neurological disorders, as well as normal development and aging.

A study from the University of Eastern Finland (UEF) and the New York University (NYU) Grossman School of Medicine establishes a direct analytical link between the axonal microgeometry and noninvasive, millimeter-scale diffusion MRI (dMRI) signals—diffusion MRI measures the diffusion of water molecules within biological tissues and is sensitive to tissue microstructure.

A genetic breakthrough links early-onset diabetes to brain disorders

Paediatric teams are now facing babies whose diabetes appears in the first weeks of life, then rapidly reveals deep problems in brain growth and function. A new genetic finding sheds light on how a single molecular fault can disrupt both blood sugar control and early brain development.

Neonatal diabetes is diagnosed in the first six months of life, often within days or weeks after birth. Unlike the more common type 1 diabetes, which usually shows up in children and teenagers, neonatal diabetes is almost always genetic.

Doctors typically notice poor feeding, weight loss, dehydration and extremely high blood sugar. In many cases, the root cause is a mutation that stops the pancreas from making enough insulin. That alone makes neonatal diabetes a medical emergency.

A Single Molecule May Explain How Blood Flow in The Brain Triggers Dementia

Reduced blood flow to the brain is thought to be a key factor in many forms of dementia, including Alzheimer’s, and scientists have just identified a new mechanism regulating this flow, which may also help explain how it goes wrong.

A fat molecule helps maintain the system’s balance, researchers at the University of Vermont discovered, and in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease, disruption of this balance led to problems.

Fixing the imbalance restored more normal blood flow, offering a hopeful new target for understanding and treating dementia-related brain changes.

Organ cross-talk: molecular mechanisms, biological functions, and therapeutic interventions for diseases

3. Pathology as Network Dysregulation.

In recent years, a transformative view of physiology has emerged: the body operates not as isolated organs, but as an integrated communication network in which signals flow bidirectionally between the brain, the immune system, the gut, and peripheral organs. This comprehensive review synthesizes current mechanistic insights into this “organ cross-talk” and frames them within systems biology and neuroscience.

At its core, organ cross-talk encompasses neural, endocrine, metabolic, and immune signaling between organs that coordinate homeostasis and orchestrate responses to stress and disease. From a neuroscience vantage point, three themes stand out:

1. The Brain as a Communication Hub.

2. Peripheral Feedback to the CNS.

Continue reading “Organ cross-talk: molecular mechanisms, biological functions, and therapeutic interventions for diseases” | >

Motor protein discovery in fruit flies may unlock neurodegenerative secrets

Scientists have long known that inherited neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or motor neuron disease, can be traced back to genetic mutations. However, how they cause the diseases remains unanswered.

In today’s issue of the journal Current Biology Professor Andreas Prokop revealed that so-called “motor proteins” can provide key answers in this quest.

The research by the Prokop group focuses on nerve fibers, also called axons. Axons are the delicate biological cables that send messages between the brain and body to control our movements and behavior. Intriguingly, axons need to survive and stay functional for our entire lifetime.

Scientists Discover Brain Cancer Begins in “Normal” Cells Long Before Tumors Appear

New research reveals that certain brain tumors may originate silently within normal brain cells long before a tumor forms. IDH-mutant glioma is a malignant brain cancer linked to changes in a single gene (IDH), and it is the most common malignant brain tumor in adults younger than 50. Doctors oft

NVIDIA Releases PersonaPlex-7B-v1: A Real-Time Speech-to-Speech Model Designed for Natural and Full-Duplex Conversations

PersonaPlex runs in a dual stream configuration. One stream tracks user audio, the other stream tracks agent speech and text. Both streams share the same model state, so the agent can keep listening while speaking and can adjust its response when the user interrupts. This design is directly inspired by Kyutai’s Moshi full duplex framework.

NVIDIA Researchers released PersonaPlex-7B-v1, a full duplex speech to speech conversational model that targets natural voice interactions with precise persona control.

Conventional voice assistants usually run a cascade. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) converts speech to text, a language model generates a text answer, and Text to Speech (TTS) converts back to audio. Each stage adds latency, and the pipeline cannot handle overlapping speech, natural interruptions, or dense backchannels.

PersonaPlex replaces this stack with a single Transformer model that performs streaming speech understanding and speech generation in one network. The model operates on continuous audio encoded with a neural codec and predicts both text tokens and audio tokens autoregressively. Incoming user audio is incrementally encoded, while PersonaPlex simultaneously generates its own speech, which enables barge in, overlaps, rapid turn taking, and contextual backchannels.

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