Tubes in mouse and human brains may also influence spread of brain disease
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How non-neuronal brain cells communicate to coordinate rewiring of the brain
A study by Dorothy P. Schafer, Ph.D., and Travis E. Faust, Ph.D., at UMass Chan Medical School, explains how two different cell types in the brain—astrocytes and microglia—communicate in response to changes in sensory input to remodel synapses, the connections between neurons.
Published in Cell, these findings are in an emerging area of interest for neurobiologists who want to understand how different cells in the brain interact to rewire the brain.
This novel mechanism has the potential to be targeted by translational scientists hoping to one day prevent synaptic damage incurred during neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or ALS as well as age-related cognitive decline. It may also lead to new insights into neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia, where the brain’s circuit refinement process may have been compromised during development.
Scientists create ChatGPT-like AI model for neuroscience to build one of the most detailed mouse brain maps to date
In a powerful fusion of AI and neuroscience, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Allen Institute designed an AI model that has created one of the most detailed maps of the mouse brain to date, featuring 1,300 regions/subregions.
This new map includes previously uncharted subregions of the brain, opening new avenues for neuroscience exploration. The findings were published in Nature Communications. They offer an unprecedented level of detail and advance our understanding of the brain by allowing researchers to link specific functions, behaviors, and disease states to smaller, more precise cellular regions—providing a roadmap for new hypotheses and experiments about the roles these areas play.
“It’s like going from a map showing only continents and countries to one showing states and cities,” said Bosiljka Tasic, Ph.D., director of molecular genetics at the Allen Institute and one of the study authors.
Brownstone Research
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How One AI Model Creates a Physical Intuition of Its Environment
Once this pretraining stage is complete, the next step is to tailor V-JEPA to accomplish specific tasks such as classifying images or identifying actions depicted in videos. This adaptation phase requires some human-labeled data. For example, videos have to be tagged with information about the actions contained in them. The adaptation for the final tasks requires much less labeled data than if the whole system had been trained end to end for specific downstream tasks. In addition, the same encoder and predictor networks can be adapted for different tasks.
Intuition Mimic
In February, the V-JEPA team reported how their systems did at understanding the intuitive physical properties of the real world — properties such as object permanence, the constancy of shape and color, and the effects of gravity and collisions. On a test called IntPhys, which requires AI models to identify if the actions happening in a video are physically plausible or implausible, V-JEPA was nearly 98% accurate. A well-known model that predicts in pixel space was only a little better than chance.
This Tiny Microchip Can Heal Live Tissue with a Single Touch
We might truly be living in the future, with the advent of a new nanochip technology which can instantaneously heal live tissue, and which is taking the medical and tech industries by a storm this week.
At Ohio State University, a team has developed a prototype for what is being called Tissue Nanotransfection, or TNT. The small hand-held device simply sits on the skin, and then an intense electrical field is generated which, while hardly registering to the patient, delivers specific genetic material to the tissue directly beneath.
Extreme lifespan multiomics
Recent studies suggest that the steady rise in life expectancy observed over the past 200 years has now stagnated. Data indicate that a limit has been reached, and that medical and healthcare advances no longer affect longevity in developed countries as they did in previous decades. Today, ageing itself, rather than disease, is the real frontier of human longevity. But what exactly is ageing? And can it be addressed in the same way as a disease?
A research team has just published the final peer-reviewed data from the study of the longest-lived person ever recorded, who far exceeded 117 years: the Catalan woman Maria Branyas. The analysis, based on samples obtained using minimally invasive techniques, takes a multi-omic approach with genomic, proteomic, epigenomic, metabolomic and microbiomic technologies, and represents the most exhaustive study ever undertaken on a supercentenarian.
In the paper, published in the prestigious journal Cell Reports Medicine, the international and multidisciplinary team explains that individuals who reach supercentenarian age do not do so through a general delay in ageing but, as the author notes, thanks to a “fascinating duality: the simultaneous presence of signals of extreme ageing and of healthy longevity.”
2025 Nobel Prize in Physics Peer Review
Introduction.
Grounded in the scientific method, it critically examines the work’s methodology, empirical validity, broader implications, and opportunities for advancement, aiming to foster deeper understanding and iterative progress in quantum technologies. ## Executive Summary.
This work, based on experiments conducted in 1984–1985, addresses a fundamental question in quantum physics: the scale at which quantum effects persist in macroscopic systems.
By engineering a Josephson junction-based circuit where billions of Cooper pairs behave collectively as a single quantum entity, the laureates provided empirical evidence that quantum phenomena like tunneling through energy barriers and discrete energy levels can manifest in human-scale devices.
This breakthrough bridges microscopic quantum mechanics with macroscopic engineering, laying foundational groundwork for advancements in quantum technologies such as quantum computing, cryptography, and sensors.
Overall strengths include rigorous experimental validation and profound implications for quantum information science, though gaps exist in scalability to room-temperature applications and full mitigation of environmental decoherence.
Framed within the broader context, this award highlights the enduring evolution of quantum mechanics from theoretical curiosity to practical innovation, building on prior Nobel-recognized discoveries like the Josephson effect (1973) and superconductivity mechanisms (1972).