The tau protein, best known for its role in Alzheimer’s disease, appears to be involved in how neurons respond to DNA damage during cell cycle activation.
Eating without being hungry: almost everyone knows the feeling. But which brain cells actually give permission to keep eating, even after you have had enough?
You eat something, and your body knows almost immediately whether it contains enough building blocks. But how?
A protein best known from cancer research turns out to play a key role in brain aging.
Forgetting where you put your keys may not be inevitable. A non-invasive brain stimulation technique targeting a specific network appears to selectively improve episodic memory in both healthy people and clinical patients…
Genetically identical animals in the same environment still behave differently from each other. And their behavior shifts over time with no identifiable trigger. That is not noise.
When neurons die, they do not simply stop working. They send out signals that damage surrounding healthy cells. Researcher Chaska Walton is developing a targeted delivery system to interrupt that process.
Until now, neuroscientists could distinguish at most two types of nerve cells at the same time while recording from a freely moving animal. A new technique raises that number to nine.
The active compound in magic mushrooms reduces cocaine-seeking behaviour in animal models. That alone is notable.
Older people often say time seems to pass faster than it used to. A new theory links this to a concrete mechanism: the energy deficit in aging cells.
A gene already connected to a rare form of intellectual disability turns out to play a central role in regulating sleep.
Muscle loss in older age isn’t just about inactivity or poor diet. The junctions where nerves tell muscles to work are quietly deteriorating — and new research suggests targeted light treatment could…
Whether something tastes sweet depends not just on what you eat, but on how much energy your body has.
A large language model performed at physician level on clinical reasoning tasks, according to a new study in Science. The result is striking. The caveats are just as important.
For years, researchers blamed a specific type of nerve damage in the inner ear for age-related hearing struggles. A new study suggests they may have been looking in the wrong place.
Drug development for epilepsy has always faced a frustrating bottleneck: waiting for a seizure to happen.
Millions of people are already experimenting with senolytic treatments to slow aging. A new study now shows that one of the most popular combinations causes brain damage strikingly similar to multiple sclerosis…
Why does one person develop severe Alzheimer’s while another with equally damaged brain tissue stays sharp into their eighties?
Your brain has a built-in system for clearing out damaged proteins. As we age, that system becomes increasingly impaired — and researchers have now identified a likely culprit: oxidative stress disables the…
A new fluorescent sensor can track the release of GABA — the brain’s main braking signal — in freely moving animals for the first time.
Dasatinib and quercetin — the most widely used senolytic combination in longevity circles — causes damage to specific brain regions in mice that closely resembles what is seen in multiple sclerosis.
Astrocytes make up roughly half the cells in the human brain and do far more than support neurons.
The brain’s outer layer is built like a six-story building, and each floor has different jobs.
Your brain produces constant rhythmic electrical pulses. One of those rhythms — the alpha wave — turns out to be a key gatekeeper of perception, determining in real time what you detect…
Two studies in Science have produced the most detailed picture yet of how individual brain cells develop differently in Down syndrome.
Surviving malaria is not the same as escaping it unharmed. New research shows the infection can leave measurable cognitive damage that persists long after the parasite is gone.
Male and female brains look largely the same. But at the level of individual cell types, a new study finds striking differences in which genes are switched on — with direct implications…
Every cell in your body is constantly building proteins — the molecules that do nearly everything. But exactly how that production is controlled has remained surprisingly murky.
The human brain is bad at quantities — and that appears to be a feature, not a bug.
When mice are trained to fear a specific odor, the structure of their offspring’s smell system changes — even though those offspring never encountered the scent themselves.
The big folds of the human brain have been mapped for over a century. But there is a second layer of smaller, shallower folds that most imaging studies have simply ignored —…
Anxiety isn’t spread diffusely across the brain. Researchers pinpointed a specific population of neurons in a rarely discussed brain region that flicks on under stress and directly drives anxious behaviour in mice…
After decades of research focused on amyloid plaques and tau tangles, a study points to a neglected signalling molecule in the brain — and drugs that target it already exist.
When chronic pain persists long after an injury has healed, many assume the problem lies in the brain.
The blood-brain barrier keeps harmful substances out of the brain. For decades it was treated as a near-impenetrable wall.
When you picture an apple in your mind, your brain activates many of the same neurons as when you actually see one.
APOE4 is the most powerful known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. But what does it actually do in the brain, long before the first symptoms appear?
A quarter of older patients become confused after surgery. It sounds temporary. But the brain damage often isn’t. Now researchers have identified a potential mechanism — and a place to intervene.
Before a single memory slips, something has already gone wrong deep in the brain. Mice carrying the most dangerous genetic variant for Alzheimer’s have smaller, chronically overexcited neurons — and researchers have…
Millions of people carry the APOE4 gene, the strongest known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s.
Around a quarter of older people become acutely confused after surgery. Most recover, but the episode leaves a mark: it permanently accelerates cognitive decline.
Researchers have developed a way to control nerve cells using light pulses — without the genetic modifications that have made this technique impractical in humans.
Adolescents have long been known to cooperate less than adults. New research now reveals what is happening internally: it is not only that they are worse at reading others — they also…
Stress is the most reliable trigger for alcohol relapse. A new study in mice and rats maps the specific neural circuit responsible — and shows how alcohol actively disrupts the very mechanism…
Stress is the most reliable trigger for alcohol relapse. A new study in mice and rats maps the specific neural circuit responsible — and shows how alcohol actively disrupts the very mechanism…