When protein A regulates protein B, we usually assume it's because A binds to B. But biology is rarely that simple. A study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation shows that FGF13, known to regulate sodium channels in the heart, works primarily through an unexpected mechanism: altering local...

Life is mostly boring. Let's be honest. You're sitting there, ambient noise happening, nothing particularly important, and then BAM, something that matters. A notification. A traffic light changing. Your name being called. The whole trick of being a functioning organism is learning to wait through...

Here's a weird thing about your nose-brain connection: the olfactory bulb is basically running a construction site and a museum at the same time. New neurons are constantly moving in, synapses are remodeling left and right, and somehow you still remember exactly what your grandma's cookies smell...

Hemorrhagic stroke (that's when a blood vessel in your brain decides to burst) kills or disables millions of people every year, and here's the frustrating part: our treatment options are still pretty terrible. Decades of research in mice has produced therapies that work great in rodents and then...

Your neurons are basically tiny electrical engineers, constantly generating and conducting electrical signals. The tools they use for this job include voltage-gated sodium channels, proteins that sit in the cell membrane and control the flow of sodium ions that make action potentials happen. When...

Here's a dirty little secret of visual neuroscience that doesn't get talked about at parties: most of what we know about "visual" brain areas comes from animals that are completely immobilized, staring at screens they have no control over. It's like trying to understand how someone drives by...

Doctors have long noticed that socially isolated cancer patients tend to fare worse than those with strong social support. But is that just because lonely people take worse care of themselves? Or is something more direct happening? A study in Neuron found a specific brain circuit connecting social...

Recording electrical signals from individual neurons is one of the most powerful techniques in neuroscience. It's also one of the most frustrating. The tools we have are either rigid enough to reach their target but stiff enough to damage everything in their path, or flexible and gentle but about...

Imagine half your brain perpetually dreaming while you're wide awake, going about your day, fully conscious and aware. Sounds like a thought experiment from a philosophy seminar, but it's exactly what researchers discovered actually happens after hemispherotomy, a surgical procedure that...

There's a tiny cluster of neurons in your brainstem called the locus coeruleus. It's about the size of a blueberry, contains only about 50,000 neurons, and it's quietly running a huge chunk of your brain's operations. Arousal, attention, stress responses, memory consolidation. The locus coeruleus...