Neuroscience has a convenient assumption baked into most animal research: brains work pretty much the same way across species. Study a rat, learn something about humans. Test a drug in mice, predict what it'll do in people. It's a reasonable assumption, right? Evolution tends to preserve solutions...

Here's something that should bother you: you can have a deeply meaningful conversation with an AI, work through a complex problem together, establish shared understanding and rapport. And then the next time you start a chat? Complete stranger. No memory that you ever spoke. It's like Groundhog Day,...

So here's a terrifying thought for your Tuesday: cancer cells are basically running a spy operation inside your body. Not content with just growing and spreading, they've figured out how to hack your pain neurons to tell your immune system to take a coffee break. And I thought telemarketers were...

Every few months, someone publishes a breathless article about how AI will finally unlock the mysteries of the brain. Train a big enough model on enough neural data, the thinking goes, and out pops understanding. It's seductive logic, especially when you see what foundation models can do with...

Here's a question that keeps Alzheimer's researchers up at night: by the time someone shows memory problems, is it already too late? The plaques and tangles that define Alzheimer's disease don't just appear overnight. They've been building for years, maybe decades, while the person still seems...

Traditional brain-machine interfaces have a translation problem. Your brain thinks in one language: subtle chemical gradients, precise timing of electrical pulses, massively parallel processing across billions of connections. Computer chips think in an entirely different language: clock cycles,...

Every few months, a headline pops up announcing that scientists can now predict intelligence, mental illness, or personality from a brain scan. The implication is usually something like "the future is here, we can see your thoughts in pretty colors." And while the science behind these claims is...

Brain tumors are hard to kill. Really hard. One of the main reasons is that they're not just a blob of identical cancer cells sitting in your skull. A single tumor can contain cells that behave completely differently from each other. Some respond to treatment. Others shrug it off. This...

Here's a question nobody wants to ask at a rugby reunion: what's happening inside the brains of people who spent years getting tackled for a living? A study in Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry went looking for answers in the blood of former elite rugby players, and what they found...

GABAergic interneuron circuits are often assumed to be uniform across the cortex. A study in Cell Reports shows this isn't true during early development - somatosensory and visual cortex use somatostatin interneurons in fundamentally different ways.