GoKawiil
Tech News
A neuroscience-based report cites research finding that smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, and inadequate sleep are among the most damaging habits for long-term brain health. The article frames smoking in particular as a major controllable risk factor for cognitive decline as people age.
Brian Chesky said he created an AI 'intelligence corpus' trained on 18,000 Keynote presentations, 50,000 Google Docs and other internal materials, paired with dashboards giving him real-time visibility into Airbnb's operations. He said the system has let him cut his meeting load in half by giving him direct access to information that previously required staff briefings.
Stanford researchers reported in Nature Neuroscience that the human brain forms from two separate progenitor cells, one giving rise to the forebrain and the other to the hindbrain, rather than developing from a single evolutionary lineage as previously assumed. Senior author Kyle Loh said the team can now grow hindbrain neurons in a lab dish to study their function separately from the forebrain.
A new developmental biology paper examining how the vertebrate nervous system forms its major segments—forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain and spinal cord—was mischaracterized in press coverage as showing humans have two brains. The confusion originated from a university press release, and the underlying research actually explores how the embryo's ectoderm gives rise to distinct neural segments during development.
A team of scientists has compiled a large single-cell gene-expression dataset mapping how brain cells change across aging in mice, published via a Nature-affiliated report. The dataset catalogs expression patterns across numerous cell types and brain regions, intended as a resource for the broader research community.
A new paper by Bassini and colleagues in Nature presents a spatial map of lipid diversity across the brain, showing that lipids are organized into distinct regional zones rather than being uniformly distributed. The researchers also report that this lipid organization changes during pregnancy, adding a new dimension to understanding brain chemistry beyond well-known lipid structures like myelin.
A multi-institution research effort combined brain tissue samples from the Mount Sinai NIH Neurobiobank, the NIMH-IRP Human Brain Collection Core, and the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center to create a harmonized dataset spanning over 1,400 samples. The team standardized clinical measures such as neuritic plaque density (CERAD scores) and cognitive impairment ratings across the different cohorts, alongside demographic and technical variables like age, sex, ancestry and postmortem interval, to enable consistent single-cell transcriptomic analysis of brain disorders.
Scientists at EPFL used mass spectrometry imaging (MALDI-MSI) alongside liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry and single-nucleus RNA sequencing to catalog lipid molecules across coronal brain sections from adult mice. The study included comparisons between male and female mice, as well as pregnant females, sampling six specific brain regions to examine how lipid composition varies by sex and physiological state.
Researchers analyzed prefrontal cortex tissue from 284 neurotypical donors aged 0 to 97, drawn from the NIMH HBCC and Mount Sinai NIH Neurobiobank collections, to build a single-cell transcriptomic atlas. Donors were screened using neuropathology criteria such as CERAD and Braak scores to exclude Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and cognitive impairment, and were grouped into developmental, young, middle and late adulthood categories.
Researchers from the PsychAD consortium describe training single-nucleus transcriptomic imputation models (snTIMs) using single-nucleus RNA sequencing data from more than 6 million nuclei drawn from brain tissue of 1,494 donors. The work involved dividing donors into ancestry groups, harmonizing genotype data across multiple sequencing and array platforms, and building ancestry-specific reference panels to align training and target cohorts, including data from the Million Veteran Program.
Amazon Web Services is giving select customers early access to a video-generation AI model built by The Biological Computing Company, which derives its algorithms from patterns observed in rat brain cells. The startup records how biological neural tissue processes visual information and then designs software that mimics those processes, aiming to make existing generative video models more efficient. Both companies expect a broader rollout to AWS enterprise customers to follow this limited preview.
Researchers have formally described Leopardus tilcayo, a small spotted feline native to South America, marking the first new cat species identified by science in over a century. Genetic analysis places it within the tiger cat lineage, distinguishing it from previously known relatives despite its similar leopard-like markings.