GoKawiil
Tech News
A Nature study analyzing more than 2,300 neurons found that over a quarter of neurons sampled from fetal brains carried major chromosomal gains or losses, compared with only about 6% in neurons examined after birth. Researchers, led by Diane Shao of Boston Children's Hospital, say this points to a natural culling process that removes genetically abnormal neurons around the time of birth.
A Myriad educational article walks through building a simulated creature called a 'spark' using minimal neural circuits—starting with one light-sensing neuron wired to one motor neuron, then expanding to two eyes and two flippers. The demonstrations show that even these simple wiring setups produce surprisingly complex, sometimes counterintuitive movement patterns, such as a spark that appears to avoid light rather than seek it.
Stanford scientists genetically engineered mice lacking a functioning cortex, then implanted human neurons derived from reprogrammed skin cells into the empty space. The transplanted cells multiplied from a few hundred to several million and wired themselves into the mouse brain, with the animals behaving largely normally despite the human tissue making up nearly half their brain volume by some measures. The findings were published in Nature.
Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine identified a small population of cortical inhibitory neurons, called Sst-Chodl cells, that make up about one percent of the cortex's inhibitory neurons. Activating these cells in mice was enough to induce sleep, showing the cortex itself can generate slow-wave sleep rhythms rather than merely responding to signals from deeper brain regions. The team spent years developing a genetic labeling method precise enough to isolate this rare cell type from more abundant, similar neurons.
Researchers at the Allen Institute and Johns Hopkins used Dbh-Cre mice with fluorescently labeled nuclei, tissue clearing, and light-sheet microscopy to image and count noradrenaline-producing neurons in the locus coeruleus at cellular resolution. They applied a deep-learning pipeline to detect neuron centroids and registered the data to a standard brain atlas to build detailed 3D density maps of this small but influential brainstem nucleus.
Researchers identified a class of long-range GABAergic (Sst+/Nos1+) inhibitory neurons in the mouse neocortex that project across distant cortical regions rather than staying local. Using genetic mouse models, in vivo imaging and chemogenetic manipulation, they showed these neurons drive widespread cortical synchrony and are linked to sleep regulation.