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2 months ago | 
thetransmitter.org | Katie Moisse |Laura Dattaro |Tyler Sloan |Mark Humphries
Contributing editor The Transmitter Share this article: Tags: Connectome, Artificial intelligence, Axons, Calcium imaging, Cellular neuroscience, Circuits, Connectivity, Dendrites, Excitatory signaling, Inhibitory signaling, Interneurons, Machine learning, Microscopy, Neural circuits, Synapses, Synaptic plasticity, Visual cortex The most comprehensive map to date of cell structure and function in the mouse cortex reveals a previously unappreciated level of coordination among inhibitory...
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Mar 25, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | Jill Adams |Chloe Williams |Katie Moisse
Multipurpose tool: The U.S. National Institutes of Health has announced that its NIH Baby Toolbox is now available as an iPad app. It contains more than 30 assessment tools to cover broad areas of development, including cognition, social-emotional function and motor skills. The app uses eye-tracking and touch-based inputs in addition to clinician and parent reports. Data can be viewed as raw scores or in relation to nationwide age-adjusted averages.
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Mar 20, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | Calli McMurray |Katie Moisse |Angie Voyles Askham |Ashley Juavinett
ReporterThe Transmitter Share this article: Tags: Cognitive neuroscience, Attention, Brain imaging, Developmental neuroscience, fMRI, Hippocampus, Learning, Memory, Neurodevelopment A decade ago, Nick Turk-Browne unintentionally created a paradox. He demonstrated in a series of studies that statistical learning, or the ability to extract patterns from experiences, depends on the hippocampus, a brain region also involved in forming episodic memories.
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Mar 20, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | Chloe Williams |Jill Adams |Katie Moisse |Angie Voyles Askham
Changes in gene regulation and expression precede alterations in neuronal function and behavior in mice lacking MECP2, the gene implicated in Rett syndrome, according to a new study. The findings shed light on the cascade of events that occur when MECP2 is lost and suggest gene expression changes likely lead to the neuronal and behavioral characteristics of the condition, the researchers say. Rett syndrome is a rare condition, usually caused by variants in MECP2.
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Mar 18, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | Jill Adams |Katie Moisse |Angie Voyles Askham |Charles Choi
Noise cancellation: Mice that carry autism-linked variants of the SCN2A gene show changes in neuronal activity that correlate with observed changes in sociability, according to a preprint. Mechanistically, the excitation-inhibition ratio was boosted in SCN2A-deficient neurons, creating a noisy background for social signals, the researchers found.
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Mar 14, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | Claudia Lopez Lloreda |Annie Melchor |Katie Moisse
For a neuroscientist, the opportunity to record single neurons in people doesn’t knock every day. It is so rare, in fact, that after 14 years of waiting by the door, Florian Mormann says he has recruited just 110 participants—all with intractable epilepsy. All participants had electrodes temporarily implanted in their brains to monitor their seizures.
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Mar 13, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | Katie Moisse |Angie Voyles Askham |Charles Choi |Jill Adams
Knocking down 19 genes linked to autism, one at a time, shakes up a network of other genes, many of which regulate the early proliferation and differentiation of brain cells, according to a new preprint. Some people with autism carry rare variants of certain genes in the network, previous research has found. Others have been implicated in genome-wide association studies of autism, which reveal common genetic variants that may work in combination to increase autism likelihood.
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Mar 3, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | Claudia Lopez Lloreda |Calli McMurray |Lydia Denworth |Katie Moisse
ReporterThe Transmitter ReporterThe Transmitter Share this article: Tags: Academia, Craft and careers, Funding, Policy The Ph.D. application process crescendos during the first few months of every year: Prospective students visit schools, programs extend offers, and applicants decide which one to enroll in by 15 April. But this year, changes to the funding infrastructure of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) have disrupted that process.
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Feb 25, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | Lydia Denworth |Katie Moisse |Mark Humphries |Austin Coley
When Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung of Princeton University saw high-resolution 2D electron microscope images in a 2018 Cell paper, they decided to try to build a fruit fly connectome with that dataset. Funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative, Murthy and Seung used the electron microscopy data to launch the work that resulted in FlyWire, a nine-paper package published in Nature in October 2024. The work made international headlines for its novelty and ambition.
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Jan 31, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | Katie Moisse |Calli McMurray |Linda Nordling |Austin Coley
Contributing editorThe Transmitter Share this article: Tags: Academia, Computational neuroscience, Funding, Policy Gerry Rubin loved his time as a Stanford University postdoctoral researcher. The two years were intense, he admits—he worked up to 80 hours a week in the lab, for pay that ended up being less than minimum wage. But he was 24, staying out of debt and could afford a car and a one-bedroom apartment (with a pool) in Palo Alto, California.
