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Jan 17, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | Anna Victoria Molofsky |John C. Tuthill |Nicole Rust |Jason Shepherd
Twenty years ago, a remarkable discovery upended our understanding of the range of elements that can shape neuronal function: A team in Europe demonstrated that enzymatic digestion of the extracellular matrix (ECM)—a latticework of proteins that surrounds all brain cells—could restore plasticity to the visual cortex even after the region’s “critical period” had ended. Other studies followed, showing that ECM digestion could also alter learning in the hippocampus and other brain circuits.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | Paul Middlebrooks |Nicole Rust
Special faculty research associate, Carnegie Mellon University;Contributor, The Transmitter Share this article: Tags: Brain Inspired, computation, Dynamical systems, Methods Your browser doesn't support the audio element Download In this episode, Paul Middlebrooks asks David Krakauer, president of the Santa Fe Institute, how complexity scientists approach the complex systems they study.
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Jan 13, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | John C. Tuthill |Nicole Rust |Angie Voyles Askham |Austin Coley
Professor of neurobiology and biophysicsUniversity of Washington Share this article: Tags: Craft and careers, Animal models, Drosophila, early career researchers, Education, Teaching On a muggy July evening in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, as vacationers lounged on nearby beaches, a group of scientists clustered around a solitary fruit fly suspended in a virtual reality flight simulator. The scientists flicked a switch to bathe the tethered fly in spooky red light.
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Jan 3, 2025 | 
thetransmitter.org | Nicole Rust
With the election of Donald Trump as the next U.S. president, it’s not political but factual to note that many scientists are being asked to justify their work in an unprecedented way. As one NPR headline reads, “With Trump coming into power, the NIH is in the crosshairs.” Eliminating wasteful government spending is a laudable goal, but the evaluation of what constitutes waste is delicate and fraught.
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Oct 14, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Jason Shepherd |Dani S. Bassett |Lauren Ross |Nicole Rust
Professor of neurobiology University of Utah Share this article: Tags: The big picture, Memory, molecular neuroscience representation, Synapses, Synaptic plasticity, Systems neuroscience “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” —Marcel Proust Our subjective experiences are continuously filtered through the lens of memory, so brains have to find a balance between stable memory storage and the flexibility to update existing memories with new...
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Oct 7, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Dani S. Bassett |Lauren Ross |Jason Shepherd |Nicole Rust
In neuroscience, “mechanism” is a common and powerful concept. Mechanisms are often viewed as causal systems, which helps explain their central role in neuroscience. Causes are factors that can control, predict and explain their effects, giving us an understanding of why things happen and a way to target future outcomes. Identifying causal relationships and systems is necessary to understand the natural world, and the brain is no exception.
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Oct 7, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Dani S. Bassett |Lauren Ross |Nicole Rust |Calli McMurray
Recent articles Researchers ask colleagues to weigh in on important topics in the field. Subscribe to get notified every time a new “The big picture” is published. Mechanism is a common and powerful concept, invoked in grant calls and publication guidelines. But scientists use it in different ways, making it difficult to clarify standards in the field. We asked nine scientists to weigh in.
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Aug 28, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Shaena Montanari |Jill Adams |Angie Voyles Askham |Nicole Rust
Mammalian brains famously come with a built-in GPS system: “place cells” in the hippocampus that selectively activate when an animal enters a specific location and power spatial cognition. A comparable navigation system had not been described in fish—until now. As it turns out, zebrafish larvae, too, possess place cells that integrate multiple sources of information and generate new cognitive maps when the animal’s environment changes, according to a study out today in Nature.
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Aug 26, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Benjamin Young |Angie Voyles Askham |Nicole Rust |Francisco J. Rivera Rosario
Upcoming titles:“From Sensing to Sentience: How Feeling Emerges From the Brain,” by Todd E. Feinberg (MIT Press)Individual brain structures work together to perform the cognitive processes that power sentience. But how sentience develops from these separate but interconnected brain areas has proved difficult to pin down. In “From Sensing to Sentience,” neurologist Todd E.
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Aug 26, 2024 | 
thetransmitter.org | Angie Voyles Askham |Olivier Winter |Grace Lindsay |Nicole Rust
Senior reporterThe Transmitter Share this article: Tags: Craft and careers, Ion channels, Neurodevelopment, Peripheral nervous system, Sensory perception, Somatosensation Theanne Griffith can’t help thinking in stories. As a child, dreaming up new worlds and writing about them were two of her favorite activities. And once she turned her attention to science, that tendency didn’t change.
