Slow-wave sleep is associated with nucleus accumbens volume in elderly adults Slow-wave sleep (SWS) is essential for restorative neural processes, and its decline is associated with both healthy and pathological ageing. Building…

Slow-wave sleep is associated with nucleus accumbens volume in elderly adults

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on ALT: a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on

Bluetorial: My NIH grant got funded; The money is in the bank

What happens behind the scenes with NIH fund transfers

Looks amazing

I was happy to #standupforscience2025 yesterday. And of course, I have been thinking about things I didn't have a chance to say.

Like because of the chaos at NIH (and the freezing of funding), how my team has been waiting for NOAs for two non-competing renewals since mid-January.

1/

Want to work in another country?

The HFSP postdoc fellowship supports proposals for frontier, potentially transformative research in the life sciences and cross-disciplinary. high-risk projects are encouraged
LOI opens March 13, 2025

#neuroskyence #academicsky 🧪🧠🪰🌱🧬
www.hfsp.org/funding/hfsp...

share of americans who say the federal department of veterans affairs should be expanded: 46%

reduced: 5%

-yougov

Hippocampus and basal forebrain degeneration differentially impact cognition in Lewy body spectrum disorders Rau et al. investigate the effects of degeneration of the hippocampus and basal forebrain on cognition in Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia. They

"The basal forebrain & hippocampus were differentially associated with distinct neurocognitive domains, thus providing an intriguing biomarker for neurocognitive staging in Lewy body disease or individualized treatment concepts"
academic.oup.com/brain/advanc...

Opinion: A century of research improving veteran health Downtown Iowa City aerial looking south on Tuesday, May 29, 2012, in Iowa City, Iowa. Veterans Administration Hospital is at …

Great article by @eliowa.bsky.social saying thank you & discussing importance of the Department of Veterans Affairs, VA researchers & our nations veterans for 100 years of service on the battlefield & their commitment towards improving medical care through research
www.thegazette.com/guest-column...

Just very happy to have our paper out today! A big thanks to all our co-authors, and to Nikolai and @steinaerts.bsky.social for the teamwork over the past years. If you are interested in using our models for cross-species enhancer studies, check out crested.readthedocs.io/en/stable/mo... 🙂

Opinion | Trump Wants to Destroy All Academia, Not Just the Woke Parts (Gift Article) The administration’s war on universities defies rational self-interest.

"the extremely strong desire is to just punish universities [..] It’s not based on any kind of coherent policy agenda. It’s just a desire to inflict pain."

This, is critical to understand. Pointing out "it's hurting us" won't do, since it's the whole point.

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/o...

Beautiful thread, thank you, I couldn’t agree more

Watch a professor explain the evolutionary war that gave us caffeine - Berkeley News Through the eyes of UC Berkeley professor Noah Whiteman, the food we love is the product of four billion years of coevolution between plants and animals.

Coevolution in 101 seconds! news.berkeley.edu/2025/02/06/w...

Steeped in Science: The Chemistry Inside Your Perfect Cup of Tea - American Chemical Society Learn the chemistry behind the different styles of tea and how to use science to brew a better cup!

Come hear me spill the tea on caffeine versus theophylline and what in tea might ease anxiety. And of course, what salt might do to improve a cup. Registration is free. www.acs.org/acs-webinars... #chemsky

Title page of the paper "Hypoxia as a medicine"

Figure 2 from the paper: Physiological responses to and pathological consequences of hypoxia for different organ systems. Quantitative estimates are based on studies of healthy adult volunteers in the first 48 hours after moving from sea level to a 13% normobaric hypoxia chamber or the altitude equivalent to this oxygen concentration (hypobaric hypoxia) (107–110). CMRO2, cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen consumption. CREDIT: A. FISHER/SCIENCE TRANSLATIONAL MEDICINE

🧪 #medsky

Oxygen is essential for humans. But breathing less oxygen long-term shows surprising healing powers in pre-clinical (animal) studies.

It's intriguing to think that one day 'oxygen diet' may become a treatment for some genetic (mitochondrial) diseases, heart damage, and brain disorders.

The locus coeruleus norepinephrine (LC-NE) system regulates arousal and awakening; however, it remains unclear whether the LC does this in a global or circuit specific manner. We hypothesized that sensory-evoked awakenings are predominantly regulated by specific LC-NE efferent pathways. Anatomical, physiological, and functional modularities of LC-NE pathways involving the mouse basal forebrain (BF) and pontine reticular nucleus (PRN) were tested. We found partial anatomical segregation between the LC->PRN and LC->BF circuits. Extracellular NE dynamics in BF and PRN exhibited distinct sound-evoked activation during sleep, including a fast sound-evoked NE peak specific to PRN. Causal optogenetic interrogation of LC efferent pathways, by retro-ChR2 activation or PdCO silencing of synapses in target regions, revealed a pivotal role for early LC->PRN activity in driving arousal and sound-evoked awakenings. Together, our results uncover a prominent role for early LC-NE PRN activity in connecting sensory and arousal pathways and establish LC heterogeneity in regulating arousal.

An early surge of norepinephrine along brainstem pathways drives sensory-evoked awakening

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Happy to see this great work (and some PdCO application) out in the wild.

📢 New preprint from the lab:

We are very excited to report the discovery of an oscillation in the Central Thalamus using rare direct recordings of human thalamic electrophysiology.

The novel oscillation is tightly coupled to specific, natural states of consciousness.🧵

EEG multitaper spectrogram with circles indicating detected spindles.

Timing patterns of brainwaves created by a sleeping brain, known as sleep spindles, are so individually distinct that they could function like fingerprints. The framework could pave the way for the development of sleep biomarkers. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Resolving forebrain developmental organisation by analysis of differential growth patterns The forebrain is the most complex region of the vertebrate CNS, and its developmental organisation is controversial. We fate-mapped the embryonic chick forebrain using lipophilic dyes and Cre-recombin...

We begin the New Year with two preprints on hypothalamic development. The first, part of a long-term collaboration with Marysia Placzek’s group, investigates the organization of the developing forebrain, and show that current models are (mostly) incorrect./1
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Lhx6-positive GABA-releasing neurons of the zona incerta promote sleep - Nature GABAergic Lhx6+ neurons in the ventral zona incerta promote both rapid eye movement and non-rapid eye movement sleep and inhibit the activity of wake-promoting GABAergic and Hcrt+ neurons of the later...

Targeting transcription factors that label novel cell types can be a great way to discover new mechanisms of behavioral regulation. This study, where we identified Lhx6-positive zona incerta cells as critical regulators of sleep pressure, is a good example./3
www.nature.com/articles/nat...

Our second preprint, which was spearheaded by @thomasdwkim.bsky.social, uses single-cell multiomic analysis to identify gene regulatory networks controlling neurogenesis and cell fate specification in mouse hypothalamus and prethalamus./1
biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

For those who missed it when I told you a couple of weeks ago, and for those who need the NIH exact text:

A reminder: for genotypes to produce phenotypes, they have to go through development

Individualized temporal patterns drive human sleep spindle timing | PNAS Sleep spindles are cortical electrical oscillations considered critical for memory consolidation and sleep stability. The timing and pattern of sle...

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Figure 4 Alternative approaches for disease modeling to better reflect human brain development features

A comparative view of human and mouse telencephalon inhibitory neuron development

In this Review, Changuk Chung, Joseph Girgiss & Joseph Gleeson offer insights into the evolutionary diversity of neurodevelopment and its implications for brain disorders:
https://doi.org/10.1242/dev.204306

I hate VAR

Sad to hear the news from Magdeburg. Thinking of my friends there

The One Big Reason Why Dems Are Losing the Information War The good news is, this can be fixed with a new approach.

When I read a new interview from Harris’s Dep Campaign Manager, it hit home for me because it was something I have warned about for years. Dems are losing the Information War, but there is one big way they can turn things around. open.substack.com/pub/meidasto...

Stylish but illegal monkey found roaming IKEA Photo of a small monkey in a tiny wool coat

happy stylish but illegal ikea monkey day to those who celebrate

Find Out Why Health Insurance Denied Your Claim You likely have the right to access records that explain why your insurer denied your claim or prior authorization request. Use ProPublica’s free tool to generate a letter requesting your claim file f...

I don't know who needs to know this, but Pro Publica has an online thing that will format a letter to your US health insurance company to demand the records behind a claim denial. (which the insurance is then legally required to provide in most cases)

projects.propublica.org/claimfile/

Trying out this new coffee alternative called “sleep”