A Small, Deep Brain Structure Helps Mice Hold a Thought
Dialing down the claustrum, a thin sheet of neurons deep in the brain, cut mouse working memory by roughly 40 to 60 percent. Some memory survived, hinting that other regions share the work.
Nature Communications
Nature Communications is a peer-reviewed, open access, multidisciplinary journal dedicated to publishing high-quality research in all areas of the biological, health, physical, chemical, Earth, social, mathematical, applied, and engineering sciences. Papers published by the journal aim to represent important advances of significance to specialists within each field.
A Cannabis-Like Drug Turned Up Threat Avoidance in Mice
Mice given a synthetic cannabinoid froze more and avoided a predator odor analog, and blocking output from fear-region somatostatin neurons prevented the avoidance boost. Whether any of this explains human cannabis anxiety is untested.
Scientists Crack Part of the Flatworm Brain-Repair Code
A screen of 74 genes in planarian flatworms found 10 needed to rebuild dopamine-producing neurons, work the authors say could improve stem cell therapies for brain injury or disease, though nothing has been tested beyond worms.
Brain Scans Show Where Blood Supply Matches Cell Demand
Stevens Neuroimaging Institute researchers built a brain scan measure that lines up blood flow with cell density layer by layer, revealing regions whose mitochondria run at higher capacity, a clue that could eventually help flag disease.
Urine Bacteria Turns a Steroid Precursor Into Testosterone
A urine-derived bacterium converted DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone) into testosterone in culture, and structural modeling showed how one unusually flexible enzyme could carry out multiple steps in the pathway.
Why What We Know About Polarization Is Mostly American
A global review of political polarization research finds that most studies, and nearly all the field’s rigorous experiments, focus on the United States, while replications run elsewhere have sometimes found the opposite effect entirely.
Scientists Learn to Both Build New Proteins and Erase Old Ones
Two new lab tools push protein engineering in opposite directions at once: one builds proteins nature never made from an expanded genetic alphabet, the other calculates precisely how to destroy a disease protein already causing harm.
Mom’s Fat Cells Send Tiny Packages That Rewire a Fetus’ Liver
Obese mice ship fat-derived vesicles across the placenta that reprogram fetal liver DNA, switching on glucose production weeks early and setting up glucose intolerance in male offspring by adulthood.
Youth Protein TIMP2 Restores Cleanup Crews in the Aging Mouse Brain
Microglia, the brain’s cleanup cells, grow sluggish and inflamed with age in mice. A youth blood protein called TIMP2 keeps them working, and restoring it in old animals revived their debris clearance.
Physicists Build a Table-Top Way to Image an Electron’s 3D Shape
A Göttingen physics team reconstructed the full 3D wavefunction of an organic semiconductor molecule using a lab-bench extreme ultraviolet source, imaging orbitals that once demanded a synchrotron and hinting at future femtosecond movies.
An AI Reads Old Sleep Tests and Finds Who Is Most at Risk
An AI model trained on more than 10,000 overnight recordings sorted sleep-study patients into five risk tiers, spotting a doubled five-year mortality gap that the standard apnea severity score missed entirely, in both men and women.
Turning Dirty Factory Exhaust Into Fuel, No Cleanup Needed
A binary-solvent electrolyte that donates hydrogen bonds only weakly let researchers turn carbon dioxide in simulated flue gas into carbon monoxide at near-total efficiency, even at 1% CO2 with oxygen present, and run the process for over 100 hours.