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The brain may have a built-in way to quickly settle disagreements between regions processing the same scene. Researchers found that matching signals between two visual areas lasted longer, while conflicting signals rapidly faded away. This “consensus building” mechanism could help explain how the brain turns many specialized inputs into one unified view of the world.

A 70-year-old leukemia drug is still revealing new secrets. Researchers found that removing a protein called NUDT5 protected cells from the drug, even though simply blocking the protein had little effect. The unexpected result points to a hidden cellular role that could help explain why people respond differently to certain leukemia treatments.

A newly identified breakdown in communication between nerves and muscles could help explain why people lose strength as they age. Researchers were able to improve muscle strength in an animal model by targeting a key protein, raising hopes that some age-related weakness could eventually be treated.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are membrane-enclosed nanoparticles that mediate intercellular communication by transferring proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids. Within the hematopoietic system, EVs orchestrate critical signaling between bone marrow (BM) niche cells and hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) to regulate quiescence, proliferation, and lineage commitment. During aging, senescence and telomere attrition drive a profound remodeling of EV biogenesis and cargo. Aged EVs,...

CONCLUSIONS: Although AgeTech standardization is advancing, critical gaps remain. Limited attention to safety, security, privacy, and digital economy and community inclusion raises concerns for trust, equity, and sustainable adoption. Addressing these gaps through targeted and coordinated standardization efforts is essential to support inclusive, trustworthy, and scalable AgeTech solutions in the context of rapid global population aging.

A large study tracking more than 95,000 people suggests that how you sleep may be linked to your risk of developing dozens of diseases. People who spent more time in REM sleep had lower risks of 83 conditions, including dementia, heart failure, and Parkinson’s disease, while more deep sleep was associated with lower risks of conditions such as type 2 diabetes and major depression.

Children taking GLP-1 medications (such as Victoza, Saxenda, Trulicity, and Ozempic) for weight loss, prediabetes, or type 2 diabetes may face an overlooked risk: nutritional deficiencies. A new study found that nearly 1 in 6 young patients developed a diagnosed deficiency within a year of starting treatment, with vitamin D deficiency affecting about 12%.

A major Swedish study of 3.7 million people has found that rare TORCH infections passed from a pregnant woman to the fetus are linked to much higher risks of autism and intellectual disability later in life. Children with a congenital TORCH infection were about three times more likely to be diagnosed with autism, more than seven times more likely to have an intellectual disability, and up to 30 times more likely to have severe to profound intellectual disability.

A topical drug that removes aging, damaged cells helped older mice heal skin wounds significantly faster. The treatment appeared to reactivate repair pathways involved in inflammation, collagen production, and new blood vessel growth.

Study reignites debate over what, if anything, machines can feel

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is highly heterogeneous and driven by diverse molecular and cellular mechanisms. Functional genomics investigates these mechanisms from genetic variants to gene expression and regulation. We performed personalized functional genomics analysis on population-scale single-nucleus RNA-seq data, with cross-cohort validation across multiple cohorts comprising over 1900 individual brains, capturing donor-level cell type interactions and gene regulatory networks. Using a...

Advances in single-cell and -nucleus transcriptomics have enabled generation of increasingly large-scale datasets from hundreds of subjects and millions of cells. These studies promise to give unprecedented insight into the cell type specific biology of human disease. Yet performing differential expression analyses across subjects remains difficult due to challenges in statistical modeling of these complex studies and scaling analyses to large datasets. Our open-source R package dreamlet (...

Neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases impose a considerable societal and public health burden. However, our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying these highly complex conditions remains limited^(1,2). Here, to gain deeper insights into the aetiology of different brain diseases, we used specimens from 1,494 unique donors to generate a population-scale single-cell transcriptomic atlas of the human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, comprising over 6.3 million individual...

Genetic risk variants for common diseases are predominantly located in non-coding regulatory regions and modulate gene expression. Although bulk tissue studies have elucidated shared mechanisms of regulatory and disease-associated genetics, the cellular specificity of these mechanisms remains largely unexplored. Here we present a comprehensive, single-nucleus multi-ancestry atlas of genetic regulation of gene expression in the human prefrontal cortex, comprising 5.6 million nuclei from 1,384...

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