The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives

Featured

Research image of fMRI scans showing decision-making across individuals.

Behavior

During decision-making, brain shows multiple distinct subtypes of activity

By Claudia López Lloreda

18 April 2025 | 5 min read

Tic-tac-toe board with pills representing x’s and o’s.

Pain

Basic pain research ‘is not working’: Q&A with Steven Prescott and Stéphanie Ratté

By Sydney Wyatt

18 April 2025 | 7 min read

National Institutes of Health building cleaved in two.

Funding

Proposed NIH budget cut threatens ‘massive destruction of American science’

By Angie Voyles Askham

17 April 2025 | 3 min read

Latest

Too much or too little brain synchrony may underlie autism subtypes

Smell studies often use unnaturally high odor concentrations, analysis reveals

Systems neuroscience

‘Natural Neuroscience: Toward a Systems Neuroscience of Natural Behaviors,’ an excerpt

Human neurotechnology

Functional MRI can do more than you think

As federal funders desert mentorship programs for marginalized students, trainee-led initiatives fill the gap

Split gene therapy delivers promise in mice modeling Dravet syndrome

U.S. human data repositories ‘under review’ for gender identity descriptors

Inhibitory cells work in concert to orchestrate neuronal activity in mouse brain

Aran Nayebi discusses a NeuroAI update to the Turing test

Exclusive: NIH nixes funds for several pre- and postdoctoral training programs

To make a meaningful contribution to neuroscience, fMRI must break out of its silo

Today’s action potentials

WHAT WE ARE READING

“The curious interpretation of novel object recognition tests”

By Adam P. Swiercz et al. in Trends in Neuroscience

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE

April

25

2025

Barcelona Blood-Brain Barrier Conference – B4 2025

NEW RESEARCH

“Human assembloid model of the ascending neural sensory pathway”

By Ji-il Kim et al. in Nature

Perspectives

Close-up of high-resolution fMRI images.

Human neurotechnology

Functional MRI can do more than you think

By Laura Lewis

14 April 2025 | 6 min read

fMRI scans exiting a grain silo.

Future of fMRI

To make a meaningful contribution to neuroscience, fMRI must break out of its silo

By Avram Holmes

8 April 2025 | 6 min read

Research image of human cortical neurons xenotransplanted into a mouse brain for months.

Human neurotechnology

In vivo veritas: Xenotransplantation can help us study the development and function of human neurons in a living brain

By Pierre Vanderhaeghen

7 April 2025 | 7 min read

Neural coding

It’s time to examine neural coding from the message’s point of view

By Daniel Graham

1 April 2025 | 0 min watch

See all Perspectives

Research image of grids of mouse and human brain scans.

Spectrum

Too much or too little brain synchrony may underlie autism subtypes

By Calli McMurray

17 April 2025 | 6 min read

Developmental delay patterns differ with diagnosis; and more

PTEN problems underscore autism connection to excess brain fluid

See all Spectrum

Research image of two mouse brain slices.

Spectrum

Split gene therapy delivers promise in mice modeling Dravet syndrome

By Holly Barker

10 April 2025 | 5 min read

See all Spectrum

Upcoming Online Seminars

Upcoming Seminar

Apr

22

2025

Arto Urtti | School of Pharmacy, University of Eastern Finland

Computational modelling of ocular pharmacokinetics

09:00 A.M. EDT

Upcoming Seminar

Apr

22

2025

Paola Binda | University of Pisa

Plasticity of the adult visual system

08:00 A.M. EDT

Upcoming Seminar

Apr

23

2025

Shaul Druckmann | Stanford department of Neurobiology and department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

Relating circuit dynamics to computation: robustness and dimension-specific computation in cortical dynamics

11:00 A.M. EDT

POWERED BY WORLD WIDE NEURO

Funding and policy

People help each other climb up a supersized human brain.

Community

As federal funders desert mentorship programs for marginalized students, trainee-led initiatives fill the gap

By Christian Cazares, Maribel Patiño

11 April 2025 | 5 min read

Scissors cut a hundred-dollar bill in half.

Funding

Exclusive: NIH nixes funds for several pre- and postdoctoral training programs

By Claudia López Lloreda

8 April 2025 | 7 min read

Coins flow from a spigot.

Funding

Newly awarded NIH grants for neuroscience lag 77 percent behind previous nine-year average

By Natalia Mesa

4 April 2025 | 5 min read

Glitchy image of a stamp.

Science and society

Coding error caused layoffs at National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke this week, source says

By Sydney Wyatt

3 April 2025 | 3 min read

See all funding and policy

Craft and careers

Illustration of a scientist reaching toward a shelf of beakers in the shape of a speech bubble.

Outreach

How to communicate the value of curiosity-driven research

By Anthony Zador

4 March 2025 | 5 min read

A student in a cap and gown sits alone in a row of folding chairs in front of a large brick building.

Academia

Neuroscience Ph.D. programs adjust admissions in response to U.S. funding uncertainty

By Claudia López Lloreda, Calli McMurray

3 March 2025 | 7 min read

See all Craft and careers

decorative blue background.

Nominate rising stars in neuroscience for our 2025 report.

Recognize early-career researchers who have made outstanding contributions to the field. Selected nominees will be featured on our website and in our annual book.

Features

Illustration of a paper draft covered in notes and sign-off signatures, and surrounded by many hands reaching towards it.

Academia

The last two-author neuroscience paper?

Author lists on papers have ballooned, and it’s getting hard to discern contribution.

By Lydia Denworth

25 February 2025 | 3 min read

A figure walks a narrow path in a canyon.

Academia

Static pay, shrinking prospects fuel neuroscience postdoc decline

Postdoctoral researchers sponsored by the National Institutes of Health now toil longer than ever before, for less money. They are responding accordingly.

By Katie Moisse

31 January 2025 | 20 min read

See all Features

From bench to bot

Computer-generated image of a waveform.

From bench to bot

Keeping it personal: How to preserve your voice when using AI

By Tim Requarth

3 March 2025 | 12 min read

Computer-generated illustration of a black box with many lines coming into its left side and a compressed stream coming out of its right side.

From bench to bot

From bench to bot: How important is prompt engineering?

By Tim Requarth

28 October 2024 | 8 min read

Computer-generated illustration of a pencil.

From bench to bot

From bench to bot: Does AI really make you a more efficient writer?

By Tim Requarth

3 September 2024 | 11 min read

See all From bench to bot

Get notified whenever a new column is published in the AI: From bench to bot series.

PROFILES

Raphael Yuste leaning on a bench in his lab. A red filter colors the scene.

Neural networks

Releasing the Hydra with Rafael Yuste

Losing HHMI Investigator status prompted Yuste to study neural networks in a new way.

By Brady Huggett, Shaena Montanari

4 April 2025 | 10 min read

A speech bubble containing multiple smaller speech bubbles.

Science and society

Amid confusion around U.S. science, some neuroscientists prepare to rally

By Sydney Wyatt

4 March 2025 | 2 min read

Grid of black-and-white headshots of neuroscience trainees.

Funding

‘A gut punch:’ How U.S. neuroscience trainees are grappling with diversity-based funding flux

By Calli McMurray, Angie Voyles Askham, Claudia López Lloreda

14 February 2025 | 2 min read

See all Profiles

Open neuroscience and data-sharing

Illustration of a funnel taking abstract shapes in at the top and spouting an organized flow of shapes out at the bottom.

The big picture

To keep or not to keep: Neurophysiology’s data dilemma

By Nima Dehghani

25 November 2024 | 5 min read

Illustration of three figures standing in front of a grid of dots and a world map.

Open neuroscience and data-sharing

The S-index Challenge: Develop a metric to quantify data-sharing success

By Loren Frank

8 October 2024 | 6 min listen

Illustration of three figures cleaning data with brooms and brushes.

Open neuroscience and data-sharing

A README for open neuroscience

By Samuel Gershman

9 September 2024 | 5 min read

Illustration of a scientist attempting to wrangle many forms of data at once: a pile of charts and graphs threatens to knock them off of their feet as they attempt to prop it up.

Open neuroscience and data-sharing

Neuroscience graduate students deserve comprehensive data-literacy education

By Letisha R. Wyatt

15 July 2024 | 6 min read

See all Open neuroscience and data-sharing

Books

Illustration of a treeline in front of a human brain.

Systems neuroscience

‘Natural Neuroscience: Toward a Systems Neuroscience of Natural Behaviors,’ an excerpt

By Nachum Ulanovsky

15 April 2025 | 9 min read

A brain made up of a matrix of small, predominately blue dots.

Ethics

‘Bioethics and Brains: A Disciplined and Principled Neuroethics,’ an excerpt

By James Giordano, John Shook

14 February 2025 | 6 min read

The word Doctored spelled out on pills.

Science and society

‘Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s,’ an excerpt

By Charles Piller

4 February 2025 | 9 min read

The big picture

Data streams into a transparent box.

NeuroAI

Accepting “the bitter lesson” and embracing the brain’s complexity

To gain insight into complex neural data, we must move toward a data-driven regime, training large models on vast amounts of information. We asked nine experts on computational neuroscience and neural data analysis to weigh in.

By Eva Dyer, Blake Richards

26 March 2025 | 8 min read

Illustration of an image of a landscape repeated over and over again, with some versions distorted and warped.

The big picture

What makes memories last—dynamic ensembles or static synapses?

Teasing out how different subfields conceptualize central terms might help move this long-standing debate forward. I asked eight scientists to weigh in.

By Jason Shepherd

14 October 2024 | 7 min read

See all The big picture