Stem cell biologists discover how to regenerate type damaged in ALS, spinal cord injuries

This handbook is for grad students, postdocs and PIs who do a lot of programming as part of their research. It will teach you, in a practical manner, how to organize your code so that it is easy to...

Spatial attention supports navigation by prioritizing information from selected locations. A candidate neural mechanism is provided by theta-paced sweeps in grid- and place-cell population activity, which sample nearby space in a left-right-alternating pattern coordinated by parasubicular direction signals. During exploration, this alternation promotes uniform spatial coverage, but whether sweeps can be flexibly tuned to locations of particular interest remains unclear. Using large-scale Neuropixels recordings in freely-behaving rats, we show that sweeps and direction signals are rapidly and dynamically modulated: they track moving targets during pursuit, precede orienting responses during immobility, and reverse during backward locomotion — without prior spatial learning. Similar modulation occurs during REM sleep. Canonical head-direction signals remain head-aligned. These findings identify sweeps as a flexible, attention-like mechanism for selectively sampling allocentric cognitive maps. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, Synergy Grant 951319 (EIM) The Research Council of Norway, Centre of Neural Computation 223262 (EIM, MBM), Centre for Algorithms in the Cortex 332640 (EIM, MBM), National Infrastructure grant (NORBRAIN, 295721 and 350201) The Kavli Foundation, https://ror.org/00kztt736 Ministry of Science and Education, Norway (EIM, MBM) Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences; NTNU, Norway (AZV)

Nicholas and Mattar found that people use episodic memory to make decisions when it is unclear what will be needed in the future. These findings reveal how the rich representational capacity of episod...

Psychophysics is a human-facing science with interventions arguably more robust than medicine.

My five-month quest to monitor the weather, track inflation, and inspect milk for harmful microorganisms

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The scientist was famous for linking healing with storytelling. Sometimes that meant reshaping patients’ reality.

Predictive theories of cognitive mapping propose that these representations encode the predictive relationships among contents as experienced by the n…

Astrocytes make up one-quarter of the brain, but researchers are only now realizing their true value.

Nature Communications - Here, the authors show learning tasks with similar structures can initially cause interference and slow down learning, but both the brain and artificial networks gradually...

IntroductionMusic has become an established complementary element of modern medicine, demonstrating beneficial effects towards various diseases such as demen...

In the hands of a great musician, the gloriously simple guitar can create the most complex works of art. Here’s how

Transcranial Focused Ultrasound (tFUS) is a popular tool for non-invasive neuromodulation which prior testing paradigms have suggested is benign. However, emerging use cases such as clinical therapies...

AlphaEvolve, an AI system created by Google DeepMind, is helping mathematicians do research at a scale that was previously impossible - even if it does occasionally "cheat" to find a solution