New neurons may repair damage from Huntington’s disease

New research shows that the adult brain can generate new neurons that integrate into key motor circuits.

The findings demonstrate that stimulating natural brain processes may help repair damaged neural networks in Huntington’s and other diseases.

“Our research shows that we can encourage the brain’s own cells to grow new neurons that join in naturally with the circuits controlling movement,” says Abdellatif Benraiss, a senior author of the study, which appears in the journal Cell Reports.

“This discovery offers a potential new way to restore brain function and slow the progression of these diseases.”

Benraiss is a research associate professor in the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) lab of Steve Goldman in the Center for Translational Neuromedicine.

It was long believed that the adult brain could not generate new neurons. However, it is now understood that niches in the brain contain reservoirs of progenitor cells capable of producing new neurons. While these cells actively produce neurons during early development, they switch to producing support cells called glia shortly after birth.

One of the areas of the brain where these cells congregate is the ventricular zone, which is adjacent to the striatum, a region of the brain devastated by Huntington’s disease.

The idea that the adult brain retains the capacity to produce new neurons, called adult neurogenesis, was first described by Goldman and others in the 1980s while studying neuroplasticity in canaries. Songbirds, like canaries, are unique in the animal kingdom in their ability to lay down new neurons as they learn new songs. The research in songbirds identified proteins—one of which was brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF)—that direct progenitor cells to differentiate and produce neurons.

Further research in Goldman’s lab showed that new neurons were generated when BDNF and another protein, Noggin, were delivered to progenitor cells in the brains of mice. These cells then migrated to a nearby motor control region of the brain—the striatum—where they developed into cells known as medium spiny neurons, the major cells lost in Huntington’s disease. Benraiss and Goldman also demonstrated that the same agents could induce new medium spiny neuron formation in primates.

The extent to which newly generated medium spiny neurons integrate into the brain’s networks has remained unclear. The new research, conducted in a mouse model of Huntington’s disease, demonstrates that the newly generated neurons connect with the complex networks in the brain responsible for motor control, replacing the function of the neurons lost in Huntington’s.

The researchers used a genetic tagging method to mark new cells as they were created, which allowed them to follow them over time as they developed new connections.

“In this paper, we used a combination of electrophysiology, optogenetics, and mouse behavior to show that these cells are not only produced in the adult brain but functionally restore motor circuits in both healthy mice and in the context of Huntington’s disease,” says Jose Cano, a postdoctoral associate in the Goldman lab and lead author of the study.

These technologies enabled the researchers to map the connections between the new neurons, their neighbors, and other brain regions. Employing optogenetics techniques, the researchers turned the new cells on and off, confirming their integration into broader brain networks important for motor control.

The study indicates that a possible treatment for Huntington’s disease would be to encourage the brain to replace lost cells with new, functional ones and restore the brain’s communication pathways.

“Taken together with the persistence of these progenitor cells in the adult primate brain, these findings suggest the potential for this regenerative approach as a treatment strategy in Huntington’s and other disorders characterized by the loss of neurons in the striatum,” says Benraiss.

The authors suggest this approach could also be combined with other cell replacement therapies. Research in Goldman’s lab has shown that glial cells called astrocytes also play an important role in Huntington’s disease. These cells do not function properly in the disease and contribute to the impairment of neuronal function. The researchers have found that replacing the diseased glial cells with healthy ones can slow disease progression in a mouse model of Huntington’s. These glial replacement therapies are currently in preclinical development.

Support for the research came from CNS2, Inc., the Huntington Disease Golf Classic, and the Hereditary Disease Foundation.

Source: University of Rochester

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Bonobos communicate a lot like humans

Bonobos—our closest living relatives—create complex and meaningful combinations of calls resembling the word combinations of humans, researchers report.

The new study investigated the vocal behavior of wild bonobos in the Kokolopori Community Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Researchers at the University of Zürich and Harvard University used novel methods borrowed from linguistics to demonstrate for the first time that, similarly to human language, bonobo vocal communication relies extensively on compositionality.

Compositionality is the capacity to combine meaningful words into phrases whose meaning is related to the meaning of the words and the way they are combined.

In more trivial compositionality, the meaning of the combination is the addition of its parts: for example, “blond dancer” refers to a person who is both blond and a dancer. However, in more complex, nontrivial compositionality, one part of the combination modifies the other. For example, “bad dancer” does not refer to a bad person who is also a dancer: “bad” in this case does not have an independent meaning but complements “dancer”.

In a first step, the researchers applied a method developed by linguists to quantify the meaning of human words.

“This allowed us to create a bonobo dictionary of sorts—a complete list of bonobo calls and their meaning,” says Mélissa Berthet, a postdoctoral researcher at the evolutionary anthropology department of the University of Zurich and lead researcher of the study.

“This represents an important step towards understanding the communication of other species, as it is the first time that we have determined the meaning of calls across the whole vocal repertoire of an animal.”

After determining the meaning of single bonobo vocalizations, the researchers then moved on to investigating call combinations, using another approach borrowed from linguistics.

“With our approach, we were able to quantify how the meaning of bonobo single calls and call combinations relate to each other,” says Simon Townsend, a University of Zurich professor and senior author of the study.

The researchers found numerous call combinations whose meaning was related to the meaning of their single parts, a key hallmark of compositionality. Furthermore, some of the call combinations bore a striking resemblance to the more complex nontrivial compositional structures in human language.

“This suggests that the capacity to combine call types in complex ways is not as unique to humans as we once thought,” says Berthet.

An important implication of this research is the potential light it sheds on the evolutionary roots of language’s compositional nature.

“Since humans and bonobos had a common ancestor approximately 7 to 13 million years ago, they share many traits by descent, and it appears that compositionality is likely one of them,” says Harvard Professor Martin Surbeck, coauthor of the study.

“Our study therefore suggests that our ancestors already extensively used compositionality at least 7 million years ago, if not more,” adds Townsend.

The findings also indicate that the ability to construct complex meanings from smaller vocal units existed long before human language emerged, and that bonobo vocal communication shares more similarities with human language than previously thought.

The research appears in Science.

Source: University of Zurich

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1 in 5 people with dementia get no care

As the world’s population rapidly ages, a new study finds that people living with dementia are struggling at an alarming rate.

Globally, at least one in five people living with dementia are receiving no care helping them with daily living, regardless of the wealth or development status of their country, according to the study.

Heightening the sense of despair was an additional finding that this lack of care has persisted for years.

“This is not just a care issue; it’s a public health crisis,” says Xi Chen, associate professor of public health (health policy) at the Yale School of Public Health and the paper’s senior author.

“We know that a lack of basic caregiving increases the risk of emergency room visits, nursing home admissions, depression, and even early death. This widespread absence of care is putting tremendous pressure on families, communities, and health care systems.”

The study analyzed data from over 10,000 individuals across the United States, England, 18 European nations, Israel, and China. It is believed to be the most comprehensive cross-national investigation to date into the caregiving experiences of people living with dementia.

Without action, the burden on families and the consequences for older adults will only grow more severe.

The research drew from four large-scale longitudinal surveys: the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), and the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). Participants were adults aged 50 and older who were residing in the community and who had been identified as living with dementia. All faced at least one limitation in basic or instrumental activities of daily living such as bathing, dressing, preparing meals, paying bills, and managing medications.

The researchers found that approximately 20% of individuals living with dementia received virtually no care in their day-to-day lives, regardless of whether they lived in a wealthy, middle-, or low-income country or their country’s cultural approach to health care. There was no evidence that the global care gap narrowed between 2012 and 2018, the period covered by the study.

“We were surprised by the consistency of the findings across countries,” says Chen, who conducts research for Yale’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and Institution for Social and Policy Studies.

“No matter how developed a country is, the care deficit has persisted over time for at least the last 10 years.”

Care gaps

The study highlighted significant gaps in both formal and informal caregiving. Formal caregiving was described as professional or paid services provided at home or nursing home-based care. Informal assistance was care provided by family or friends.

In China, nearly 99% of older adults with dementia and daily limitations reported receiving no formal care, while the US fared only slightly better, with 86% lacking formal support, the study says. Even in Europe and England, where social care systems are more developed, over 70% of participants went without formal assistance.

Although somewhat more common, informal care was also alarmingly insufficient—about one in four individuals with dementia reported receiving no informal care, according to the study.

The study also notes stark disparities based on socioeconomic status. Individuals with lower levels of education were significantly more likely to go without formal care, and individuals living alone often had little to no informal support, leaving them especially vulnerable.

The cost of care

The findings come as countries around the world adjust to a rapidly growing global population of people aged 65 and older. In 2022, over 55 million people globally were living with dementia. That number is projected to rise to 139 million by 2050.

Dementia is an umbrella term used to describe a group of diseases that cause a decline in memory, thinking, and other cognitive abilities that are severe enough to interfere with daily life. While dementia is more common in older adults, it is not a normal part of aging.

An estimated 6.9 million Americans are currently living with dementia. Individuals with dementia face significantly greater caregiving needs and health care costs than those with other conditions, such as heart disease or cancer, the researchers say. Due to prolonged illness, people living with dementia often endure years of disability and dependence, with health and long-term care costs projected to reach $360 billion in 2024 and nearly $1 trillion by 2050, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

What to do?

Addressing dementia care gaps requires a multifaceted approach, Chen says. Significant financial investment is needed to improve access to care, increase professional caregiver staffing, and provide greater support to informal caregivers worldwide. Understanding cultural nuances and regional and family demographics is also critical when developing solutions, he says.

Chen urges policymakers to prioritize effective and context-specific care models for individuals with dementia.

“To close these care gaps, we need transformative policy changes, more funding for formal care, and better support for informal caregivers,” says Chen. “Without action, the burden on families and the consequences for older adults will only grow more severe.”

The full study appears in Nature Aging.

Additional authors are from the University of Illinois, Chicago; Yale University; the World Bank; and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

Support for the study came from the US National Institute on Aging and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, with additional support from the World Bank.

Source: Yale

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Stone cooking tool residue shed lights on ancient food

New research digs into how ancient stone kitchens preserve food secrets.

The mortar, pestle and cutting board in your kitchen are modern versions of manos and metates—ancient cooking implements found in archaeological sites around the world.

A mano is a hand-held stone tool used with a metate to grind and pulverize food materials from plants and animals. The metate is a large, flat piece of stone or a depression ground into a bedrock surface. These bedrock metates, also known as open-air metates, are particularly common at archaeological sites, with the oldest dating as far back as 15,500 years.

Now, researchers at the Natural History Museum of Utah are using new techniques to extract microscopic plant residues preserved within the cracks and crevices of bedrock metates to learn more about the people who put them there.

Their latest findings appear in the journal American Antiquity.

“People have lived here for time immemorial and have been processing native plants on ground stone tools for a long time too,” says archaeobotanist Stefania Wilks, a Natural History Museum of Utah research assistant and University of Utah graduate student, referring to the Western US, where she conducts her research. That research includes studying plants that people used for food and medicine to learn about traditional lifeways and how the landscapes have changed over time.

Currently, Wilks is working with NHMU’s Curator of Archaeology Lisbeth Louderback, a University of Utah professor of anthropology, to recover plant residues from metates across western North America. Not just any piece of plant matter, though. Wilks and Louderback work specifically with starch granules, tiny structures within a plant cell used to store energy in the form of carbohydrates. And those granules are itty-bitty: Even the largest granules are smaller than a tenth of a millimeter.

The granules’ small size means scientists can’t see them with their naked eye. They have to extract them from surfaces where people have processed plants, such as ground stone, pottery, and basketry. Louderback suspected that an untapped source of starch granules could be bedrock metates. Although the surface of the rock is exposed to outside elements that would sweep away the granules or degrade them over time, she suspected that small crevices in the rock could be hiding plant residue.

“Through their actions of grinding and mashing, people would have forced these starches down deeper into the stone,” Wilks explains.

Bedrock metates can be obvious or cryptic, and their appearance depends on the type of rock and how it was ground. In Utah, for example, the exposed bedrock is typically sandstone, and the metates are often shaped as an oblong groove. Other bedrock metates are circular, dish-shaped and some are deep and round, like a modern-day mortar. Regardless of their shape, the metates tend to appear in groups or lined up in a row. “They aren’t sexy like an arrowhead,” Wilks says, “…but they still contain valuable information about what plants people processed in the past.”

Multiple bedrock metates occur along basalt outcrops in the uplands of southern Oregon and are associated with thousands of petroglyph panels. Also occurring among these archaeological features are large populations of culturally significant plants, especially geophytes (those with starchy underground storage organs like roots and tubers). Archaeologists once assumed people only ventured up to the uplands for hunting.

“We were up there testing to see if the bedrock metate surfaces were actually being used to process plants,” Wilks says.

To do that, the team compared plant residues on the surface of the metates to those deep within the crevices. Using an electric toothbrush and water, they scrubbed material from the surface of the metate. Then, they added a deflocculant—a substance similar to laundry detergent—to break up clumped particles and release them from deep within the stone. They applied the electric toothbrush again, and this time, the material they collected was whatever had been forced down into the stone’s crevices. They repeated this procedure on the surfaces of nearby rocks that weren’t used as metates to serve as a control.

With samples in hand, the team turned to their microscopes to observe starch granules. Both the metate and control surfaces revealed virtually no granules. But the deeply-embedded samples contained hundreds.

“It increased our confidence that what we were seeing was direct evidence that different plant species with starchy organs were processed on the metate,” Wilks recalls.

Having proven that they could extract starch granules from the bedrock metates, the team then began to establish what plant species the granules came from. It was a time-consuming process: Wilks analyzed hundreds of starch granules from multiple plant species to study their morphological characteristics, then compared them to granules of plant species currently growing in the area.

They were able to narrow down the plant family of many granules, and some could even be identified down to the genus level. For example, members of the carrot family were common, including a group of plants called biscuit root. They also found wild grasses—most likely wild rye—and plants belonging to the lily family. These are all plant taxa that were, and continue to be, important food sources for local Indigenous groups.

“Starch analysis is helpful in studying human diets of the past because some plant parts don’t preserve in the archaeological record,” Wilks says.

Root vegetables, for example, will break down faster than seeds or grains. This new method of recovering starch granules provides researchers another way to study the role of plants in human diets. It also demonstrates how bedrock metates, often overlooked at archaeological sites, contain valuable information about past human lifeways.

Source: University of Utah

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Listen: What are the hidden dangers of grief?

In a new podcast episode, a psychologist examines the stress that loss has on the body—and how society can help.

When we lose someone close to us, we often say we have a broken heart: But what if that’s not just a metaphor?

In her new book, The Grieving Body: How The Stress of Loss Can Be An Opportunity For Healing (Harper Collins, 2025), Mary Frances O’Connor, a psychology scholar at the University of Arizona, shares groundbreaking insights into the biological and physiological impacts grief has on our bodies.

O’Connor reveals how profound loss can lead to serious medical conditions, from heart attacks to immune system breakdowns, and explains why grieving can make us more vulnerable to diseases like cancer, pneumonia, and even autoimmune disorders.

In this episode of the Big Brains podcast, drawing on her personal experiences and extensive research, O’Connor outlines why our medical system—and society at large—needs to rethink how we support grieving individuals . She makes a powerful case for viewing grief not only as an emotional experience but as a medical event deserving careful monitoring and intervention, similar to pregnancy or chronic illness.

Read the episode’s transcript.

Source: University of Chicago

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Study may rewrite what we know about megalodon

The megalodon has long been imagined as an enormous great white shark, but new research suggests that perception is all wrong.

The study finds the prehistoric hunter had a much longer body—closer in shape to a lemon shark or even a large whale.

The researchers used a novel approach to estimate the shark’s total body length, moving beyond traditional methods that rely primarily on tooth size.

By examining megalodon’s vertebral column and comparing it to over 100 species of living and extinct sharks, they determined a more accurate proportion for the head, body, and tail.

The findings in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica suggest the prehistoric predator may have reached about 80 feet, or about two school buses in length. It also likely weighed an estimated 94 tons, comparable to a large blue whale, but with a body designed for energy-efficient cruising rather than continuous high-speed pursuit.

“This study provides the most robust analysis yet of megalodon’s body size and shape,” says Phillip Sternes, a shark biologist who completed his PhD at the University of California, Riverside.

“Rather than resembling an oversized great white shark, it was actually more like an enormous lemon shark, with a more slender, elongated body. That shape makes a lot more sense for moving efficiently through water.”

Great white sharks have a stocky, torpedo-shaped body built for bursts of speed, with a broad midsection that tapers sharply toward the tail. In contrast, lemon sharks have a leaner, more uniform body shape, with a less pronounced taper. Their longer, more cylindrical build allows for smoother, more energy-efficient swimming. If megalodon had a body structure more like a lemon shark, as this study suggests, it would have looked much sleeker than the bulky predator often depicted in popular media.

Sharks, like airplanes or Olympic swimmers, must minimize drag to move smoothly and easily.

“You lead with your head when you swim because it’s more efficient than leading with your stomach,” says Tim Higham, a biologist who contributed insights to the study on how animals move through water. “Similarly, evolution moves toward efficiency, much of the time.”

The study highlights how large aquatic animals including sharks, whales, or even extinct marine reptiles, follow similar patterns when it comes to body proportions.

“The physics of swimming limit how stocky or stretched out a massive predator can be,” Higham says.

The research also sheds light on megalodon’s swimming capabilities. While debates have raged over whether it was a high-speed predator or a slower, cruising hunter, the new findings suggest a balance. The shark likely swam at moderate speeds, with the ability to burst forward when attacking prey. Given its sheer size and energy demands, constant high-speed swimming wouldn’t have been efficient.

The study also indicates that as a newborn, a megalodon could have been nearly 13 feet long, roughly the size of an adult great white shark.

“It is entirely possible that megalodon pups were already taking down marine mammals shortly after being born,” Sternes says.

A key breakthrough of this study was identifying the lemon shark as the best living analog for megalodon’s proportions. Unlike the great white, lemon sharks have a more elongated body. When the researchers scaled up the proportions of a lemon shark to megalodon’s estimated length, it was a near-perfect match.

“This research not only refines our understanding of what megalodon looked like, but it also provides a framework for studying how size influences movement in marine animals,” Sternes says.

Beyond reshaping our understanding of megalodon, the study offers insight into why only certain animals can evolve to massive sizes.

“Gigantism isn’t just about getting bigger—it’s about evolving the right body to survive at that scale,” Sternes says. “And megalodon may have been one of the most extreme examples of that.”

Source: UC Riverside

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Is napping good for you?

A doctor and expert in sleep surgery explains why napping can interfere with your sleep cycle.

In Spain and in many Latin American countries, residents take a respite after lunch to sleep. “Siesta” time is an almost sacred tradition.

In some businesses in Japan, employees are encouraged to take a short rest with the hope that it will increase their alertness and productivity.

If you’re a fan, you’re not alone. About four out of five US adults—80.7%—reported taking at least one nap of 10 minutes or more in the past three months, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center. The same survey revealed that 30.5% of adults take one more than once a week.

Napping spikes among older adults. More than half of adults ages 80 and older say they napped in the past day. Among every other age group in the survey—including both the young (ages 18 to 29) and the older (ages 70 to 79)—about a third said they napped in the past 24 hours.

Here, Maria V. Suurna, professor of clinical otolaryngology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and director of sleep surgery at UHealth–University of Miami Health System, addresses questions about napping:

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