Nature has just published a pretty incredible paper. The authors introduce a framework that turns research papers into interactive AI agents. Rather than engaging with a paper only as static text, researchers can question its agent, ask it to reproduce an analysis, or apply the paper’s methods to new data. This could make research methods much easier to understand, reproduce, and use. It also opens up a strange possibility: research papers that can, in a sense, talk to one another. The authors demonstrate this by connecting agents derived from different papers so that they can combine their methods and data. Used carefully (and with human scientific judgment still firmly in the loop) this could become a powerful new form of scientific communication. * Full paper in the first reply

Acoustic enhancement of slow wave sleep improves memory retention by coordinating brain oscillatory rhythms and autonomic activity academic.oup.com/sleep/advan…

neuromarkers.io : Browse, view, and download fMRI neuromarkers, population-level predictive brain models that can be applied to new studies and populations

Psychedelics align brain activity with context - new in @Nature from Devon Stoliker @dpsyc42 @adeelrazi & many others (including me, very minorly). Full pdf #openaccess is here nature.com/articles/s41586-0… - commentary by Stefan Borgward and Mihai Avram here: nature.com/articles/d41586-0…

Memories can survive even after the brain temporarily loses more than half of its synaptic connections, according to a new mouse study in Science, which challenges the long-held view that long-term memories depend on stable individual synapses. Learn more: scim.ag/4x3dVZG

Recharge, reboot, rewire: sleep optimizes information processing in neural circuits academic.oup.com/sleep/artic…

Memories can survive even after the brain temporarily loses more than half of its synaptic connections, according to a new mouse study in Science, which challenges the long-held view that long-term memories depend on stable individual synapses. Learn more: scim.ag/4x3dVZG

I've been lucky to work with an amazing team and mentor on some really cool (and important!) projects 😊 Looking forward to finally sharing some of the work we've been cooking up over the past few years 👀

The anterior cingulate cortex modulates pupil-linked arousal science.org/doi/full/10.1126…

Recent studies have revealed the synchronization of neuromodulators including norepinephrine, serotonin, acetylcholine, dopamine, and histamine during sleep. A new #ScienceReview explores what potential role the synchronization of these oscillations may play in health. scim.ag/4ve9ObR

Sleep physiology and dementia, a new 5★ review @ScienceMagazine, gets into glymphatics, blood volume, heart rate variability, vasoactive amines, and neuromodulators. by @MaiNedergaard science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…

This is one of craziest papers I’ve ever read. They made a new color by using a laser to individually stimulate particular cells in your eyes. Apparently it looks like an impossibly saturated teal, but you can’t know what it looks like without experiencing it directly.

Just out in @NatureNeuro! Eyelash-sized Neuropixels probes show how brief electrical bursts between seizures ("interictal spikes") arise from consistent neurons in human cortex layers, hijack neurons used for cognition, & can be predicted up to 1-sec ahead nature.com/articles/s41593-0…

Large-scale electrophysiology at single-spike resolution — a Review by Joshua H. Siegle & Nicholas A. Steinmetz nature.com/articles/s41583-0…

Interpreting human sleep activity through neural contrastive learning cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S08…

This paper has been a long time coming. Instead of reanalyzing the same old resting-state fMRI datasets, we combined nearly all datasets around the world. Note that we didn't exactly find indisputable evidence for "default mode network disintegration." nature.com/articles/s41591-0…

Emotion concepts? Feed it all of human literature and obviously it will capture many elements of emotion concepts, like any other concept. "Acting like having emotions" given such concepts is not surprising. But emotion concepts are a minor part of what emotion is.

Sleep restores the brain's natural rhythms after learning disrupts them overnight. Perturbations in aperiodic activity caused by new information are reversed during non-REM sleep by morning, and this specific reset predicts successful memory consolidation. tinyurl.com/BarnesNg

1/8. New preprint! Using fUSi in head-fixed mice🐭, we found that arousal events trigger a brain-wide wave of activity 🌊🧠. Surprisingly, this pattern was preserved during manipulations of the locus coeruleus, pointing to a minor role for noradrenaline. biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…

New Alzheimer’s research just caught my attention. Scientists at Northwestern found that levetiracetam, a decades-old FDA-approved seizure drug, may stop Alzheimer’s before it starts. Instead of clearing plaques after damage happens, it blocks the production of the toxic amyloid-beta 42 protein that forms plaques in the first place. The study shows the drug works during the neuron signaling cycle by binding to SV2A, keeping APP on the neuron surface and diverting it away from the pathway that creates the toxic peptide. Key insight: the intervention would likely need to happen very early, potentially 10–20 years before symptoms. Early data from patient records also suggests people taking levetiracetam had a small but meaningful delay in Alzheimer’s progression. Still early science, but this shifts the conversation from treating plaques to preventing them entirely.