Red-Light Therapy - Head Direction Cells - Brain Development Map - Trivers Obit

[Breedlove, S]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00878-1

The surprising science behind red-light therapy — and how it really works

    Lynne Peeples 

In 2021, dermatologist David Ozog was on holiday with his family in the Bahamas, when his 18-year-old son had a massive stroke. The teenager was airlifted to Florida, and then to Chicago for surgery. As his son was lying partially paralysed in a hospital bed, Ozog got a call from a colleague who had an unconventional suggestion.

The colleague, a dermatologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, told Ozog about research he was conducting with the US Department of Defense. Early results hinted that red and near-infrared light applied to the head might protect neural tissue after brain injury. He urged Ozog to consider trying it on his son.

Ozog stayed up until 4 a.m. that night reading scientific papers and, ultimately, ordering several panels made of red and near-infrared light-emitting diodes (LEDs). “I started sneaking them into the hospital,” says Ozog, who works at Henry Ford Health in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Today, his son is walking and back in university. Ozog cannot prove that light therapy made a difference, but he thinks that it helped. He has since become a convert to an idea that, at the time, was considered fringe. “I thought the same thing,” he says, “How could shining this thing on you possibly have any biologic effect?”

But what was at the margins of medicine just a few years ago is now edging towards the mainstream. Red-light devices are increasingly appearing in dermatology offices, wellness centres, locker rooms and homes. According to some projections, the global market will surpass US$1 billion by 2030, propelled by a surge of companies promising benefits for everything from ageing skin to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) — claims echoed widely across social media.

Experts warn that there is considerable hype about red-light therapy. But a growing body of legitimate science has been exploring the benefits for several conditions. Clinical studies have reported improvements in peripheral neuropathy1, retinal degeneration2 and certain neurological disorders3. For some indications, expert groups now recommend red-light regimens1.

Researchers are also uncovering how red and near-infrared light might exert these effects. Mitochondria — the power plants of the cell — are emerging as a central piece of the puzzle.

© 2026 Springer Nature Limited

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https://www.thetransmitter.org/spatial-cognition-and-navigation/head-direction-cells-stably-orient-mice-to-outside-world/

 Head direction cells stably orient mice to outside world

By Angie Voyles Askham

The idea that some neural representations can “drift,” or change over time, even in the seeming absence of learning, is broadly accepted. But characterizing the phenomenon across the brain has proved challenging.

“The interesting part is what exactly seems to be stable and what exactly seems to be drifting. That’s not an easy question,” says Tobias Rose, a group leader at the University of Bonn Medical Center, who presented findings on drift in the mouse primary visual cortex earlier this month at the Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) annual meeting.

Other new research adds nuance to the discussion: Neurons that code for head direction in the mouse post-subiculum show little drift, retaining their tuning for multiple weeks, according to a study published last month in Nature. And they differ from hippocampal place cells, which are also part of the spatial navigation system but have highly variable responses, as reported in previous research.

The new findings raise questions about how stable and flexible representations interact in the brain, given that signals from the post-subiculum ultimately feed into the hippocampus, says Rose, who was not involved in the work. “It’s a rather important study,” he says.

The relative stability of head direction cell tuning does not invalidate previous reports of drift elsewhere in the brain, says Adrien Peyrache, associate professor at the Montreal Neurological Institute, who led the head direction study. Instead, it may be that these invariant responses act as a “rigid backbone” onto which more flexible sensory and cognitive responses can be mapped, he says. “I find it reassuring.”

Still, the low drift reported in the new work may be partially due to the study’s methods, which eliminated cells that lost their response from one day to the next, says Timothy O’Leary, professor of information engineering and neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the work.

© 2026 Simons Foundation

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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00975-1

First atlas of brain organization shows development over a lifetime

    Gemma Conroy 

Scientists have created the first atlas of specific key patterns of brain ‘chatter’ and determined how these patterns change over the entire human lifespan1.

The comprehensive guide draws on brain scans from almost 3,600 people, ranging from infants to centenarians. It maps a property called functional connectivity, which describes the level of coordination between separate brain regions. The data suggest that in young adults, particular patterns of this connectivity are linked to cognitive performance.

Such a guide could be useful for understanding when developmental issues and neurodegenerative conditions emerge, says Jakob Seidlitz, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the research. “This is an important contribution to the field,” he adds.

The findings were published today in Nature.

The brain is a noisy place. Sometimes two brain regions that are far apart are active at the same time, suggesting that they work together to support the same function. Such regions are said to be functionally connected, even though they do not necessarily sit close to each other in the brain.

To understand how this functional connectivity is organized, brain areas are plotted along a scale, or axis, on the basis of their connectivity patterns with the rest of the brain, says study co-author Patrick Taylor, a computer scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who focuses on neuroscience. There are three main functional axes. The sensory-to-association axis, for example, allows researchers to describe brain regions that lie along a continuum from those that focus mainly on processing sensory information to those that are engaged in sophisticated processes such as integrating sensory information into complex thought. The brain regions at each point along the axis have similar patterns of connectivity.

© 2026 Springer Nature Limited

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/science/robert-trivers-dead.html

Robert Trivers, Eccentric Scientist Who Probed Human Nature, Dies at 83

By Michael S. Rosenwald

Robert Trivers, a visionary, eccentric and volatile evolutionary biologist who explored the genetic reasons humans cooperate, compete and deceive each other, drawing comparisons to Charles Darwin in a career filled with intellectual highs and behavioral lows, died on March 12, in Mount Vernon, N.Y. He was 83.

His death, at his daughter Natasha Trivers Howard’s home, was confirmed by his family. No cause was given.

Professor Trivers was a rebellious figure in academia who joined the Black Panthers, clashed with colleagues and spoke in support of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, from whom he accepted research money. He was often stoned and nearly always armed with a knife for self-defense.

“Robert Trivers was unlike any other academic I have known,” David A. Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, wrote in a remembrance of Professor Trivers for the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. “In another life, he might have been a hoodlum.”

Raised by a diplomat and a poet, and educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and Harvard University, Professor Trivers thrived on challenging scientific orthodoxies, calling the field of psychology a “set of competing guesses.” (He also scorned physics, noting that its utility was “connected primarily to warfare.”)

In the early 1970s, as a graduate student at Harvard and later as an untenured professor there, he published a series of papers applying Darwin’s theory of natural selection to social behavior, arguing that science had failed to connect evolution to an understanding of everyday life.

    © 2026 The New York Times Company
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