Brain "Neighborhoods" - Parkinson's Mysteries - Making Music - Microglia & Waste

[Breedlove, S]

https://www.quantamagazine.org/fed-on-reams-of-cell-data-ai-maps-new-neighborhoods-in-the-brain-20260209/

Fed on Reams of Cell Data, AI Maps New Neighborhoods in the Brain

By Amber Dance

Real estate agents will tell you that a home’s most important feature is “location, location, location.” It’s similar in neuroscience: “Location is everything in the brain,” said Bosiljka Tasic (opens a new tab), a self-described “biological cartographer.” Brain injury in one spot could knock out memory; damage in another could interfere with personality. Neuroscientists and doctors are lost without a good map.

Researchers have been mapping the brain for more than a century. By tracing cellular patterns that are visible under a microscope, they’ve created colorful charts and models that delineate regions and have been able to associate them with functions. In recent years, they’ve added vastly greater detail: They can now go cell by cell and define each one by its internal genetic activity. But no matter how carefully they slice and how deeply they analyze, their maps of the brain seem incomplete, muddled, inconsistent. For example, some large brain regions have been linked to many different tasks; scientists suspect that they should be subdivided into smaller regions, each with its own job. So far, mapping these cellular neighborhoods from enormous genetic datasets has been both a challenge and a chore.

Recently, Tasic, a neuroscientist and genomicist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and her collaborators recruited artificial intelligence for the sorting and mapmaking effort. They fed genetic data from five mouse brains — 10.4 million individual cells with hundreds of genes per cell — into a custom machine learning algorithm. The program delivered maps that are a neuro-realtor’s dream, with known and novel subdivisions within larger brain regions. Humans couldn’t delineate such borders in several lifetimes, but the algorithm did it in hours. The authors published their methods (opens a new tab) in Nature Communications in October.

 © 2026 Simons Foundation

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https://www.npr.org/2026/02/10/nx-s1-5702451/parkinsons-disease-symptoms-scan-network

 This complex brain network may explain many of Parkinson's stranger symptoms

Jon Hamilton

Parkinson's disease does more than cause tremor and trouble walking. It can also affect sleep, smell, digestion and even thinking.

That may be because the disease disrupts communication in a brain network that links the body and mind, a team reports in the journal Nature.

"It almost feels like a tunnel is jammed, so no traffic can go normally," says Hesheng Liu, a brain scientist at Changping Laboratory and Peking University in Beijing and an author of the study.

The finding fits nicely with growing evidence that Parkinson's is a network disorder, rather than one limited to brain areas that control specific movements, says Peter Strick, a professor and chair of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh who was not involved in the study.

Other degenerative brain diseases affect other brain networks in different ways. Alzheimer's, for example, tends to reduce connectivity in the default mode network, which supports memory and sense of self. ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) primarily damages the motor system network, which controls movement.

Understanding the network affected by Parkinson's, which affects about 1 million people in the United States, could change the way doctors treat the disease.
A mystery solved?

People with Parkinson's often have symptoms that vary in ways that are hard to explain.

For example, someone who usually is unable to stand may suddenly leap when faced with an emergency. And Parkinson's patients who can still walk may freeze if they try to carry on a conversation.

    © 2026 npr


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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/arts/music/neuroscience-piano-nicolas-namoradze.html

What Happens in a Performer’s Brain While Playing Music?

By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

The placid chords of a Debussy prelude splashed through a darkened auditorium during a recital by the pianist Nicolas Namoradze at the University of California, San Francisco, on a November evening.

A translucent image of Namoradze’s brain appeared above him on a screen: Electrical currents of different wavelengths, associated with varying levels of alertness, registered as colorful activity coursing through the model like storm fronts on a weather map. With each chord, clouds of green and blue bloomed, then faded as the sound receded. As the recital progressed with works by Bach, Beethoven and Scriabin, the image of the gently rotating brain showed a complex choreography of signals that sometimes ping-ponged between different areas or flickered simultaneously across the organ’s hemispheres.

As a visual spectacle accompanying Namoradze’s pellucid playing, it was mesmerizing: an X-ray, seemingly, of virtuosity at work.

But to the scientists in the audience, attendees at a conference on the neuroscience of music and dance, it was more than entertainment. It was evidence of a breakthrough in experiment design — one that opens up possibilities in an area that has long eluded scientific study: how music activates the brain, not in listeners, but in performers. It was also a reminder of the value artists can bring to scientific inquiry as active participants shaping studies of their craft.

The neuroscientist Theodore Zanto, a member of the Neuroscape lab at U.C.S.F. that created the “Glass Brain” animations, said in an interview the next day that he was surprised — and moved — by the result. “It’s probably the cleanest real-time representation of what’s happening inside the brain during a piano performance,” he said.
    © 2026 The New York Times Company


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https://www.thetransmitter.org/aging/aging-neurons-outsource-garbage-disposal-clog-microglia/

Aging neurons outsource garbage disposal, clog microglia

By Holly Barker

Synaptic proteins degrade more slowly in aged mice than in younger mice, a new study finds. Microglia appear to unburden the neurons of the excess proteins, but that accumulation may turn toxic, the findings suggest. 

To function properly, cells need to clear out old and damaged proteins periodically, but that process stalls with age: Protein turnover is about 20 percent slower in the brains of older rodents than in youthful ones, according to an analysis of whole-brain samples. The new study is the first to probe protein clearance specifically in neurons in living animals.

“Neurons face unique challenges to protein turnover,” says study investigator Ian Guldner, a postdoctoral fellow in Tony Wyss-Coray’s lab at Stanford University. For instance, their longevity prevents them from distributing old proteins among daughter cells. And unlike other proteins on the path to degradation, neuronal components must first navigate the axon—sometimes traveling as far as 1 meter, Guldner says.

In the new study, Guldner and his colleagues engineered mice to express a modified version of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase—a component of the protein synthesis machinery—in excitatory neurons. Every day for one week, mice of different ages received injections of chemically altered amino acids compatible only with that mutant enzyme. Neurons used the labeled amino acids to replenish proteins, enabling the group to track how quickly those proteins degraded over the subsequent two weeks.

“The achievement lies in the technical advance, namely by being able to look at protein degradation and aggregation specifically in neuronal cells,” says F. Ulrich Hartl, director of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, who was not involved in the study.

© 2026 Simons Foundation

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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/feb/09/tea-coffee-could-lower-dementia-risk-scientists-say

A couple of teas or coffees a day could lower risk of dementia

Ian Sample Science editor

People who have a couple of teas or coffees a day have a lower risk of dementia and marginally better cognitive performance than those who avoid the drinks, researchers say.

Health records for more than 130,000 people showed that over 40 years, those who routinely drank two to three cups of caffeinated coffee or one to two cups of caffeinated tea daily had a 15-20% lower risk of dementia than those who went without.

The caffeinated coffee drinkers also reported slightly less cognitive decline than those who opted for decaf and performed better on some objective tests of brain function, according to a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The findings suggest habitual tea and coffee drinking is good for the brain, but the research cannot prove it, as caffeine drinkers may be less prone to dementia for other reasons. A similar link would arise if poor sleepers, who appear to have a greater risk of cognitive decline, steered clear of caffeine to get a better night’s rest.

“Our study alone can’t prove causality, but to our knowledge, it is the best evidence to date looking at coffee and tea intake and cognitive health, and it is consistent with plausible biology,” said the lead author, Yu Zhang, who studies nutritional epidemiology at Harvard University.

Coffee and tea contain caffeine and polyphenols that may protect against brain ageing by improving vascular health and reducing inflammation and oxidative stress, where harmful atoms and molecules called free radicals damage cells and tissues. Substances in the drinks could also work by improving metabolic health. Caffeine, for example, is linked to lower rates of type 2 diabetes, a known risk factor for dementia.

© 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited 
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