Elephant Whiskers - Microglia & Infantile Amnesia - Reading & Dementia - Exercise & Neuroplasticity

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Feb 14, 2026, 7:01:15 AM (10 days ago) Feb 14

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/science/elephant-whiskers.html

An Elephant Is Blind Without Its Whiskers

By Alexa Robles-Gil

Every elephant has about 1,000 whiskers on its trunk.

They play a crucial role for the animals, which have thick skin and poor eyesight. Elephants cannot regrow these hairs, meaning a lost one creates a permanent sensory blind spot on a trunk, which they use for almost everything in daily life.

And as such an important feature, they are also unique among mammalian facial hairs.

“Elephant whiskers are aliens,” said Andrew Schulz, a mechanical engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany.

In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, Dr. Schulz and his colleagues identified the structural features that give elephant whiskers a kind of “built-in” intelligence, providing the sensitivity that the largest mammals on land need to navigate their world.

While other animals like rats can move their whiskers around, a behavior known as “whisking,” elephants lack the necessary muscles. That leaves their whiskers essentially stationary, even if they protrude from the flexible trunk. This puzzled Dr. Schulz, who had previously studied the movement of their trunks.

“If elephant trunk whiskers can’t move, there’s probably something built into them that allows them to” function in a way similar to mammals that whisk, Dr. Schulz said.

To find out, Dr. Schulz gathered scientists from many fields. Engineers, neuroscientists, biologists and material scientists were among the few who studied whiskers from baby and adult Asian elephants. (All elephant whiskers came from animals that had died naturally, and were donated by a zoo veterinarian; “We did not go up and pluck whiskers from elephants,” Dr. Schulz said.)

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https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/microglia-implicated-in-infantile-amnesia/

Microglia implicated in infantile amnesia

By Lauren Schneider

Microglia may be a key mediator between maternal immune activation and a pup’s memory of contextual fear conditioning in early infancy, a new mouse study reports.

The findings sharpen the picture of memory formation in early life, but the study’s approach to microglia has raised questions. That scrutiny comes as scientists reevaluate concepts such as synaptic pruning, through which microglia may shape neuronal circuits in early life and beyond.

Humans and rodents are unable to recall some of the earliest memories formed after birth. This period of infantile amnesia offers researchers a window to test conditions that may alter the survival of engrams, the changes in the brain tied to memory formation.

“Development is an experiment that nature does for you,” says study investigator Tomás Ryan, professor in neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin.

Activation of the immune system during pregnancy in mice leads to autism-like behaviors in their pups and reduces infantile amnesia, according to a previous study by Ryan’s team. Blocking microglial activity allows some infantile memories to persist in mice, Ryan and his colleagues report in the new paper, published 20 January in PLOS Biology.

Administering minocycline in water daily starting one day before foot-shock conditioning at postnatal day 17 led to greater fear memory at postnatal day 25, after the typical onset of infantile amnesia. This recall was accompanied by a reactivation of associated engrams in the basolateral amygdala and central amygdalar nucleus.

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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/feb/11/reading-writing-lower-dementia-risk-study-finds

Reading and writing can lower dementia risk by almost 40%

Andrew Gregory Health editor

Reading, writing and learning a language or two can lower your risk of dementia by almost 40%, according to a study that suggests millions of people could prevent or delay the condition.

Dementia is one of the world’s biggest health threats. The number of people living with the condition is forecast to triple to more than 150 million globally by 2050, and experts say it presents a big and rapidly growing threat to future health and social care systems in every community, country and continent.

US researchers found that engaging in intellectually stimulating activities throughout life, such as reading, writing or learning a new language, was associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, and slower cognitive decline.

The study author Andrea Zammit, of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, said the discovery suggested cognitive health in later life was “strongly influenced” by lifelong exposure to intellectually stimulating environments.

“Our findings are encouraging, suggesting that consistently engaging in a variety of mentally stimulating activities throughout life may make a difference in cognition. Public investments that expand access to enriching environments, like libraries and early education programs designed to spark a lifelong love of learning, may help reduce the incidence of dementia.”

Researchers tracked 1,939 people with an average age of 80 who did not have dementia at the start of the study. They were followed for an average of eight years. Participants completed surveys about cognitive activities and learning resources during three stages.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00414-1

Exercise rewires the brain — boosting the body’s endurance

Mariana Lenharo

Exercise pumps up your muscles — but it might also be pumping up your neurons. According to a study published today in Neuron1, repeated exercise sessions on a treadmill strengthen the wiring in a mouse’s brain, making certain neurons quicker to activate. This ‘rewiring’ was essential for mice in the study to gradually improve their running endurance.

The work reveals that the brain — in mice and, presumably, in humans — is actively involved in the development of endurance, the ability to get better at a physical activity with repeated practice, says Nicholas Betley, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and a co-author of the paper.

“You go for a run, and your lungs expand, your heart gets pumping better, your muscles break down and rebuild. All this great stuff happens, and the next time, it gets easier,” Betley says. “I didn’t expect that the brain was coordinating all of that.”

Betley and his colleagues were curious about what happens in the brain as people get stronger through exercise.

They decided to focus on the ventromedial hypothalamus, a brain region that regulates appetite and blood sugar. The team then zeroed in on a group of neurons in that region that produce a protein called steroidogenic factor 1 (SF1), which is known to play a part in regulating metabolism2. A previous study3 found that the deletion of the gene that codes for SF1 impairs endurance in mice.

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https://theconversation.com/living-in-space-can-change-where-your-brain-sits-in-your-skull-new-research-273663

Living in space can change where your brain sits in your skull

Rachael Seidler Tianyi (Erik) Wang

Going to space is harsh on the human body, and as a new study from our research team finds, the brain shifts upward and backward and deforms inside the skull after spaceflight.

The extent of these changes was greater for those who spent longer in space. As NASA plans longer space missions, and space travel expands beyond professional astronauts, these findings will become more relevant.
Why it matters

On Earth, gravity constantly pulls fluids in your body and your brain toward the center of the Earth. In space, that force disappears. Body fluids shift toward the head, which gives astronauts a puffy face. Under normal gravity, the brain, cerebrospinal fluid and surrounding tissues reach a stable balance. In microgravity, that balance changes.

Without gravity pulling downward, the brain floats in the skull and experiences various forces from the surrounding soft tissues and the skull itself. Earlier studies showed that the brain appears higher in the skull after spaceflight. But most of those studies focused on average or whole brain measures, which can hide important effects within different areas of the brain.

Our goal was to look more closely.
Astronauts need to exercise and take care of their bodies while in space.

We analyzed brain MRI scans from 26 astronauts who spent different lengths of time in space, from a few weeks to over a year. To focus on the brain’s movement, we aligned each person’s skull across scans taken before and after spaceflight.
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https://www.npr.org/2026/02/12/nx-s1-5711686/glp1-obesity-normal-weight-loss-bmi

Using GLP-1s to maintain a normal weight? There are benefits and risks

Yuki Noguchi

At just over 5 foot, 5 inches, Christie Woodard weighs a lean 125 pounds. She's also open about relying on a low-dose GLP-1 to keep her weight there. She says sometimes people question why she's on the drug, "because they look at me and think I'm at healthy weight, or maybe they even think I'm thin."

What people don't see is Woodard's previous struggles with obesity, which began in her 30s, and landed her at 260 pounds. She took up running half-marathons, but at that weight, it was painful.

"I was not fast," she says. "I had massive issues; I was in physical therapy constantly. I tore my meniscus."

Woodard, now 53 and living in Easton, Md., got gastric bypass surgery four years ago and cut her weight in half. Elated, she set a goal of completing half-marathons in all 50 states.

Her weight remained stable until last year, when pounds began creeping back, despite adhering to a strict diet and lots of exercise.

"I feel it in my knees, and mainly I feel it in my soul," she says. "I feel it in my confidence. It's messing with my head in a big way. I was terrified that I was going to go back to what I was."

So her bariatric surgeon, Dr. Betsy Dovec, prescribed a low dose of the drug Zepbound, even though Woodard's body mass index didn't technically classify her as overweight.

Dovec says Woodard isn't her only normal-weight patient on GLP-1s. "I prescribe medications for all types of people," she says. Though, she clarifies, she does not give the drugs to people for purely aesthetic reasons, like someone trying to shed a few pounds before an event, for example.