Prosthetic Retina - Disconnecting Sleep - Psychedelic Brain - Testosterone for Women
Breedlove, S
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/health/retinal-implant-macular-degeneration.html
Vision Restored Using Prosthetic Retinal Implant
By Gina Kolata
For the first time, researchers restored some vision to people with a common type of eye disease by using a prosthetic retinal implant. If approved for broader use in the future, the treatment could improve the lives of an estimated one million, mostly older, people in the United States who lose their vision to the condition.
The patients’ blindness occurs when cells in the center of the retina start to die, what is known as geographic atrophy resulting from age-related macular degeneration. Without these cells, patients see a big black spot in the center of their vision, with a thin border of sight around it. Although their peripheral vision is preserved, people with this form of advanced macular degeneration cannot read, have difficulty recognizing faces or forms and may have trouble navigating their surroundings.
In a study published Monday in The New England Journal of Medicine, vision in 27 out of 32 participants improved so much that they could read with their artificial retinas.
The vision that is restored is not normal: It’s black and white, blurry, and the field of view is small. But after getting the retinal implant, patients who could barely see gained on average five lines on a standard eye chart. The implant gets signals from glasses and a camera that projects infrared images to the artificial retina. The camera has a zoom feature that can magnify images like letters, allowing people to read, albeit slowly because with the zoom they don’t see many letters at a time.
“This is at the forefront of science,” said Dr. Demetrios Vavvas, director of the retina service at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, a specialty hospital in Boston. He was not involved in the study and emphasized that the implant was not a cure for macular degeneration. But he called it the dawn of a new technology that he predicted will significantly advance.
The treatment is only for people with a loss of retinal photoreceptors, so it would not work for other forms of blindness.
The study participants had an average age of 79 and had been told that once vision was lost, it was gone forever.
© 2025 The New York Times Company
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03388-8
Disconnecting part of the brain sends it into a deep sleep
Rachel Fieldhouse
Slow, sleep-like brain waves persist in part of the brain that has been surgically disconnected from the rest of the organ even though the person is awake. The findings1, published in PLoS Biology, add to researchers’ understanding of what conscious and unconscious brain states look like.
Children with severe epilepsy who do not respond to medication can undergo a surgical procedure called a hemispherotomy. During surgery, clinicians disconnect the part of the brain in which seizures originate from the rest of the brain, stopping them from spreading. The disconnected tissue is left in the skull and has an intact blood supply.
The team wanted to find out whether the disconnected part has some form of awareness — or was capable of exhibiting consciousness, says co-author Marcello Massimini, a neurophysiology researcher at the University of Milan in Italy. “The question arises because we have no access” to the disconnected region, he says, adding that it was unclear what happens once part of the brain is isolated.
Studies investigating consciousness are difficult because there is no consensus on what conscious and unconscious states in the brain look like, says Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, a neuroscientist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. “There’s no generally accepted definitive signatures of consciousness in terms of electrical readings or brain activity,” he adds.
Even defining unconsciousness is challenging, because activities associated with consciousness, such as remembering dreams, can occur during states associated with unconsciousness, such as sleep or anaesthesia, Massimini says.
© 2025 Springer Nature Limited
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What Is Your Brain Doing on Psychedelics?
By Grigori Guitchounts
On a mellow spring night, I gazed at the setting desert sun in Joshua Tree National Park in California. The sun glowed a warm blood-orange and the sky shimmered pink and purple.
I had just defended my Ph.D. in neuroscience, and my partner and I had flown west to celebrate and exhale. It was early March 2020, and we were hoping to quiet our minds in the desert. I was also hoping to change mine.
I had been curious about psychedelics for years, but it wasn’t until I read How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan about the new science of psychedelics, that I felt ready. The book made a compelling case that psychedelics provided a fascinating introspective experience. Still, I was nervous. I’d heard stories about bad trips and flashbacks. I knew enough neuroscience to know these were serious drugs—compounds that could temporarily dismantle how the brain makes sense of reality and potentially change it irreversibly.
I also knew I was burned out. My Ph.D. had been hard in the way Ph.D.s often are: thrilling, lonely, disorienting. My advisor had left academia halfway through, and I’d spent years without much supervision, never quite sure whether I was on the right track and if I had a future in academia. But I didn’t take LSD seeking healing or clarity. I just wanted to see what the fuss was about. After years of hunkering down, I was craving a freeing experience.
What followed was strange, intense, and beautiful. The wooden floorboards of our cabin turned into a bustling cityscape. The mirror in the bathroom showed my face aged beyond recognition: The natural lines in my skin became deep wrinkles, my eyes sunken, as if time had decided to give me a sneak peak of what would come. Later, absorbed with coloring pencils, I watched the marks I was making dissolve in real time, as if the paper were being erased by invisible rain.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/magazine/testosterone-women-health-sex-libido-menopause.html
‘I’m on Fire’: Testosterone Is Giving Women Back Their Sex Drive
By Susan Dominus
Spend enough time speaking to women who are taking testosterone — specifically, in very high doses — and you start to notice that they sound messianic. They’re often talking fast and intensely; they’re amped up; they’re describing what they clearly consider a miracle drug; and they have no intention of lowering their dose, despite the unknown risks or some problems with facial hair. After all, how can they worry about facial hair when they feel so alive? It’s nothing they can’t take care of with a quick waxing, which they now have the energy to do at the end of the day — right after they prepare a high-protein dinner for their family and before they put the finishing touches on their spreadsheets, close their laptops and light a few mood candles for the sex that they know will be great, maybe even better than the sex they had last night, even though they’re a day older.
“It’s changed my marriage,” Jessica Medina, a 41-year-old marketing consultant in Orange County, Calif., told me. With four kids in the house, and sex happening six times a week (up from “How about never?” pre-testosterone), she had to put a lock on the bedroom door. She and her husband had attended a “marriage growth” group at church for years, but it took testosterone for their relationship to be, as she put it, “100 times closer.” She was a little less emotional, a little less sentimental than she used to be, but she didn’t have time for that kind of thing, anyway. “It’s more like: Get stuff done, handle business, work out,” she said. “In order to do all that and still have time for our kids and their sports, there’s no time to whine about how hard it is.”
Catherine Lin, a single mother who ran a bicoastal fashion media company, went on testosterone in her early 40s to raise her energy. She got the boost she wanted, started lifting heavier weights, decided to pursue a degree in holistic nutrition and enjoyed an unexpected side effect: She started having orgasms for the first time in years.
© 2025 The New York Times Company
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Gene-activity map of developing brain reveals new clues about autism’s sex bias
By Giorgia Guglielmi
Male and female human fetuses show distinct patterns of gene activity and DNA regulation in the cerebral cortex, according to a new analysis of thousands of individual brain cells.
The study offers one of the most detailed maps to date of how such activity differs between boys and girls’ brains during the second trimester. It also compares sex differences in gene activity in fetuses with spontaneous genetic changes in autistic people, revealing clues as to how these de novo changes affect boys and girls.
“As the field evolves, this [work] will be a helpful reference” for exploring sex-related molecular differences in early brain development, says Matthew Oetjens, assistant professor of human genetics at Geisinger Medical Center, who was not involved in the study. Understanding these differences may help explain why certain neurodevelopmental conditions are more common in one sex than the other, he says.
Autism, for example, is diagnosed about four times more often in boys than in girls, but scientists are still trying to understand why. Theories include the possibility that boys are more vulnerable, girls are sometimes protected, or a combination of both.
“We know that autism … has a very strong genetic component. What is not known is how the genetic risk architecture intersects with any differences at the molecular level that might exist between male and female human brains,” says study investigator Tomasz Nowakowski, associate professor of neurological surgery, anatomy and psychiatry, and behavioral sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.
More than 940 genes are expressed differently between the sexes, according to the new analysis of more than 38,000 brain cells from 21 female and 27 male mid-gestation fetuses. Most of these differentially expressed genes are more active in females.
© 2025 Simons Foundation
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Mental exercise can reverse a brain change linked to aging
Jon Hamilton
Scientists are reporting the first compelling evidence in people that cognitive training can boost levels of a brain chemical that typically declines with age.
A 10-week study of people 65 or older found that doing rigorous mental exercises for 30 minutes a day increased levels of the chemical messenger acetylcholine by 2.3% in a brain area involved in attention and memory.
This illustration shows a pink human brain with stick legs and stick arms. The pink stick arms are holding up a black barbell with black disk-shaped weights on each end. The background is light blue.
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The increase "is not huge," says Étienne de Villers-Sidani, a neurologist at McGill University in Montreal. "But it's significant, considering that you get a 2.5% decrease per decade normally just with aging."
So, at least in this brain area, cognitive training appeared to turn back the clock by about 10 years.
The chemical change observed after intensive brain training is persuasive, says Michael Hasselmo, director of the Center for Systems Neuroscience at Boston University, who was not involved in the study.
"It was compelling enough that I thought, 'Maybe I need to be doing this,'" he says.
The result backs earlier research in animals showing that environments that stimulate the brain can increase levels of certain neurotransmitters. Studies of people have suggested that cognitive training can improve thinking and memory.
Never skip brain day
The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, comes amid a proliferation of online brain-training programs, including Lumosity, Elevate, Peak, CogniFit and BrainHQ.
© 2025 npr
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