Eyewitness Memory - Ultrasound for Parkinson's - Locus Coeruleus - Anti-Depressants

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May 27, 2026, 6:48:07 AM (yesterday) May 27

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01618-1

Memory on trial: the new science of when to trust eyewitness testimony

R. J. Mackenzie

At dawn in late January 1998, two men entered the home of Betty Black in Farmers Branch, a suburb of Dallas, Texas. They killed her in an apparent burglary gone wrong. A few hours later, an eyewitness — Black’s neighbour — described what she had seen to police. She said that two white men with long hair had got out of a car and walked towards Black’s house in the early morning light.

The neighbour, Jill Barganier, went to the police station the next day and identified Richard Childs, a white man with long hair, as the car’s driver. Childs would later confess to his involvement and serve 16 years in prison.

Over the next week, the police homed in on 28-year-old Charles Don Flores as the second suspect. Flores had been seen with Childs on the morning of the murder, but he was a Latino man with short hair. On 4 February, Barganier was called to the police station. There, in an attempt to jog her memory, an officer used ‘forensic hypnosis’, a discredited practice that has since been discontinued in Texas and many other jurisdictions. During the session, he suggested to Barganier that one of the men might have had “neatly trimmed” hair. She once again described the passenger as a white man with long hair and then helped police to produce a composite sketch that looked nothing like Flores. She studied another photo line-up consisting of Flores and five other Latino men with short hair; she didn’t recognize any of them.

More than a year later, however, in March 1999, Barganier’s memory had changed. She testified in court that Flores was in the car, saying that she was “over 100 percent” sure that he was the man she had seen. In the absence of DNA evidence connecting Flores to the crime, this testimony became the cornerstone of the prosecution’s case. A jury convicted Flores of capital murder, and he is currently on death row.

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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/parkinsons-ultrasound-brain-shake-pain

Ultrasound aimed at the brain offers new hope for Parkinson’s patients

By Laura Sanders

This is a two-part series on Parkinson’s, detailing the daily struggles with the disease, new treatment programs and how patients’ lives have been impacted by emerging therapies. You can read the first part here.

The night before he had brain surgery to treat his Parkinson’s disease symptoms, Robert Goings couldn’t sleep.

“He was pacing all night,” says his wife, Diana. That’s because it hurt to stop moving. Normally, Goings’ restless movements, stiffness and muscle cramps were eased by medicine. But doctors wanted his symptoms unmasked for the procedure, which meant he was feeling them full blast. “My legs would cramp up, my arms, you know, everything would cramp up without the medication,” Goings says.

The next morning, last November 5, Goings, who at age 68 had been living with increasingly disruptive symptoms for years, slid into an MRI machine at Oregon Health and Science University, or OHSU, in Portland. While Goings was inside the MRI tube, doctors aimed 1,024 ultrasound beams at several spots deep in his brain, burning the problematic tissue there.

Afterward, Goings was wheeled to a recovery room. “He held out his hand — dead still,” Diana says. She remembers thinking, “Oh my God, I don’t believe this. It’s gone. Absolutely gone.”

In opting for this treatment, called high-intensity focused ultrasound, Goings has joined a small but growing number of people choosing to control their Parkinson’s symptoms with permanent lesions in their brain. Already, an estimated 50 to 60 people have undergone the surgery at OHSU, where the treatment calendar is booked up months in advance.

https://www.thetransmitter.org/locus-coeruleus/brains-blue-spot-possesses-unexpected-structure-function-ties/

Brain’s blue spot possesses unexpected structure-function ties

By Holly Barker

Neurons in the locus coeruleus, which provides norepinephrine to the rest of the brain and spinal cord, are more spatially and functionally diverse than previously thought, a new preprint finds. The work reveals how such a small structure located deep in the brainstem can influence a range of functions in multiple brain regions.

Locus coeruleus neurons show gene expression variations that track with differences in the cells’ shape and projection targets, the study found. And neurons that occupy opposite ends of the structure respond differently to the rewards mice receive during a learning task, suggesting that the neurons facilitate learning in distinct ways.

“This is the bread-and-butter work that the locus coeruleus field needed,” says Nelson Totah, associate professor of neurophysiology and pharmacology at the University of Helsinki, who was not involved in the study. “What they did here was not ask flashy questions [but] answer fundamental questions about this evolutionarily ancient nucleus, so I’m really glad to see this work.”

The locus coeruleus—which translates from Latin to “blue spot”—is named for the blue pigmented cells that synthesize norepinephrine. The structure was long thought to consist of homogeneous neurons that secrete norepinephrine in synchrony. But over the past two decades it has become increasingly clear that the region is structurally and functionally heterogeneous: It has two distinct neuronal subtypes that fire asynchronously and drive opposite behaviors in rats, according to papers published in 2018 and 2017, respectively.

The new findings suggest that the structure’s neurons are even more diverse and follow a precise organizational pattern: From one end of the region to the other, neurons show a spatial gradient in gene expression differences that map onto variations in the cells’ morphology, electrical activity and target regions, the new study found.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/science/rfk-jr-antidepressants-ssri-psychiatry.html

Kennedy’s Push to Curb Antidepressants Has Shaken Psychiatry

By Ellen Barry

Most years, when thousands of psychiatrists gather for the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, they walk past a scattering of protesters. There are Scientologists with megaphones; Falun Gong groups doing their exercises; and, often, former patients, saying they have been harmed by medications or electroconvulsive therapy.

This year, though, the profession is facing criticism from the highest levels of the federal government. The American Psychiatric Association gathered just 10 days after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a set of policies to encourage doctors to deprescribe, or assist patients in stopping, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants.

A current of anxiety ran through the meeting, held here this week. Many physicians in the crowd said they worried that Mr. Kennedy’s statements would prompt people to refuse medications, or to quit them and relapse. The plenary session erupted in applause when Dr. Marketa Wills, the organization’s chief executive, declared, “We will never support governmental interference in the practice of medicine.”

“We are standing tall for evidence-based care,” she continued. “We are standing tall against stigma, oversimplification, and anything that would move patients further away from the care that they need.”

But there were also signs that the field’s leaders are engaging, albeit cautiously, with Mr. Kennedy’s effort to curb overprescribing. Numerous sessions offered training in helping patients taper off medications. In July, the association’s president will take part in a panel convened by the Department of Health and Human Services to develop clinical guidance on tapering antidepressants.

In an interview, Dr. Wills said she had been “encouraged” by the invitation to participate in the panel, and she credited the administration with “putting mental health front and center.”