Astrocytes Rule - Mushroom Supplements - PIEZO Everywhere - Autism Panel

[Breedlove, S]

https://www.quantamagazine.org/once-thought-to-support-neurons-astrocytes-turn-out-to-be-in-charge-20260130/

 Once Thought To Support Neurons, Astrocytes Turn Out To Be in Charge

By Ingrid Wickelgren

The human brain is a vast network of billions of neurons. By exchanging signals to depress or excite each other, they generate patterns that ripple across the brain up to 1,000 times per second. For more than a century, that dizzyingly complex neuronal code was thought to be the sole arbiter of perception, thought, emotion, and behavior, as well as related health conditions. If you wanted to understand the brain, you turned to the study of neurons: neuroscience.

But a recent body of work from several labs, published as a trio of papers in Science in 2025, provides the strongest evidence yet that a narrow focus on neurons is woefully insufficient for understanding how the brain works. The experiments, in mice, zebra fish, and fruit flies, reveal that the large brain cells called astrocytes serve as supervisors. Once viewed as mere support cells for neurons, astrocytes are now thought to help tune brain circuits and thereby control overall brain state or mood — say, our level of alertness, anxiousness, or apathy.

Astrocytes, which outnumber neurons in many brain regions, have complex and varied shapes, and sometimes tendrils, that can envelop hundreds of thousands or millions of synapses, the junctions where neurons exchange molecular signals. This anatomical arrangement perfectly positions astrocytes to affect information flow, though whether or how they alter activity at synapses has long been controversial, in part because the mechanisms of potential interactions weren’t fully understood. In revealing how astrocytes temper synaptic conversations, the new studies make astrocytes’ influence impossible to ignore.

“We live in the age of connectomics, where everyone loves to say [that] if you understand the connections [between neurons], we can understand how the brain works. That’s not true,” said Marc Freeman (opens a new tab), the director of the Vollum Institute, an independent neuroscience research center at Oregon Health and Science University, who led one of the new studies. “You can get dramatic changes in firing patterns of neurons with zero changes in [neuronal] connectivity.”

© 2026 Simons Foundation

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/29/magazine/wonder-day-mushroom-gummies.html

The Mushroom Gummies That Claim to Stimulate Your Brain

By Amy X. Wang

Alice, fumbling through Wonderland, comes across a mushroom. One bite of it shrinks her down in size. Chowing on the other side makes her swell up, huge, taller than the treetops. Urgently, Alice sets to work “nibbling first at one and then at the other, and growing sometimes taller and sometimes shorter,” until finally she succeeds in “bringing herself down to her usual height” — whereupon everything feels “quite strange.”

Is this Lewis Carroll’s 1865 fantasy tale or … the average body-conscious, improvement-obsessed 2026 Whole Foods shopper? Mushrooms, long venerated in literature as dark transformative forces, have become Goopified. Nowadays, you can chug “adaptogenic mushroom coffee,” slurp “functional mushroom cocoa,” doze off with “mushroom sleep drops” or ingest/imbibe any number of other tinctures in the billion-dollar fungal supplements market that promise to fine-tune, or even totally recalibrate, the self. The latest and hottest items in this booming new retail category are mushroom gummies, gushed over by wellness influencers, spilling out from supermarket shelves right there next to your standard cough drops and protein bars.

Fungi have aided medical advances like antibiotics and statins, it’s true, and certain species have shown promising results in fighting Parkinson’s or cancer — but what these pastel gumdrops proffer is a broader, more elliptical “cellular well-being.” The mystique feels intentional on product-makers’ part: Like Carroll’s baffled heroine, maybe you’re meant to be in a bit of thrall to the mysterious, almighty mushroom — lurching through Wonderland, charmed and confused by design. After all, you wonder, what are these ancient, alien creatures, growing in the secret dark? Hippocrates was supposedly using them to cauterize wounds around the 5th century B.C.E. In the Super Mario video games, mushrooms might give you extra lives; in HBO’s “The Last of Us,” they bring about the ruin of human civilization.

    © 2026 The New York Times Company


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https://www.thetransmitter.org/interoception/piezo-channels-are-opening-the-study-of-mechanosensation-in-unexpected-places/

PIEZO channels are opening the study of mechanosensation in unexpected places

By Calli McMurray

In 2010, Ardem Patapoutian unmasked a piece of cellular machinery that had long evaded identification: PIEZO channels, pores wrenched open by changes in a cell’s membrane tension to allow ions to flow through, thereby converting mechanical force into electrical activity. 

The discovery marked a turning point for the field of mechanosensation—a process that can be unwieldy to study, says Arthur Beyder, associate professor of physiology and medicine at the Mayo Clinic, because “it reaches its fingers into everything.” The field needed “something to grab onto,” he says, to untangle these processes from other sensory ones—and PIEZO channels provided the first handhold. 

The PIEZO discovery garnered much attention, and since then, a flurry of studies have outlined how the channels contribute to touch, itch and proprioception. In 2021, Patapoutian shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his contributions to this work. Now, a growing cadre of researchers is using these receptors as a tool to explore interoception, or the brain’s sense of what the internal organs are doing. 

“We’re seeing a resurgence and an expansion of research in this area,” says Miriam Goodman, professor of molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford University. The field, she adds, is in the middle of a “PIEZO-driven renaissance.” 

Even a body at rest is in constant motion: The heart pumps blood, the lungs expand and contract, the gut squeezes food, and the bladder stretches with urine. Biologists had intuited that mechanical force was a key part of these processes—and also part of how organs communicate with the brain—but for decades they did not have a way to dive into the molecular mechanisms behind them.
© 2026 Simons Foundation

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/29/health/autism-panel-kennedy-iacc.html

Kennedy Overhauls Federal Autism Panel in His Own Image

By Azeen Ghorayshi

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has overhauled a panel that helps the federal government set priorities for autism research and social services, installing several members who have said that vaccines can cause autism despite decades of research that has failed to establish such a link.

The panel, the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, was established in 2000 and has historically included autistic people, parents, scientists and clinicians, as well as federal employees, who hold public meetings to debate how federal funds should best be allocated to support people with autism.

The 21 new public members selected by Mr. Kennedy include many outspoken activists, among them a former employee of a super PAC that supported Mr. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, a doctor who has been sued over dangerous heavy metal treatments for a young child with autism, a political economist who has testified against vaccines before a congressional committee, and parents who have spoken publicly about their belief that their children’s autism was caused by vaccines.

The group, which also includes 21 government members across many federal agencies, will advise the federal government on how to prioritize the $2 billion allocated by Congress toward autism research and services over the next five years.

Though it’s not yet clear what the committee will do — or what it can do, given that it serves only an advisory function — many longtime autism advocates and researchers said they were alarmed by the fact that the committee seemed stacked to advance Mr. Kennedy’s priorities on vaccines.

“The new committee does not represent the autism community,” said Alison Singer, who served on the committee from 2007 to 2019. Ms. Singer, whose 28-year-old daughter has profound autism, is the head of the Autism Science Foundation. “It disproportionately, excruciatingly so, represents an extremely small subset of families who believe vaccines cause autism.”

    © 2026 The New York Times Company


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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/placebo-brain-activity-vaccine-antibody

A study hints positive thinking could strengthen vaccine immunity

By Simon Makin

Positive thinking may boost the body’s defenses against disease.

Increasing activity in a brain region that controls motivation and expectation, specifically the brain’s reward system, is linked with making more antibodies after receiving a vaccine. The finding suggests these boosts were related to the placebo effect, researchers report January 19 in Nature Medicine.

“Placebo is a self-help mechanism, and here we actually harness it,” says Talma Hendler, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University. “This suggests we could use the brain to help the body fight illness.”

The work is important because it “is first-in-human evidence of a relationship between brain reward systems and immune function,” says Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., who was not involved in the study. The study was not designed to test vaccine effectiveness. Larger studies, including more complete immune assessments, will be required to test this association as a medical intervention.

Scientists have found many links between the brain and bodily health. Both negative and positive mental states can affect the immune system, and studies in rodents have suggested that the brain’s reward network is involved in these effects.

To find out if the same circuitry was at play in humans, Hendler and colleagues trained healthy volunteers to regulate their brain activity using neurofeedback, a technique that uses brain imaging to show users the activity of the area they are trying to boost. The team randomly assigned 85 participants to receive training aimed at increasing activity in either their reward network or a different network, or to receive no training.
© Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.
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