Neural Computing - ALS in Women - Disturbing Gulls - SSRIs & Teenagers

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Nov 12, 2025, 6:59:39 AM (12 days ago) Nov 12

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03633-0

The computers that run on human brain cells

David Adam

In a town on the shores of Lake Geneva sit clumps of living human brain cells for hire. These blobs, about the size of a grain of sand, can receive electrical signals and respond to them — much as computers do. Research teams from around the world can send the blobs tasks, in the hope that they will process the information and send a signal back.

Welcome to the world of wetware, or biocomputers. In a handful of academic laboratories and companies, researchers are growing human neurons and trying to turn them into functional systems equivalent to biological transistors. These networks of neurons, they argue, could one day offer the power of a supercomputer without the outsized power consumption.

The results so far are limited. But keen scientists are already buying or borrowing online access to these brain-cell processors — or even investing tens of thousands of dollars to secure their own models.

Some want to use these biocomputers as straightforward replacements for ordinary computers, whereas others want to use them to study how brains work. “Trying to understand biological intelligence is a very interesting scientific problem,” says Benjamin Ward-Cherrier, a robotics researcher at the University of Bristol, UK, who rents time on the Swiss brain blobs. “And looking at it from the bottom up — with simple small versions of our brain and building those up — I think is a better way of doing it than top down.”

Biocomputing advocates claim that these systems could one day rival the capability of artificial intelligence and the potential of quantum computers.

Other researchers who work with human neurons are more sceptical of what’s possible. And they warn that hype — and the science-fictional allure of what are sometimes labelled brain-in-a-jar systems — could even be counterproductive. If the idea that these systems possess sentience and consciousness takes hold, there could be repercussions for the research community.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/11/health/als-young-women.html

The Young Women Grappling With an ‘Old Man’s Disease’

By Roni Caryn Rabin

The most stressful part of the trip for Sunny Brous came when she had to part with her wheelchair so that the flight crew could put it in the luggage hold. You just never know what shape it will be in when you get it back, she said.

“I tell them, ‘Take the best care of it you can,’” she said. “Those wheels are my legs! Those wheels are my life.”

Ms. Brous, 38, who lives in Hico, Texas, was one of dozens of women who converged on the Sea Crest Beach Resort on Cape Cod toward the end of summer for the gathering of a club no one really wanted to be a member of: women diagnosed in their 20s and early 30s with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S.

The terminal neurodegenerative disorder robs them of the ability to talk, walk, use their hands or even breathe. It has long been seen as a disease of older men, who make up a majority of patients. There is no cure.

The women traveled with husbands, mothers, sisters and aides, and they did not travel light. Their packing lists included heavy BiPAP machines to help them breathe, formula for their feeding tubes, commodes, portable bidets, myriad chargers, leg braces and canes, pills and pill crushers and bottles of a medication with gold nanoparticles that was still being tested in clinical trials.

Half of Ms. Brous’s suitcase was filled with party gifts for the friends she texts with throughout the year on an endless WhatsApp chat, including bags of popcorn with Texan flavors like Locked and Loaded, a Cheddar, bacon, sour cream and chives combo that you can only get in Hico.

Desiree Galvez Kessler’s sister drove her, her mother and an aide up from Long Island in a van with a clunky Hoyer transfer lift in the back. Ms. Kessler — Desi to her friends — was diagnosed at 29, and has not been able to walk or speak for 10 years; the large computer tablet that she communicates with using eye-gaze technology is mounted on her wheelchair.

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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/nov/12/yelling-best-way-deter-gulls-uk-study-suggests

Worth a shout? Yelling is best way to deter gulls

Steven Morris

Some people respond to the unwanted attentions of a gull eyeing up a bag of chips or a Cornish pasty by frantically flapping their hands at the hungry bird while others beat a rapid retreat into the nearest seaside shelter. But researchers have found that a no-nonsense yell – even a relatively quiet one – may be the best way to get rid of a pesky herring gull.

Animal behaviourists from the University of Exeter tried to establish the most effective method of countering a feathery threat by placing a portion of chips in a place where gulls were bound to find them.

Once a gull approached, they played three recordings. First, a male voice shouting: “No, stay away, that’s my food, that’s my pasty!” Then, the same voice speaking the same words was played, followed by the “neutral” birdsong of a robin.
Study finds shouting is best way to get rid of pesky seagulls – video

They tested 61 gulls across nine seaside towns in Cornwall and found nearly half of the birds exposed to the shouting voice flapped away within a minute.

Only 15% of the gulls exposed to the speaking male voice flew off, though the rest walked away from the food, still apparently sensing danger. In contrast, 70% of gulls exposed to the robin song stayed put.

The volume of the “shouting” and “speaking” voices was the same, meaning the gulls seemed to be responding to the acoustic properties of the message rather than the loudness.

https://nautil.us/he-erased-memory-in-mice-then-thought-about-erasing-his-own-1247163/?_sp=33b0540a-5645-403f-b701-c7676f178387.1762947553868

He Erased Memory in Mice. Then Thought About Erasing His Own

By Kevin Berger

Steve Ramirez was feeling on top of the world in 2015. His father, Pedro Ramirez, had snuck into the United States in the 1980s to escape the civil war in El Salvador. Pedro Ramirez held jobs as a door-to-door salesman for tombstones, a janitor in a diner, and a technician in an animal lab. After years of ’round-the-clock work, Pedro Ramirez became a U.S. citizen. And here was his son, born in America, with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, still in his 20s, being celebrated as one of the most exciting and promising neuroscientists in the country.

Steve Ramirez had published research papers with his MIT mentor Xu Liu that reported how they used lasers to erase fear memories, spur positive memories, and even fabricate new memories in the brain. The experiments were only in mice. But they were impressive. Memories are made of networks of brain cells called engrams. The lasers targeted specific cells in engrams. Zap those cells and the whole engram was muted. The pair of neuroscientists gave a popular TED Talk on memory manipulation and were featured in international press stories that invariably mentioned the plotlines in the movies Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Inception could be real. Bad memories could be deleted. New memories could be implanted.

One night in 2013 Ramirez and Liu were celebrating the publication of one of their papers in a jazz lounge at the top of the Prudential Building in Boston. The music was grooving, and the city below glittered like stars. Ramirez thought, I’ve never been so happy and so fully alive.

In early 2015, Liu, age 37, died suddenly. There had been no warning signs. Ramirez had never had a friend like Liu. Liu opened his mind to experiences in science he couldn’t have imagined. Their relationship felt organic from Ramirez’s first day in the lab. Liu joked they would always have chemistry doing science together. Grief is when the future your brain plans for is cut off. Ramirez’s thoughts of doing science without Liu became a trapdoor that landed him in a cellar of pain.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/magazine/antidepressants-ssris-teen-sexual-side-effects.html

More Teens Are Taking Antidepressants. It Could Disrupt Their Sex Lives for Years.

By Daniel Bergner

Marie began taking fluoxetine, the generic form of Prozac, when she was 15. The drug — an S.S.R.I., a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor — was part of her treatment in an outpatient program for an eating disorder. It took its toll on her sexuality. “I was in touch with initial sparks of sexual energy relatively young,” she said, remembering crushes as far back as the age of 6 or 7. Shortly before starting on the drug, she was dazzled, from a distance, by a blue-eyed hockey player at school, tall and funny and charismatic. She recalled the fluster and fantasies he stirred. But on the medication, she felt the infatuation vanish swiftly.
Listen to this article, read by Eric Jason Martin

“And then,” Marie said, “I realized, Oh, I’m not developing new crushes.” She had no clue that the drug might be the cause: “I wasn’t informed about sexual side effects.”

Even as the worst of the eating disorder abated, psychiatrists and family doctors told Marie and her parents that she should stay on an antidepressant. She complied, while trying and failing to escape the sexual side effects. She traded fluoxetine for other antidepressants, including Wellbutrin, a different class of antidepressant, which is sometimes prescribed to combat low libido. She’s 38 now and has been off psychiatric medication for six years. But sexual desire remains absent. “For me it’s just an empty dark space,” she said. “There’s nothing there.”

Marie told me she has PSSD, post-S.S.R.I. sexual dysfunction, a loss of sexuality that persists after the drug is no longer being taken. It’s a controversial designation, because while the sexual side effects of S.S.R.I.s are well established — depleted or deadened desire, erectile dysfunction for men, elusive arousal for women, delayed and dulled orgasms or the inability to reach orgasm at all — the general assumption is that they subside completely when the drug is no longer in your system. Some psychiatrists suspect that PSSD is actually a result not of repercussions from the drugs but of the problem that led the patient to be medicated in the first place. Depression itself can stymie sexuality. So can anxiety, the other leading reason patients are prescribed S.S.R.I.s.

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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03677-2

Want a younger brain? Learn another language

Katie Kavanagh

Speaking multiple languages could slow down brain ageing and help to prevent cognitive decline, a study of more than 80,000 people has found.

The work, published in Nature Aging on 10 November1, suggests that people who are multilingual are half as likely to show signs of accelerated biological ageing as are those who speak just one language.

“We wanted to address one of the most persistent gaps in ageing research, which is if multilingualism can actually delay ageing,” says study co-author Agustín Ibáñez, a neuroscientist at the Adolfo Ibáñez University in Santiago, Chile. Previous research in this area has suggested that speaking multiple languages can improve cognitive functions such memory and attention2, which boosts brain health as we get older. But many of these studies rely on small sample sizes and use unreliable methods of measuring ageing, which leads to results that are inconsistent and not generalizable.

“The effects of multilingualism on ageing have always been controversial, but I don’t think there has been a study of this scale before, which seems to demonstrate them quite decisively,” says Christos Pliatsikas, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Reading, UK. The paper’s results could “bring a step change to the field”, he adds.

They might also “encourage people to go out and try to learn a second language, or keep that second language active”, says Susan Teubner-Rhodes, a cognitive psychologist at Auburn University in Alabama.