Summary: A growing number of researchers are urging that the body mass index (BMI) be retired as a standard measure of health. This simple height-to-weight ratio is increasingly seen as outdated and misleading: it does not capture where fat is stored, how much muscle someone has, or important factors such as age and ethnicity. Despite … Read more

Summary: Déjà vu — that uncanny impression that a present moment has already occurred — has long fascinated thinkers. Modern neuroscience treats it as a commonplace brain event: a brief mismatch between perception and memory that produces a vivid but false sense of familiarity. Research indicates that brief bursts of electrical activity in the temporal … Read more

Summary: A recent pre-registered study finds that misophonia—an intense negative emotional reaction to specific everyday sounds—is strongly associated with cognitive and emotional inflexibility. People with more severe misophonia had greater difficulty shifting between emotional tasks and reported persistent rigid thinking in daily life. The study also links misophonia with elevated rumination—repetitive negative thinking—which appears to … Read more

Summary: A new study shows that the brain’s social perception network — the system that processes faces, gaze and speech — is active at or shortly after birth. Advanced neonatal brain imaging reveals strong functional connectivity in regions responsible for visual and social processing. These early connections predict how infants attend to faces and may … Read more

Summary: Glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer, does more than damage brain tissue: it erodes the skull and reshapes the immune environment by changing the marrow inside the skull. Researchers found that tumors increase the number and size of tiny channels that link skull marrow to the brain, enabling waves of inflammatory immune … Read more

Summary: A large Finnish cohort study shows that mothers who experience difficulty bonding with their infants are more likely to have children with persistent sleep problems that continue into toddlerhood. Maternal bonding challenges measured at eight months were linked to sleep disturbances—such as frequent night awakenings, trouble falling asleep, and reliance on sleep associations—that still … Read more

Summary: Researchers have created a novel ultrasound device that can non-invasively stimulate several precisely defined points in the brain at the same time. This represents a major advance in transcranial neuromodulation: by using hologram-like wave interference and lower-intensity pulses, the method reduces risks such as overheating and uncontrolled excitation while improving control over which brain … Read more

Summary: Researchers report that postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) appears in nearly one-third of patients with severe long COVID, a far higher rate than in the pre-pandemic general population. The largest study to date on this topic found that primarily middle-aged women were affected and commonly experienced dizziness, rapid heart rate, fatigue, and impaired concentration. … Read more

Summary: Spatial memory — the brain’s ability to remember “where” — is among the earliest cognitive skills to decline with age and a characteristic sign of dementia. New research shows that in older mice, grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex — the brain’s internal GPS — become less stable and less precise, reducing the … Read more

Summary: A groundbreaking study identifies a biological route by which obesity may increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease: extracellular vesicles released from adipose (fat) tissue carry distinct lipid cargo that alters the rate of amyloid‑β plaque formation. Because these tiny vesicles can cross the blood–brain barrier, they provide a direct communication channel between body fat … Read more