Extracellular recordings from the sensory pits, conspicuous sensory organs on the cuticle of planthopper nymphs (suborder Fulgoromorpha), were performed. No responses to sound, ultrasound, direct mech...

Oceans cover over 70% of the earth’s surface and house a dizzying array of organisms, including five species of the peppercorn-sized ocean-skater Halobates, which live exclusively at the ocean surface...

Bats use echolocation to get around, but it wasn’t clear how these creatures managed to navigate dense environments—until now

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Spatial attention supports navigation by prioritizing information from selected locations. A candidate neural mechanism is provided by theta-paced sweeps in grid- and place-cell population activity, which sample nearby space in a left-right-alternating pattern coordinated by parasubicular direction signals. During exploration, this alternation promotes uniform spatial coverage, but whether sweeps can be flexibly tuned to locations of particular interest remains unclear. Using large-scale Neuropixels recordings in freely-behaving rats, we show that sweeps and direction signals are rapidly and dynamically modulated: they track moving targets during pursuit, precede orienting responses during immobility, and reverse during backward locomotion — without prior spatial learning. Similar modulation occurs during REM sleep. Canonical head-direction signals remain head-aligned. These findings identify sweeps as a flexible, attention-like mechanism for selectively sampling allocentric cognitive maps. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, Synergy Grant 951319 (EIM) The Research Council of Norway, Centre of Neural Computation 223262 (EIM, MBM), Centre for Algorithms in the Cortex 332640 (EIM, MBM), National Infrastructure grant (NORBRAIN, 295721 and 350201) The Kavli Foundation, https://ror.org/00kztt736 Ministry of Science and Education, Norway (EIM, MBM) Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences; NTNU, Norway (AZV)

Papilio xuthus is a flower-foraging butterfly with sophisticated color vision. In the Papilio brain, the mushroom bodies (MBs) receive prominent visual input that is spatially segregated from olfacto...

Learn about neuroscience labs launched in the past two years, plus a few opening their doors in 2026.

Acoustic ecology introduces an additional dimension in plant-insect communication, revealing that female moths use ultrasonic emissions from dehydrated plants to guide oviposition decisions.

Nature - Using two-photon microscopy with a panoramic virtual reality setup, how head direction cells in larval zebrafish integrate visual landmarks and optic flow to track orientation is revealed.

Here, the authors use the diurnal upside-down jellyfish and the crepuscular starlet sea anemone as simple nerve net models to examine the potential evolutionary origins of sleep. They describe and define sleep patterns in these species, finding that sleep deprivation increases neuronal DNA damage and that sleep facilitates genome stability.