AI is altering how scientists study the brain

Animals actively sense their environment to extract features of interest to guide behaviors. For mammals, odors are prominent environmental features which are sampled by active modulation of sniffing ...

En modulant l’activité des astrocytes dans le cerveau de souris obèses, des chercheurs ont montré que ces cellules influent sur la flexibilité cognitive et sur le métabolisme corporel.

Striatal neural circuits control reward-associated behaviors but the role of astrocytes is still unclear. Here, the authors show that chemogenetic manipulation of striatal astrocyte in mice restore ob...

Nature Reviews Neuroscience - Recent years have seen a growth in our understanding of the biological drivers of eating disorders and their interactions with environmental and psychosocial factors....

The authors describe a sensory circuit involving the medial septum (MS), where MS glutamatergic neurons integrate food odours to prime satiety and regulate nutrient intake.

'DREAM Olfactory Mixtures Prediction Challenge 2025' (Synapse ID: syn64743570) is a project on Synapse. Synapse is a platform for supporting scientific collaborations centered around shared biomed...

This book gathers methods essential for investigating the multifaceted roles of astrocytes in both physiology and pathological conditions.

Nature - New data on brain-wide circuits centred around two interconnected hypothalamic neuron populations provide significant mechanistic insights into the emergence of social need during social...

Pour ce mois de février, j'ai souhaité mettre un coup de projecteur sur un handicap méconnu et souvent passé sous silence l'anosmie... Qu'est-ce que l'anosmie ? Ce mot vous rappelle peut-être vagu...

Glia is the top neurobiology journal for research into glial cells (also called gliocytes or neuroglia). Articles cover all aspects of glial cell biology in health and disease.

People with changes in the overall sensory experience of food often complain of taste disturbances, although the problem is normally caused by the loss of aroma in the food (thus an olfactory disorder...

Roughly 6,000 readers answered our poll, with many declaring that Bluesky was nicer, kinder and less antagonistic to science than X.

In many species, olfactory abilities in females are more acute than those in males. Studies in humans show that women have lower olfactory thresholds and are better able to discriminate and identify odors than men. In mice, odorants elicit faster activation from a larger number of olfactory bulb glomeruli in females than in males. Our study explores sex differences in olfaction in Long Evans rats from a behavioral and electrophysiological perspective. Local field potentials (LFPs) in the olfactory bulb (OB) represent the coordinated activity of bulbar neurons. Olfactory gamma (65–120 Hz) and beta (15–30 Hz) oscillations have been functionally linked to odor perception. Spontaneous and odor-evoked OB LFPs were recorded from awake rats at the same time for 12 days. Odors used included urine of both sexes and monomolecular odorants characterized previously for correlation of volatility with behavior and OB oscillations. Sampling duration in a habituation context, baseline gamma and beta power, and odor-elicited beta and gamma power were analyzed. We find that females sample odorants for a shorter duration than males (just over 1-s difference). Although baseline gamma and beta power do not show significant differences between the two sexes, odor-elicited gamma and beta power in females is significantly lower than in males. Neither sampling duration nor beta and gamma power in females varied systematically with day of estrus. We further verify that variance of these behavioral and physiological measures is not different across sexes, adding to growing evidence that researchers need not be concerned about often-claimed additional variance in female subjects. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Olfaction plays a large role in evolutionary processes. However, we know little about sex differences in olfactory bulb neurophysiology, and many scientists believe that females are more variable because of estrus. We show that female rats sniff odors for shorter durations than males and have lower power in neural oscillations related to cognition. Estrus was not related to variance in any measures. Finally, males and females show equal variance on these behavioral and physiological processes.