Ritchie Brown
sleepwakeeeg.bsky.social
Ritchie Brown
@sleepwakeeeg.bsky.social
Neuoscientist studying the brain circuitry controlling sleep, wakefulness and cortical rhythms
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
Slow-wave sleep is associated with nucleus accumbens volume in elderly adults

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Slow-wave sleep is associated with nucleus accumbens volume in elderly adults
Slow-wave sleep (SWS) is essential for restorative neural processes, and its decline is associated with both healthy and pathological ageing. Building…
www.sciencedirect.com
March 28, 2025 at 5:15 PM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
Bluetorial: My NIH grant got funded; The money is in the bank

What happens behind the scenes with NIH fund transfers
a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on
ALT: a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on
media.tenor.com
March 12, 2025 at 9:50 AM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
I was happy to #standupforscience2025 yesterday. And of course, I have been thinking about things I didn't have a chance to say.

Like because of the chaos at NIH (and the freezing of funding), how my team has been waiting for NOAs for two non-competing renewals since mid-January.

1/
March 8, 2025 at 9:50 PM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
Want to work in another country?

The HFSP postdoc fellowship supports proposals for frontier, potentially transformative research in the life sciences and cross-disciplinary. high-risk projects are encouraged
LOI opens March 13, 2025

#neuroskyence #academicsky 🧪🧠🪰🌱🧬
www.hfsp.org/funding/hfsp...
Postdoctoral Fellowships | Human Frontier Science Program
www.hfsp.org
March 1, 2025 at 10:11 PM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
share of americans who say the federal department of veterans affairs should be expanded: 46%

reduced: 5%

-yougov
February 27, 2025 at 9:01 PM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
"The basal forebrain & hippocampus were differentially associated with distinct neurocognitive domains, thus providing an intriguing biomarker for neurocognitive staging in Lewy body disease or individualized treatment concepts"
academic.oup.com/brain/advanc...
Hippocampus and basal forebrain degeneration differentially impact cognition in Lewy body spectrum disorders
Rau et al. investigate the effects of degeneration of the hippocampus and basal forebrain on cognition in Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia. They
academic.oup.com
February 23, 2025 at 8:13 PM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
Great article by @eliowa.bsky.social saying thank you & discussing importance of the Department of Veterans Affairs, VA researchers & our nations veterans for 100 years of service on the battlefield & their commitment towards improving medical care through research
www.thegazette.com/guest-column...
Opinion: A century of research improving veteran health
Downtown Iowa City aerial looking south on Tuesday, May 29, 2012, in Iowa City, Iowa. Veterans Administration Hospital is at …
www.thegazette.com
February 20, 2025 at 5:11 PM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
Just very happy to have our paper out today! A big thanks to all our co-authors, and to Nikolai and @steinaerts.bsky.social for the teamwork over the past years. If you are interested in using our models for cross-species enhancer studies, check out crested.readthedocs.io/en/stable/mo... 🙂
February 14, 2025 at 10:08 AM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
"the extremely strong desire is to just punish universities [..] It’s not based on any kind of coherent policy agenda. It’s just a desire to inflict pain."

This, is critical to understand. Pointing out "it's hurting us" won't do, since it's the whole point.

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/o...
Opinion | Trump Wants to Destroy All Academia, Not Just the Woke Parts (Gift Article)
The administration’s war on universities defies rational self-interest.
www.nytimes.com
February 14, 2025 at 1:54 PM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
Come hear me spill the tea on caffeine versus theophylline and what in tea might ease anxiety. And of course, what salt might do to improve a cup. Registration is free. www.acs.org/acs-webinars... #chemsky
Steeped in Science: The Chemistry Inside Your Perfect Cup of Tea - American Chemical Society
Learn the chemistry behind the different styles of tea and how to use science to brew a better cup!
www.acs.org
February 5, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
🧪 #medsky

Oxygen is essential for humans. But breathing less oxygen long-term shows surprising healing powers in pre-clinical (animal) studies.

It's intriguing to think that one day 'oxygen diet' may become a treatment for some genetic (mitochondrial) diseases, heart damage, and brain disorders.
February 4, 2025 at 6:02 PM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
An early surge of norepinephrine along brainstem pathways drives sensory-evoked awakening

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Happy to see this great work (and some PdCO application) out in the wild.
January 30, 2025 at 1:52 PM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
📢 New preprint from the lab:

We are very excited to report the discovery of an oscillation in the Central Thalamus using rare direct recordings of human thalamic electrophysiology.

The novel oscillation is tightly coupled to specific, natural states of consciousness.🧵
Thalamic oscillations distinguish natural states of consciousness in humans https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.28.635248v1
January 29, 2025 at 3:05 PM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
Timing patterns of brainwaves created by a sleeping brain, known as sleep spindles, are so individually distinct that they could function like fingerprints. The framework could pave the way for the development of sleep biomarkers. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
January 23, 2025 at 3:39 PM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
We begin the New Year with two preprints on hypothalamic development. The first, part of a long-term collaboration with Marysia Placzek’s group, investigates the organization of the developing forebrain, and show that current models are (mostly) incorrect./1
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Resolving forebrain developmental organisation by analysis of differential growth patterns
The forebrain is the most complex region of the vertebrate CNS, and its developmental organisation is controversial. We fate-mapped the embryonic chick forebrain using lipophilic dyes and Cre-recombin...
www.biorxiv.org
January 11, 2025 at 11:36 PM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
Targeting transcription factors that label novel cell types can be a great way to discover new mechanisms of behavioral regulation. This study, where we identified Lhx6-positive zona incerta cells as critical regulators of sleep pressure, is a good example./3
www.nature.com/articles/nat...
Lhx6-positive GABA-releasing neurons of the zona incerta promote sleep - Nature
GABAergic Lhx6+ neurons in the ventral zona incerta promote both rapid eye movement and non-rapid eye movement sleep and inhibit the activity of wake-promoting GABAergic and Hcrt+ neurons of the later...
www.nature.com
January 12, 2025 at 3:15 PM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
Our second preprint, which was spearheaded by @thomasdwkim.bsky.social, uses single-cell multiomic analysis to identify gene regulatory networks controlling neurogenesis and cell fate specification in mouse hypothalamus and prethalamus./1
biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...
January 12, 2025 at 3:08 PM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
For those who missed it when I told you a couple of weeks ago, and for those who need the NIH exact text:
January 9, 2025 at 10:23 PM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
A reminder: for genotypes to produce phenotypes, they have to go through development
January 8, 2025 at 5:09 PM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
A comparative view of human and mouse telencephalon inhibitory neuron development

In this Review, Changuk Chung, Joseph Girgiss & Joseph Gleeson offer insights into the evolutionary diversity of neurodevelopment and its implications for brain disorders:
https://doi.org/10.1242/dev.204306
January 7, 2025 at 4:29 PM
I hate VAR
December 26, 2024 at 9:30 PM
Sad to hear the news from Magdeburg. Thinking of my friends there
December 21, 2024 at 11:55 AM
Reposted by Ritchie Brown
When I read a new interview from Harris’s Dep Campaign Manager, it hit home for me because it was something I have warned about for years. Dems are losing the Information War, but there is one big way they can turn things around. open.substack.com/pub/meidasto...
The One Big Reason Why Dems Are Losing the Information War
The good news is, this can be fixed with a new approach.
open.substack.com
December 17, 2024 at 3:56 PM