Biometric data relating to human cognitive, affective, and conative states (“cognitive biometrics”) are not adequately protected under existing privacy laws. The authors argue for an expansive approach that would treat neural and cognitive biometric data holistically as categories of “sensitive data” and provide them with analogous privacy protections ..read more

Collaborative neuroscience requires systematic data management and analysis. How this is best done in practice remains unclear. Based on a survey across collaborative neuroscience projects, Schottdorf et al. document the current state of the art focusing on data integration, sharing, and researcher training. Schottdorf et al. propose best practices and list actions and policies to attain these goals ..read more

Now entering its second decade, the National Institutes of Health Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative, or the NIH BRAIN Initiative, has yielded remarkable success, accelerating research on the neural circuit basis of behavior and breaking new ground toward the treatment of complex human brain disorders ..read more

In an interview with Neuron, Cori Bargmann discusses C. elegans as a model organism, the importance of considering the animal’s own world (thinking like a worm), choosing a scientific problem, and her experience as head of science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and co-chair of the BRAIN Initiative ..read more

In this issue of Neuron, Zada et al. examine how linguistic information flows from a speaker’s brain to a listener’s brain during face-to-face spontaneous conversation. The authors use intracranial recordings from five pairs of epilepsy patients and neural network language models to establish the existence of an abstract, linguistic space that is shared during conversation ..read more

While the enteric nervous system (ENS) is highly dynamic during development, the extent to which it is capable of repair remains unclear. In this issue of Neuron, Stavely et al. show that enteric neurons can reinnervate damaged regions to regain functionality using a glial positioning system (GPS) as their guide ..read more

Tunneling nanotubes (TNTs) facilitate the exchange of intracellular cargo between cells. In this issue of Neuron, Scheiblich et al. reveal that TNTs selectively mediate the bidirectional transfer of cytoplasmic protein aggregates from neurons to microglia and mitochondria from microglia to neurons, thereby preserving neuronal health ..read more

The EU AI Act, the first comprehensive regulation of AI, came into effect in August. Here, Bublitz et al. provide an overview of the provisions that apply to the field of neurotechnology with respect to research and development and neuroscience practice and discuss some implications for the future ..read more

Neuronal activity-responsive gene expression regulates neural circuit plasticity. Griffith et al. review the critical role of cis-regulatory enhancer elements in orchestrating gene expression programs and highlight the promise of enhancer-focused studies to advance understanding of neural plasticity mechanisms ..read more

Blood-brain barrier (BBB) maintains homeostasis of the central nervous system, but it also hinders the delivery of most drugs into the brain. In this study, Xie et al. construct a human single-cell atlas for main BBB-forming cell types. This atlas offers new insights for understanding brain health and developing treatments ..read more