Neurons. Credit: Leterrier, NeuroCyto Lab, INP, Marseille, France When NIH launched The BRAIN Initiative® a decade ago, one of many ambitious goals was to develop innovative technologies for profiling single cells to create an open-access reference atlas cataloguing the human brain’s many parts. The ultimate goal wasn’t to produce a single, static reference map, but rather to capture a dynamic view of how the brain’s many cells of varied types are wired to work together in the healthy brain and how this picture may shift in those with neurological and mental health disorders. So I’m now thrill ..read more

Caption: Global partnerships fostered by NIH’s Fogarty International Center speed translation of scientific discoveries into lifesaving biomedical products. Credit: Gabe Bienczycki, PATH, Seattle Efforts over the past few years to end the COVID-19 pandemic clearly reveal how global health impacts individual wellbeing and national security. At NIH, the Fogarty International Center helps the other institutes become engaged with global health research, which investigates the dual burden of infectious disease and non-communicable disease. Global health research also encompasses data science, econo ..read more

Credit: Donny Bliss, NIH; Shutterstock/Vasyl Shulga If you’ve been staying up late to watch the World Series, you probably spent those nine innings hoping for superstars Bryce Harper or José Altuve to square up a fastball and send it sailing out of the yard. Long-time baseball fans like me can distinguish immediately the loud crack of a home-run swing from the dull thud of a weak grounder. Our brains have such a fascinating ability to discern “right” sounds from “wrong” ones in just an instant. This applies not only in baseball, but in the things that we do throughout the day, whether it’s hit ..read more

Biologists have long wondered how neurons from different regions of the brain actually interconnect into integrated neural networks, or circuits. A classic example is a complex master circuit projecting across several regions of the vertebrate brain called the basal ganglia. It’s involved in many fundamental brain processes, such as controlling movement, thought, and emotion. In a paper published recently in the journal Nature, an NIH-supported team working in mice has created a wiring diagram, or connectivity map, of a key component of this master circuit that controls voluntary movement. Th ..read more

One of the great mysteries in biology is how we humans ended up with such large, complex brains. In search of clues, researchers have spent years studying the protein-coding genes activated during neurodevelopment. But some answers may also be hiding in non-coding regions of the human genome, where sequences called regulatory elements increase or decrease the activity of genes. A fascinating example involves a type of regulatory element called a human accelerated region (HAR). Although “human” is part of this element’s name, it turns out that the genomes of all vertebrates—not just humans—co ..read more

All of us make many decisions every day. For most things, such as which jacket to wear or where to grab a cup of coffee, there’s usually no right answer, so we often decide using values rooted in our past experiences. Now, neuroscientists have identified the part of the mammalian brain that stores information essential to such value-based decision making. Researchers zeroed in on this particular brain region, known as the retrosplenial cortex (RSC), by analyzing movies—including the clip shown about 32 seconds into this video—that captured in real time what goes on in the brains of mice as th ..read more

Credit: Chen X, Cell, 2019 These colorful lights might look like a video vignette from one of the spectacular evening light shows taking place this holiday season. But they actually aren’t. These lights are illuminating the way to a much fuller understanding of the mammalian brain. The video features a new research method called BARseq (Barcoded Anatomy Resolved by Sequencing). Created by a team of NIH-funded researchers led by Anthony Zador, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, BARseq enables scientists to map in a matter of weeks the location of thousands of neurons in the mouse brain with gr ..read more

Caption: Confocal LNA-PRISM imaging of neuronal synapses. Conventional images of cell nuclei and two proteins (top row, three images on the left), along with 11 PRISM images of proteins and one composite, multiplexed image (bottom row, right). Credit: Adapted from Guo SM, Nature Communications, 2019 The NIH-led Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative is revolutionizing our understanding of how the brain works through its creation of new imaging tools. One of the latest advances—used to produce this rainbow of images—makes it possible to view dozens of ..read more

Credit: Lydia Polimeni, NIH What do you see in the faces above? We constantly make assumptions about what others are feeling based on their facial expressions, such as smiling or frowning. Many have even suggested that human facial expressions represent a universal language. But an NIH-funded research team recently uncovered evidence that different people may read common facial expressions in surprisingly different ways. In a study published in Nature Human Behaviour, the researchers found that each individual’s past experience, beliefs, and conceptual knowledge of emotions will color how he ..read more

Caption: Cortical organoid, showing radial glial stem cells (green) and cortical neurons (red). Credit: Sofie Salama, University of California, Santa Cruz In seeking the biological answer to the question of what it means to be human, the brain’s cerebral cortex is a good place to start. This densely folded, outer layer of grey matter, which is vastly larger in Homo sapiens than in other primates, plays an essential role in human consciousness, language, and reasoning. Now, an NIH-funded team has pinpointed a key set of genes—found only in humans—that may help explain why our species possesse ..read more