The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives

Featured

Research image of organoids derived from stem cell lines from people with intellectual disability, polymicroglia or microcephaly, alongside a control organoid.
Spectrum

New organoid atlas unveils four neurodevelopmental signatures

By Diana Kwon
17 December 2025 | 4 min read

Latest

Drug development

How basic neuroscience has paved the path to new drugs

Frameshift

Frameshift: Shari Wiseman reflects on her pivot from science to publishing

Brain waves

Dispute erupts over universal cortical brain-wave claim

Developmental neuroscience

Waves of calcium activity dictate eye structure in flies

Spectrum

Among brain changes studied in autism, spotlight shifts to subcortex

Organoids

What is the future of organoid and assembloid regulation?

Retraction

Exclusive: Springer Nature retracts, removes nearly 40 publications that trained neural networks on ‘bonkers’ dataset

Artificial intelligence

Seeing the world as animals do: How to leverage generative AI for ecological neuroscience

Today’s action potentials

ATTENDANCE ATROPHY
Alexandra Witze reports in Nature on how federal DEI restrictions and funding cuts are leading to depressed turnout at conferences for scientists from underrepresented backgrounds.
READ MORE
SEEING REPRESENTATIONS
In PLOS Computational Biology, Raj Magesh Gauthaman et al. find that “neural representations in [the] human visual cortex follow a remarkably consistent scale-free organization.”
READ MORE
BRAIN TO BODY
In a preprint, Adithya Gopinath et al. find evidence for midbrain dopamine neurons’ effect on the peripheral immune system: The cells form a circuit to the spleen that modulates splenic immunity.
READ MORE

Perspectives

Close up of thumb and forefinger holding a transparent red and white capsule pill with a lab inside it.
Drug development Microphone

How basic neuroscience has paved the path to new drugs

By Alex Kwan
15 December 2025 | 6 min read
Research image of a virtual environment simulating an animal’s viewpoint close to the ground.
Artificial intelligence Microphone

Seeing the world as animals do: How to leverage generative AI for ecological neuroscience

By Shahab Bakhtiari
8 December 2025 | 8 min read
A hand holds a clear rectangular prism up to a series of abstract patterns, offering a new view of them.
Behavioral neuroscience Microphone

Beyond the algorithmic oracle: Rethinking machine learning in behavioral neuroscience

By Nedah Nemati, Matthew Whiteway
3 December 2025 | 7 min read
Illustration of a group of neurons.
This paper changed my life Microphone

This paper changed my life: Nancy Padilla-Coreano on learning the value of population coding

By Nancy Padilla-Coreano
1 December 2025 | 5 min read
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Spectrum logo
Spectrum

Home makeover helps rats better express themselves: Q&A with Raven Hickson and Peter Kind

By Holly Barker
4 December 2025 | 0 min watch
Spectrum

Insights on suicidality and autism; and more

Spectrum

Autism scientists push back on CDC’s inaccurate vaccine claims

A child sits at a table moving around small cutout drawings.
Spectrum

Genetic profiles separate early, late autism diagnoses

By Natalia Mesa
27 November 2025 | 5 min read
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Funding and policy

Complex stack of rectangular prisms.
Community

Neurophysiology data-sharing system faces funding cliff

By Lauren Schneider
17 November 2025 | 5 min read
Kevin B Marvel.
Teaching

A change at the top of SfN as neuroscientists gather in San Diego

By Natalia Mesa
16 November 2025 | 6 min read
Illustration of coins falling through space.
Funding

Establishing a baseline: Trends in NIH neuroscience funding from 2008 to 2024

By Natalia Mesa
15 November 2025 | 8 min read
A book in which one page is a door.
Industry

How will the field’s relationship to industry change over the next decade? Will a larger neurotechnology sector emerge?

By The Transmitter
15 November 2025 | 10 min read
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Craft and careers

Collage illustration of Shari Wiseman.
Frameshift

Frameshift: Shari Wiseman reflects on her pivot from science to publishing

By Katie Moisse
15 December 2025 | 7 min read
Two hands hold a paper airplane.
Training

How will neuroscience training need to change in the future?

By The Transmitter
15 November 2025 | 11 min read
A tree limb-like pattern superimposed over a landscape.
Craft and careers

Tracing neuroscience’s family tree to track its growth

By Stephen David
15 November 2025 | 7 min read
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Features

Illustration of two hands holding an abstract geometric object that resembles a human brain.
Neuroscience

The state of neuroscience in 2025: An overview

The Transmitter presents a portrait of the field through four lenses: its focus, its output, its people and its funding.

By The Transmitter
15 November 2025 | 4 min read
Illustration of a neuron.
Neurodegenerative disorders Microphone

New questions around motor neurons and plasticity

A researcher’s theory hangs muscle degeneration on a broken neural circuit.

By David Adam
10 October 2025 | 9 min read
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This paper changed my life

Abstract illustration of a synaptic vesicle.
This paper changed my life Microphone

This paper changed my life: Sandra Jurado marvels at the first-ever 3D model of a synaptic vesicle

By Sandra Jurado
21 October 2025 | 5 min read
Illustration of human figures holding brightly colored connected dots.
This paper changed my life Microphone

This paper changed my life: Dan Goodman on a paper that reignited the field of spiking neural networks

By Dan Goodman
17 September 2025 | 5 min read
Illustration of a musical staff with notes represented by neurons.
This paper changed my life Microphone

This paper changed my life: Abigail Person on birdsong, feed-forward circuits and convergent computations

By Abigail Person
12 August 2025 | 5 min read
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Publishing

A stack of papers topped by many paper shreddings against a red background.
Retraction Microphone

Exclusive: Springer Nature retracts, removes nearly 40 publications that trained neural networks on ‘bonkers’ dataset

By Calli McMurray
8 December 2025 | 5 min read
Stack of papers.
Publishing

What are the most-cited neuroscience papers from the past 30 years?

By The Transmitter
15 November 2025 | 11 min read
Portion of The Transmitter’s state of neuroscience semantic map.
Publishing

Putting 50 years of neuroscience on the map

By The Transmitter
15 November 2025 | 3 min read
A man with glasses reads from a paper with a graph-like pattern of peaks and valleys on it.
Community

The buzziest neuroscience papers of 2023, 2024

By Calli McMurray, Francisco J. Rivera Rosario
15 November 2025 | 18 min read
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PROFILES

Stars shooting upward.
Early-career researchers

The Transmitter ’s Rising Stars of Neuroscience 2025

By Francisco J. Rivera Rosario, Lauren Schneider
15 November 2025 | 23 min read
Composite of headshots of researchers who opened new labs in the past several years.
Community

The Transmitter’s New Lab Directory

By Francisco J. Rivera Rosario
15 November 2025 | 21 min read
Nachum Ulanovsky sits against a black background with one bat in his hands and another with its wings spread above his head.
Neuroethology Microphone

Diving in with Nachum Ulanovsky

By Claudia López Lloreda
16 October 2025 | 14 min read
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Systems neuroscience

Psychedelics Microphone

Psilocybin rewires specific mouse cortical networks in lasting ways

By Siddhant Pusdekar
5 December 2025 | 0 min watch
Two bouncing balls.
Neuroscience

What are the fastest-growing areas in neuroscience?

By The Transmitter
15 November 2025 | 6 min read
Collage illustration of a brain, people looking at the brain, and geometric shapes.
Systems neuroscience Microphone

Neuroscience needs engineers—for more reasons than you think

By Timothy O’Leary
3 November 2025 | 8 min read
Illustration of a series of floating pools of water overflowing into each other.
Neural dynamics Microphone

The missing half of the neurodynamical systems theory

By Xiao-Jing Wang
27 October 2025 | 8 min read
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Books

A see-through human brain with circuits inside it.
Language

‘Wired for Words: The Neural Architecture of Language,’ an excerpt

By Gregory Hickok
2 December 2025 | 8 min read
Colorful drawing of a human brain.
Organoids

‘Neuroethics: The Implications of Mapping and Changing the Brain,’ an excerpt

By Walter Glannon
11 November 2025 | 7 min read
Colored outlines form the silhouette of a human brain in profile.
Memory

‘How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past,’ an excerpt

By Steve Ramirez
7 November 2025 | 9 min read
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The big picture

Illustration of a series of shapes, with a few resembling human eyes.
The big picture

The visual system’s lingering mystery: Connecting neural activity and perception

Figuring out how the brain uses information from visual neurons may require new tools. I asked 10 neuroscientists what experimental and conceptual methods they think we’re missing.

By Grace Lindsay
13 October 2025 | 24 min read
A drosophila connectome.
The big picture Microphone

One year of FlyWire: How the resource is redefining Drosophila research

We asked nine neuroscientists how they are using FlyWire data in their labs, how the connectome has transformed the field and what new tools they would like to see in the future.

By Francisco J. Rivera Rosario
7 October 2025 | 17 min read
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