Methods

Recent articles

New tissue-clearing techniques let microscopes peer deeper into living brains

Washing mouse brain tissue with a blood protein or complex sugar can illuminate cells 550 micrometers into the cortex without compromising its normal physiology.

By Calli McMurray
18 October 2024 | 0 min watch
Illustration of three figures standing in front of a grid of dots and a world map.

The S-index Challenge: Develop a metric to quantify data-sharing success

The NIH-sponsored effort aims to help incentivize scientists to share data. But many barriers to the widespread adoption of useful data-sharing remain.

By Loren Frank
8 October 2024 | 6 min listen

Octopus arm anatomy, molecular makeup revealed in new maps

The datasets provide “a very nice reference” for future functional studies.

By Calli McMurray
25 September 2024 | 1 min watch
Photograph of a child sitting at a laptop and performing an executive function test.

Brain imaging at the fair with Ka Ip

Does environment affect how children from diverse backgrounds perform on tests of executive function? Ip went to the Minnesota State Fair to find out.

By Angie Voyles Askham
24 September 2024 | 9 min read
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Kim Stachenfeld on the dance between neuroscience and artificial intelligence

As a researcher at both Google DeepMind and Columbia University, Stachenfeld offers cross-disciplinary insight into how to understand the brain.

By Paul Middlebrooks
11 September 2024 | 93 min listen
Illustration of three figures cleaning data with brooms and brushes.

A README for open neuroscience

Making data (and code) useful for yourself automatically makes it useful for others.

By Samuel Gershman
9 September 2024 | 5 min read
Illustration of a blue face with sunglasses.

Neuroscience needs a career path for software engineers

Few institutions have mechanisms for the type of long-term positions that would best benefit the science.

By Gaëlle Chapuis, Olivier Winter
19 August 2024 | 7 min listen
Research image of neurons firing in the hippocampus of Egyptian fruit bats.

Egyptian fruit bats’ neural patterns represent different experimenters

The findings underscore the importance of accounting for “experimenter effects” on lab animals.

By Sneha Khedkar
13 August 2024 | 4 min read
Illustration of a single digitally rendered figure wandering a fragmented and distorted virtual environment.

Nonsense correlations and how to avoid them

This statistical error is common in systems neuroscience. Fortunately, straightforward methods can help you prevent it.

By Kenneth Harris
12 August 2024 | 6 min listen
Photograph of a neuroscience research training workshop in Africa.

Addressing the lack of infrastructure and training that stymies African neuroscience

A newly launched research center in Nigeria could offer a model for expanding neuroscience across the continent.

By Mahmoud Bukar Maina
29 July 2024 | 6 min read

Explore more from The Transmitter

New catalog charts familial ties from autism to 90 other conditions

The research tool reveals associations stretching across three generations.

By Charles Q. Choi
17 October 2024 | 4 min read
Illustration of three columns of text with certain passages underlined and circled.

This paper changed my life: ‘Spontaneous cortical activity reveals hallmarks of an optimal internal model of the environment,’ from the Fiser Lab

Fiser’s work taught me how to think about grounding computational models in biologically plausible implementations.

By Megan Peters
16 October 2024 | 5 min read
Research image of brain scans showing the density of neuronal synapses.

SYNGAP1; executive function; synaptic density

Here is a roundup of autism-related news and research spotted around the web for the week of 14 October.

By Jill Adams
15 October 2024 | 2 min read