Science

A new postmortem study is drawing attention to the chemistry of the human brain after suicide, suggesting that patterns in fatty molecules may be linked not only to suicidal death but also to age and environmental experience. Published in Translational Psychiatry, the exploratory research examined lipid composition in the anterior cingulate cortex, a brain region inv...

Vampire bats are confronting a rapidly changing night-time world, and a new study suggests that human disturbance can reshape not only where these animals sleep, but also how they behave after leaving their roosts. Published in Scientific Reports, the research by Ribeiro, Zariquiey, Chavez and colleagues examines roost switching and behavioural shifts among vampire b...

Encephalitis in children can begin with symptoms that seem psychiatric, behavioral, or nonspecific: sudden anxiety, insomnia, confusion, seizures, abnormal movements, speech loss, or a dramatic change in personality. Behind some of these cases lies anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, an autoimmune disorder in which the immune system produces antibodies against a key protein on t...

A cellular recycling system has emerged as a potential early intervention point in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), according to a study reporting that autophagy induction reduced the formation of abnormal FUS protein aggregates and limited early synaptic dysfunction in a FUS-ALS model. The work, published in Cell Death Discovery, focuses on the neuromuscular jun...

For decades, machines have been trained to recognize speech, classify environmental sounds and analyze music as separate technical problems. A new review argues that this fragmented approach is giving way to a broader ambition: building machines with something closer to general auditory intelligence. Instead of treating audio as a narrow stream of acoustic signals, researcher...