neuropharmacology

K2P channels underlie background K+ currents that act as brakes on neuronal excitability. In the somatosensory system, the K2P channels TASK-1 and TASK-3 play a relevant role in cold sensing, mechanosensitivity, and pain. Combining molecular docking and molecular dynamic simulations, patch-clamp recordings of recombinant channels, Ca2+-imaging and patch-clamp analysis in cultured primary somatose…

BackgroundAdolescent depression, characterized by high incidence rates and significant recurrence risks, has emerged as a major global public health concern. Current diagnosis relies predominantly on subjective questionnaires, lacking objective biomarkers and presenting challenges for early identification. Although exercise intervention is recommended as a safe and effective first-line non-pharma…

(Wired) – With $500 million in funding and a reported $2.5 billion valuation, Flourish wants to reinvent AI by putting real neurons under the microscope. Here’s what Bezos, sitting on his yacht somewhere, read while Williams anxiously watched on Zoom: … Read More

A new study has uncovered how antidepressants affect different groups of serotonin-producing brain cells in opposite ways, offering new insights into why selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) can cause unpleasant side effects at the start of treatment but lead to symptom relief over time.

One-third of people with anorexia nervosa don’t recover and treatment has remained stagnant for years. Now we’re beginning to understand how the condition takes over the mind

Scientists have uncovered a key brain signal that helps us break old habits and adapt when circumstances suddenly change. By watching mice navigate a virtual maze, researchers found that disappointment—when an expected reward failed to appear—triggered a surge of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, making the animals more likely to try a new strategy. When acetylcholine was blocked, the mice beca…

A surprising gut-brain discovery suggests that anxiety could one day be treated with specially designed probiotics. Could anxiety be shaped, at least in part, by tiny organisms living in the gut? Research from Duke-NUS Medical School and the National Neuroscience Institute of Singapore points to a striking connection between gut microbes and anxiety-related behavior. The [...]

IntroductionAmbient glutamate is capable of regulating neural excitability and contributes to several brain pathologies. It is well established by experiments on rodent tissue that extrasynaptic glutamate –mainly regulated by astrocytic glutamate uptake- can elicit both phasic slow inward currents (SICs) and tonic inward currents. These currents are thought to be mediated by overlapping mechanism…

Every engineering team has a version of this story. It’s 2 AM. Redis is down. The on-call engineer opens Slack, searches “Redis ECONNREFUSED”, scrolls through 847 messages, finds a thread from eight months ago, tries to understand what Arjun did that night, realizes the thread is incomplete, opens three runbooks, finds nothing specific, and spends 45 minutes figuring out something the team has al…

I spent two semesters building an AI agent that runs penetration tests. For the non-hackers in the room, penetration tests are basically security assessments where you try to break into a system to find vulnerabilities before someone else does. My project aims to automate this process. It proposes commands, executes them on an isolated virtual machine over SSH, and chains together multi-step atta…

Nature Communications, Published online: 06 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41467-026-73903-6 In this study, the authors present that cholecystokinin-positive interneurons (CCK-INs) in hippocampal dorsal CA2 are essential for social memory encoding in male mice by mediating disinhibition of pyramidal neurons. Deficiency of Neuroligin 1 disrupts CCK-INs activity and induces social memory impairments, offe…

Neuropsychopharmacology, Published online: 05 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41386-026-02459-2 Role of submedius thalamus and its interaction with orbitofrontal cortex in incubation of oxycodone craving

Neuropsychopharmacology, Published online: 05 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41386-026-02457-4 GABAergic neurons in the ventrolateral periaqueductal gray mediate fentanyl withdrawal and self-administration in mice

New research shows that psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, reduces chronic nerve pain in mice. It also significantly enhances the performance of common pain drugs, suggesting the psychedelic might fundamentally rewire how the brain processes pain.

IntroductionChronic neuroinflammation disrupts oligodendrocyte differentiation and limits effective remyelination across multiple neurological disorders. Among the molecular regulators integrating inflammatory cues with oligodendrocyte maturation, G protein-coupled receptor 17 (GPR17) has emerged as a critical checkpoint. Physiologically, GPR17 expression is low in early oligodendrocyte precursor…

Metabolic dysregulation is increasingly being recognized as a hallmark across various neurodegenerative diseases. While Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is well-established as a dual proteinopathy characterized by amyloid-beta (Aβ) deposition and tau protein tangles, the specific mechanisms mediating lipid homeostasis imbalance have garnered increasing attention. However, translating these findings into …

A team at Northwestern University has developed printable artificial neurons capable of triggering real neural activity in living tissue, according to a study published in Nature Nanotechnology. The finding matters because lab-built hardware isn’t just simulating brain signaling but producing responses indistinguishable enough from biological signals that actual neurons react to them. Led by prof…

Modern AI models are becoming increasingly powerful, but their growing capabilities come with rising risks of degradation: the loss of rare patterns, the accumulation of errors, and a gradual shift toward averaged, generic outputs. A11 does not try to replace existing approaches — it offers a different way to work with these risks: to record gaps, avoid smoothing contradictions, and use the tensi…

I had a hypothesis I was pretty excited about: that you could detect a multi-agent system going off the rails before it actually fails — early enough to stop it. If true, that's a product. If false, I wanted to know in a month, not a year. So I ran it as an actual experiment. Here's what happened, including the part where the result didn't just come back negative — it came back backwards. The set…

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 04 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02266-4 Imaging axonal transport in vivo in the mouse cortex reveals that deficits in axonal transport arise at early stages of tau pathology, are caused by enlarged tau envelopes and are reversed by inhibiting MAPK p38α.