Nature Neuroscience

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 19 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02363-4 Longitudinal MRI reveals that the cortex becomes relatively thicker years before amyloid positivity is detected on PET, providing insight into the earliest brain changes and potential consequences of amyloid accumulation in Alzheimer’s disease.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 19 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02395-w Brain activity is complex but not arbitrary, and some patterns dominate others, with dimensionality describing how many such patterns exist. The authors show how brain connectivity controls dimensionality, allowing complexity to vary across time and behavior.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 17 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02410-0 Mice flexibly reuse neurons specialized for stimulus processing and memory maintenance, regardless of the content, providing evidence for reusable modular organization in the brain.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 17 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02404-y Reawakening of endogenous retroviruses due to loss of chromatin compaction causes microglia to acquire aging-associated features, leading to perturbed tissue homeostasis and behavior.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 13 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02398-7 STARFISH, a method for visualizing endogenous mRNA translation, is used to show that tau is translated exclusively in neuronal dendrites and rapidly degraded by neuroproteasomes. Failure of this degradation leads to accumulation of tau aggregates.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 12 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02403-z The authors show that human neurons in bilateral corticolimbic sites fire together, modulated by working memory, and reinstate stimulus-selective firings when both sites briefly oscillate at 90 Hz, suggesting a mechanism for long-distance integration.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 11 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02416-8 On 11 July 2026, neuroscience lost one of its most visionary scientists with the passing of Susumu Tonegawa at the age of 86. Across an extraordinary career spanning more than five decades, Tonegawa pursued biology’s deepest mysteries with relentless curiosity and unwavering conviction, inspiring generations of …

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 11 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02400-2 Using cerebroids, a 3D ex vivo model of the human fetal brain, the authors show that IL-17A, a mediator of maternal immune activation linked to neurodevelopmental disorders, disrupts early human cortical development through NF-κB signaling.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 07 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02391-0 A multimodal cell-type atlas of the mouse insular cortex reveals specialized pyramidal types and circuits in distinct insular subregions, as well as intra-insular functional connections that integrate sensory inputs with valence.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 07 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02392-z Endocannabinoid-dependent corticostriatal plasticity underlies avoidance learning in mice after a single experience. Disrupting this process impairs learning, revealing a nonclassical synaptic basis supporting one-shot learning.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 06 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02380-3 Charbonneau et al. compare how the insula is structured and functions in humans, monkeys and rodents, revealing similarities and differences across species that are likely to impact the translation of animal research to humans.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 06 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02397-8 This study finds that shed NLGN3 interacts with the glycosylated surface protein CSPG4 on both normal and malignant glial cells, activating mechanotransduction pathways that drive glioma growth and maintain oligodendroglial progenitor states.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 06 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02375-0 Chiu et al. have developed engineered HTR2A mouse lines enabling in vivo mapping, targeting and modulation of receptor-expressing neurons and validated their utility across biochemical, electrophysiological and behavioral studies of psychedelic mechanisms.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 05 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02379-w This study shows that GPCR-based norepinephrine and dopamine sensors display crosstalk in several brain areas. Relative innervation densities determine the extent of crosstalk, and loss-of-function controls are required to interpret sensor signals.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 05 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02388-9 The authors present a dense connectomic reconstruction of a 0.1 mm3 hippocampal CA3 volume and reveal spatial gradients, high convergence and cell-type-selective feedforward inhibition of inputs to pyramidal cells.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 04 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02367-0 Klimmt, Cardoso Gonçalves et al. developed a reproducible human three-dimensional brain tissue model with neurons, astrocytes and microglia, replicating in-vivo-like maturation and enabling the study of Alzheimer’s disease-relevant perturbations and drug responses.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 04 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02382-1 Compositionality exists on a continuum of increasing complexity rather than as a binary trait. Studying its implementation in simpler biological and artificial systems is the most tractable path toward understanding its role in general intelligence.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 03 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02387-w Researchers discover a transient inhibitory cell type, and reveal that the developing cortex builds inhibitory diversity through three routes—early commitment, gradual diversification and selective elimination.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 03 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02350-9 The authors developed a new microscope that can measure and manipulate brain activity across multiple brain regions simultaneously with high precision, enabling scientists to study how spatially distributed brain circuits communicate and process information.

Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 03 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02406-w Rapid trajectory learning in mice and agents