Featured Story:
From Pills to Brain Stimulation: Public Views on Modulating Brain Function with Neurotechnologies
October 31, 2025
Rémy Furrer and Amanda Merner share the results of a survey of 1,052 U.S. adults, which found that neurotechnologies targeting motor symptoms were viewed as more acceptable and beneficial than those for mood or memory symptoms. Non-surgical options like transcranial magnetic stimulation were generally preferred over invasive ones such as deep brain stimulation.
Community Stories
August 20, 2025
New research reveals that acute and chronic insults both reshape how pain signals are sent to the brain, but through distinct mechanisms. By using long-term calcium imaging in mice, researchers from the Woolf lab tracked the same spinal cord neurons over time and found that acute pain temporarily increases sensitivity, while chronic nerve injury recruits a previously ‘silent’ group of neurons – offering a potential key to understanding chronic pain.
Original article in: Neuron >
August 13, 2025
Bryan Baxter and Dara Manoach share a new study on the brain basis of motor learning. When learning a typing task, epilepsy patients show higher rates of “hippocampal ripples”--an electrical activity pattern in the brain associated with memory formation--during brief rest breaks than during the typing itself. These ‘offline’ ripples predict gains in speed, suggesting that ripples contribute to motor learning during wakeful rest.
Original article in: Nature Communications >
July 17, 2025
Dost Öngür introduces a perspectives piece arising from a meeting he recently organized, bringing together experts in neuroscience, psychiatry, and metabolism to discuss how disruptions in brain energy metabolism may contribute to psychiatric disorders—and what might be done to develop innovative therapeutics.
Original article in: Nature Mental Health >
July 3, 2025
Connie Cepko provides an overview of her lab’s longstanding work developing gene therapies for ocular diseases using mouse and rat models. She shares images from studies on retinitis pigmentosa, the most common cause of inherited retinal degeneration worldwide—showing, for instance, how gene therapy can combat oxidation to prolong the survival of cone photoreceptors in the mouse retina, as well as preserve the retinal pigment epithelium.
In the News
November 10, 2025
The Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence has launched an ambitious new project that brings together the frontiers of biology and computing to uncover how genetic mutations in the brain give rise to epilepsy. This research is being led by Bernardo Sabatini and Beth Stevens.
November 10, 2025
New research from Christopher Walsh, Eunjung Alice Lee, Michael B. Miller, August Yue Huang, and colleagues, co-first authors Guanlan Dong and Chanthia C Ma finds that chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) — a neurodegenerative disease diagnosed after death, most often in athletes who played contact sports and in military personnel — is not just caused by repeated head impact but also linked to DNA damage similar to that seen in Alzheimer’s disease.
Original article in: Science >
November 10, 2025
Harvard Medical School researchers Arjun (Raj) Manrai, Thomas Buckley, and colleagues are developing a new artificial intelligence system, called Dr. CaBot, to be used as a medical education tool. The system operates in both presentation and written formats, shows how it reasons through a case, offering what’s called a differential diagnosis — a comprehensive list of possible conditions that explain what’s going on — and narrowing down the possibilities until it reaches a final diagnosis.
Awards & Honors
November 10, 2025
Round up of awards and honors earned by the HBI community.
September 4, 2025
Round up of awards and honors earned by the HBI community.