Topic
Imaging of brain structure and activity with tools such as MRI, used to compare brains across people and to track change within one person over time.
A study with UC San Diego co-authors scanned 114 adults with chronic back pain after a provoked flare and saw default mode network activity rise. An outside neuroscientist praised the design but said lingering pain or anxiety could also explain the signal.
Reality
Boston Children's researchers tied anxiety in nearly 3,500 adolescents to weaker amygdala-thalamus-cerebellum connectivity. The differences are already measurable at ages 11 to 12, so the circuit is a candidate early-detection marker, but the report describes an association only.
Reality
For years, dog cognition mostly asked owners what their dogs were like. Rossano's soundboard project and two newer studies measure the dogs instead, though the published account is short on samples and controls.
Reality
Radiologists at the University of Wisconsin matched 2,826 routine brain scans to a census-based deprivation index and found larger brain-age gaps, smaller total volumes and more white matter damage in the most deprived areas.
Reality
Johns Hopkins researchers ran a miniature brain microscope autonomously through a full day of mouse behavior, recording neuronal activity, blood flow and oxygenation, and catching spontaneous seizures hours after a drug dose.
Reality
A two-scan study of 1,095 female brains in Nature Communications finds the ordinary adult decline in cortical gray matter flattening through late perimenopause and resuming afterward. Its first author says the implications are hard to state.
Reality