The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives
Featured
Fly database secures funding for another year, but future remains in flux
By
Calli McMurray
17 October 2025 | 3 min read
Diving in with Nachum Ulanovsky
By
Claudia López Lloreda
16 October 2025 | 14 min listen
Gene-activity map of developing brain reveals new clues about autism’s sex bias
By
Giorgia Guglielmi
16 October 2025 | 6 min listen
Today’s action potentials
”Everyone who has studied sex differences in rodents is going to drop their jaws. — BERNARD MULVEY, POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW, LIEBER INSTITUTE FOR BRAIN DEVELOPMENT
“The role of feedforward and feedback inhibition in modulating theta-gamma cross-frequency interactions in neural circuits”
By
Dimitrios Chalkiadakis et al. in PLOS Computational Biology
Upcoming Webinars
October
21
2025
Memory Decoding Journal Club: Functional connectomics revea…
Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston | Monash University
October
22
2025
NF1 exon 51 alternative splicing: functional implications i…
Charoula Peta | Biomedical research Foundation of the Academy of Athens
November
3
2025
Organization of thalamic networks and mechanisms of dysfunc…
Vasileios Zikopoulos | Boston University
The big picture
The visual system’s lingering mystery: Connecting neural activity and perception
By
Grace Lindsay
13 October 2025 | 5 min read
One year of FlyWire: How the resource is redefining Drosophila research
By
Francisco J. Rivera Rosario
7 October 2025 | 19 min listen
Why we need basic science to better understand the neurobiology of psychedelics
By
Devin Effinger, Melissa Herman
1 October 2025 | 7 min listen
Reproducibility is a team sport: Lessons from a large-scale collaboration
By
Anne Churchland
29 September 2025 | 8 min listen
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Gene-activity map of developing brain reveals new clues about autism’s sex bias
By
Giorgia Guglielmi
16 October 2025 | 6 min listen
Spectrum
Boosting SCN2A expression reduces seizures in mice
By
Charles Q. Choi
9 October 2025 | 5 min read
Spectrum
Autism researchers ‘pleasantly surprised’ by list of NIH data project grantees, despite initial concerns
By
Calli McMurray
2 October 2025 | 10 min read
Funding
NIH awarded 37 percent fewer neuroscience-related grants in 2025 than in past years
By
Natalia Mesa
29 September 2025 | 4 min read
International scientific collaboration is more necessary—yet more challenging—than ever
By
Lucina Q. Uddin
15 September 2025 | 6 min listen
Building the future of neuroscience at HBCUs
By
Jheannelle Johnson
8 September 2025 | 8 min listen
Should neuroscientists ‘vibe code’?
By
Benjamin Dichter
25 August 2025 | 9 min listen
What U.S. science stands to lose without international graduate students and postdoctoral researchers
By
Joshua R. Sanes
28 July 2025 | 7 min listen
How to build a truly global computational neuroscience community
By
Megan Peters, Bradley Roberts
23 July 2025 | 9 min listen
New questions around motor neurons and plasticity
A researcher’s theory hangs muscle degeneration on a broken neural circuit.
By
David Adam
10 October 2025 | 11 min listen
Cephalopods, vision’s next frontier
For decades, scientists have been teased by the strange but inaccessible cephalopod visual system. Now, thanks to a technological breakthrough from a lab in Oregon, data are finally coming straight from the octopus brain.
By
Calli McMurray
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27 May 2025 | 14 min listen
This paper changed my life: Dan Goodman on a paper that reignited the field of spiking neural networks
By
Dan Goodman
17 September 2025 | 5 min listen
This paper changed my life: Victoria Abraira on a tasty link between circuits and behavior
By
Victoria Abraira
22 July 2025 | 5 min listen
From bench to bot: Why AI-powered writing may not deliver on its promise
By
Tim Requarth
2 September 2025 | 8 min listen
From bench to bot
Keeping it personal: How to preserve your voice when using AI
By
Tim Requarth
3 March 2025 | 12 min read
Spectrum
Exclusive: Who is Richard Frye, the neurologist who researches and advocates for leucovorin as an autism treatment?
Frye has led two placebo-controlled trials of the folate supplement in autistic people; the first was suspended by regulators, and the other has yet to be published.
By
Brendan Borrell
1 October 2025 | 11 min read
Motor behavior
Facial movements telegraph cognition in mice
By
Lauren Schneider
30 September 2025 | 0 min watch
Michael Breakspear and Mac Shine explain how brain processing changes across neural population scales
By
Paul Middlebrooks
10 September 2025 | 1 min read
Decision-making
Everything everywhere all at once: Decision-making signals engage entire brain
By
Claudia López Lloreda
3 September 2025 | 5 min read
The Transmitter’s reading list: Six upcoming neuroscience books, plus notable titles in 2025
By
Francisco J. Rivera Rosario
27 August 2025 | 10 min listen
‘What Is Intelligence?’: An excerpt
By
Blaise Agüera y Arcas
23 September 2025 | 9 min read
‘Bird Brains and Behavior,’ an excerpt
By
Andrew Iwaniuk, Georg Striedter
5 August 2025 | 9 min read
‘Elusive Cures: Why Neuroscience Hasn’t Solved Brain Disorders—and How We Can Change That,’ an excerpt
By
Nicole Rust
10 June 2025 | 9 min read
Beyond Newtonian causation in neuroscience: Embracing complex causality
The traditional mechanistic framework must give way to a richer understanding of how brains actually generate behavior over time.
By
Luiz Pessoa
22 September 2025 | 25 min listen
Emotion research has a communication conundrum
In 2025, the words we use to describe emotions matter, but their definitions are controversial. Here, I unpack the different positions in this space and the rationales behind them—and I invite 13 experts to chime in.
By
Nicole Rust
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5 September 2025 | 37 min listen