neural degeneration

Recent articles

The silent majority: How astrocytes shape the brain across scales

Melissa Cooper talks to Mac Shine about her new work that reveals how these glial cells—long dismissed as the brain’s housekeepers—wire together in precise, long-range networks that remodel in response to experience.

By Mac Shine
12 May 2026 | 29 min watch

Explore more from The Transmitter

Illustration of scientists climbing over a barrier to reach publications.

Scientific talent is global. Access to the world’s scientific stage is not.

Neuroscience in Chile, and across Latin America, does not lack talent or ideas, but the systems that make science visible—prestigious journals, conferences and networks—increasingly price its researchers out.

By Vicente Medel
3 August 2026 | 8 min read
Ground squirrel.

How thirteen-lined ground squirrels illuminate retinal development

In most mammalian retinas, rods outnumber cones. But that ratio is flipped in ground squirrels, a quirk that helps Seth Blackshaw explore how retinal cells develop their identities.

By Sarah Thau
31 July 2026 | 5 min read