Discover Breaks

Our internal fight against loneliness

Wake up microglia! How brain state regulates immune cells

Microglia, the immune cells of the brain, helps the brain modify its circuits in response to new experiences. In a recent study, we found that microglia...

Visualizing the effects of sleep on neurons’ maintenance

All animals sleep, and the loss of sleep result in significant deficits to brain performance. Prolonging sleep deprivation could be fatal; however, why do we...

New, smaller-than-ever devices to help us understand how our brain works from the inside

We developed a new neural probe which can be inserted into the deep vasculature of the brain to achieve high-precision measurement of its activity. This...

Three’s a crowd: group interactions in the real-world data, and how to find them

Discovering the complex interactions among variables in real-world events is critical, whether it is brain function, the financial market, or even epidemics....

How does the brain orchestrate survival?

Eating when hungry, drinking when thirsty and fear under threat are essential behaviors for animal survival produced by the long evolution of life. We found...

On where altruistic behaviour can be found in our brain

What neuroscience has found about the brains of “selfish” and “selfless” people? To understand what is really driving our behaviour, scientists need to look...

How machine intelligence helps in translating the neural code

What happens when visually responsive neurons in the primate brain are allowed to interact with artificial neural networks that generate images?

Finding the one: what prairie voles can tell us about the drive to seek out our romantic partner

Like us, monogamous prairie voles can form lifelong pair bonds. We asked how these long-term bonds change brain activity in brain regions associated with...

Our own choices generate biases for subsequent decisions

Humans like to think of their judgments as ‘rational’, solely based on objective information. Instead, we have found that people interpret decision-relevant...

AutonoMouse: A platform for automating mouse behavioral studies

Behavioral assessments in animal models are crucial to neuroscience research, but manual implementation of these methods can limit throughput. We developed...