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Cell Press

Featured Neuroscience Visual Neuroscience

·May 23, 2025·5 min read

Infrared-Seeing Contact Lenses Turn Humans into Night Visionaries

Researchers have developed contact lenses that enable humans and mice to see near-infrared light by converting it into visible wavelengths. These lenses use specialized nanoparticles embedded in standard soft contact material, allowing users to perceive flickering infrared signals without needing external power.

Featured Neurology Neuroscience

·May 3, 2025·5 min read

Bitten Hundreds of Times, Now His Blood Could Save Snakebite Victims

Scientists have developed the most broadly protective antivenom yet, using antibodies from a donor who built immunity through years of self-injection with lethal snake venoms. By combining two antibodies from the donor with a small molecule inhibitor, the antivenom protected mice from deadly snakes like black mambas and king cobras.

This shows a head, a brain, and a clock.

Featured Neuroscience

·April 24, 2025·6 min read

Why Do Our Minds Sometimes Go Blank?

Mind blanking—the experience of thinking about nothing—has often been misunderstood or lumped together with mind wandering. However, new research suggests it’s a distinct mental state linked to physiological arousal levels, with its own brain and body signatures.

This shows a woman on a tablet and an AI face.

Featured Neuroethics Neuroscience Psychology

·April 11, 2025·5 min read

When AI Becomes a Lover: The Ethics of Human-AI Relationships

As AI technologies grow more human-like, some people are forming deep, long-term emotional bonds with them, even engaging in non-legally binding marriages. A recent opinion paper explores the ethical risks of such relationships, including their potential to undermine human-human connections and provide dangerous or manipulative advice.

Featured Genetics Neuroscience

·January 28, 2025·5 min read

Mouse With Two Male Parents Survives to Adulthood

Researchers have successfully engineered bi-paternal mice, born from two male parents, that survived to adulthood using embryonic stem cell techniques. By modifying 20 key imprinting genes, they overcame the developmental barriers that previously limited unisexual reproduction in mammals.

Featured Neuroscience

·January 8, 2025·5 min read

Deep Sleep Drives Brain’s Waste Clearance, Aiding Cognitive Health

Deep sleep may clear the brain of toxic waste via a process driven by norepinephrine, a molecule that creates rhythmic blood vessel contractions. This "brainwashing" system, part of the glymphatic system, helps remove harmful proteins linked to neurological disorders.

Featured Genetics Neuroscience

·December 13, 2024·6 min read

Hair Regeneration Slowed by Intermittent Fasting

New research shows that intermittent fasting, while beneficial for metabolic health, may slow hair regrowth by impairing hair follicle stem cells (HFSCs). In mice, fasting caused HFSCs to undergo apoptosis during extended fasting periods due to oxidative stress and free fatty acid buildup.

Featured Neuroscience

·November 14, 2024·3 min read

Microbial Load, Not Disease, Shapes Gut Microbiome Signatures

A new study reveals that changes in gut microbial load, influenced by factors like diet, age, and antibiotics, drive the presence of bacteria previously linked to diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancer. Using a machine learning model, researchers found that microbial load variations explained bacterial signatures in patients' microbiomes more strongly than the diseases themselves.

Featured Neuroscience

·November 8, 2024·4 min read

Chimpanzees’ Task Performance Changes When Observed by Humans

A new study finds that chimpanzees, like humans, are affected by being watched: their performance on computer tasks improved on difficult tasks with larger human audiences but declined on simpler ones. This phenomenon, known as the "audience effect," was previously thought to be unique to humans and linked to reputation management. The results suggest that sensitivity to being observed may have evolved before human society developed its complex reputation-based social structures.

Featured Neuroscience

·November 6, 2024·5 min read

How the Brain Reacts to Movie Scenes

By analyzing fMRI scans of people watching films, neuroscientists have created a comprehensive functional map of the brain, showing how it activates in response to complex scenes. This study identified 24 distinct networks that process aspects like faces, speech, or movement, and revealed how executive functions shift between easy and challenging scenes.

Featured Neuroscience Psychology

·October 23, 2024·4 min read

Social Media Verification Drives Polarization and Echo Chambers

A new study shows that X's verification system, which gives verified users priority in algorithms, can increase polarization and trigger the formation of echo chambers. Researchers used computational modeling to simulate how verified users affect the spread of political opinions on social media. They found that when verified users with entrenched opinions post, their influence can drive polarization, while centrist ideologues can reduce it if present in sufficient numbers.

This shows a person playing a trumpet with sound waves coming out of it.

Auditory Neuroscience Featured Neuroscience

·October 4, 2024·4 min read

Can We Hear Magic? The Struggle to Create Auditory Illusions

A new study explores why magic tricks based solely on sound are rare, despite the many auditory illusions we encounter in everyday life. Researchers suggest that the difficulty lies in how the brain processes visual versus auditory information, with vision being more trusted.