Published16 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesThere appears to have been a rise in the proportion of middle class and wealthier women under the age of 45 smoking in England, research from University College London suggests. The percentage of women in this group who smoked rose from 12% to 15% between 2013-2023, the study estimates.Less advantaged women were more likely to smoke overall but smoking rates in this group fell from 29% to 22%.Researchers warn smoking can affect health, fertility and pregnancy.Every month from 2013-23, a different 1,700 adults were surveyed, including a total of 44,000 women aged under 45.”It is concerning to find an apparent increase in smoking among women under 45 from more advantaged social groups in England,” Dr Sarah Jackson, who worked on the study, from University College London, said.”We did not see this in all adults or in men of the same age.”These findings suggest this group may benefit from targeted intervention to prevent the uptake of smoking or relapse.”Reducing smoking is especially important among women in this age group as smoking reduces fertility and increases the chances of complications during pregnancy, miscarriage and poor infant health.”What is the smoking ban and how will it work?The researchers say more work is needed to confirm their findings and learn more about why the figures have changed.Participants were deemed:more advantaged, in households whose highest earners were in professional, managerial or clerical jobsless advantaged, in households whose highest earners were in manual, semi- or unskilled jobs, or not workingThe study, in the journal BMC Medicine, also found an increase in smokers using mainly hand-rolled, rather than manufactured, cigarettes. The increases were greater for young women than men. Dr Sharon Cox said: “The reasons for the possible increase in smoking among more advantaged women under 45 are unclear. “However, it may be that financial pressures of smoking were less influential for this group.”Some may also have moved to cheaper hand-rolled cigarettes – a trend that was most pronounced among less advantaged female smokers, 68% of whom rolled their own cigarettes by 2023.”‘Devastating harm’The proportion of women under 45 vaping rose from 5% to 20% – with a similar increase in men of the same age. Alizee Froguel, of the charity Cancer Research UK, which helped fund the research, said: “Smoking is the biggest cause of cancer and death in the UK. “We cannot afford to be complacent about the devastating harm tobacco use continues to cause across the whole of our society.”Mr Froguel urged the government to implement “robust measures” to prevent people taking up smoking and help them quit. It comes as MPs in the UK backed a plan to ban anyone born after 2009 from buying cigarettes, effectively ensuring it will become law.More on this storyWhat is the smoking ban and how will it work?Published1 day agoSmoking decline stalls since pandemic – studyPublished14 December 2023

After a drawn-out global controversy over the coronavirus, the W.H.O. has updated its classification of how pathogens spread through the air.In the early days of the Covid pandemic, a team of scientists called on the World Health Organization to acknowledge that the disease could spread through the air.Initially, the agency rebuffed them, despite growing evidence that coronavirus-laden droplets stuck around in the air, making indoor spaces hotbeds of infection. The researchers responded with a public campaign, which helped persuade the World Health Organization to finally acknowledge, in late 2021, that Covid was airborne.In the wake of the controversy, the agency also asked a group of advisers — including some of its scientific critics — to update its formal guidelines for classifying the ways that pathogens spread. After more than two years of discussion, that group has published a report laying out new definitions that could have significant implications for countries around the world that depend on the agency to set policies to curb the spread of disease.The W.H.O.’s previous stance was that only a handful of pathogens — those that travel in small droplets and spread across long distances, like tuberculosis — could be considered airborne. But the new report suggests broader categories that do not rely on droplet size or distance spread. Such changes were contentious because they raised the prospect that more diseases might now demand costly control measures, such as hospital isolation rooms and protective gear.“It’s an important first step,” said Dr. Ed Nardell, a tuberculosis expert at Harvard Medical School and a member of the group. “We really have a start, with agreed-upon terminology, even if everybody’s not happy with it.”Before the pandemic, the W.H.O. and other agencies typically recognized a few ways diseases could spread. One was by “contact transmission,” in which someone picked up a pathogen either by touching an infected person directly or through contact with a contaminated surface.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Published58 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingBy Matthew HillHealth correspondent, West of EnglandA baby as young as eight months old has been seen by a new weight management service for severely obese children.A growing number of pre-school children are severely overweight in Somerset. The NHS service, called Splash, is one of only a few in the country offering under fours and their families access to dietary and compassionate psychological support. One doctor involved said while eight months was atypically young, the earlier patients were seen the better.’Milk for comfort’Clinical director of paediatrics Dr Chris Knight said: “[Eight months] is unusual, but at that kind of age we can really make progress about how they are feeding those children at such an early stage. There’s a really good opportunity there to turn thing around.”He continued: “The majority of our cases are between the ages of two and four, but about 15% are under two.”At the very young age of eight months old, that often relates to issues where young babies are taking really large quantities of milk. That can be a difficult cycle to break, they’re relying on milk for comfort, but having a really high intake does mean they gain a lot of weight.”He said in other cases, causes of childhood obesity were often a combination of food and lifestyle.Image source, Family photoPeter Fleming, professor of infant health and developmental physiology at the University of Bristol, said: “It’s not unheard of for babies as young as six months to be severely obese because their parents often start giving them solids too soon.”‘Struggled with my weight’The Royal College of General Practitioners and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has been contacted for comment. The Somerset Pre-school Lifestyle Activity Skills for Self-Help (SPLASH) is a weight management service where doctors, dietitians and psychologists monitor food behaviours and seek to build parental confidence.One patient it has been working with is Lainee, who is now a healthy four-year-old. But when she was two, she was living with severe obesity.Her mother Claire said: “I had always worried about her weight mainly because I had struggled with my own. So I went to the doctor.”I just wanted to get a bit of advice, see if I could get a bit of support or just something to guide me along the way, and they mentioned a new programme called Splash and the next thing I knew, I was in it.”Splash first started as a trial in April 2022, but has proved so successful it has now been given permanent funding.It is led by psychologists and dieticians like Isobel Feakins, who carry out home visits.’Blamed or shamed’She said: “Coming to meet a family at home, really getting an understanding once they are in their environment. We can have conversations with Mum around what they are having for tea tonight, what snacks or different foods there are in the cupboard and things like that. We can really talk about those things and give practical tips for the family.” “Also, seeing Lainee with Mum, and those interactions, and how she manages Lainee’s demands around food and requests,” really helped, she added. More than 50 families have been working with the service since it started and two in five of those have also had the support of the team’s psychologist, Dr Megan Rowley.”Quite often our parents have had stigmatising experiences where they’ve felt blamed or shamed about their child’s weight, and this can be incredibly challenging and quite unpleasant,” Dr Rowley said.”Part of my role is to listen and validate some of these experiences of what it’s like to parent a child that lives with severe obesity.””There are different things that can contribute to obesity, ranging from individual factors, parental factors, but also broader social economic and cultural factors. “So we need to take all of that into account. We work really hard to move away from this narrative that the parents are to blame,” Dr Rowley said.’Will she fit?’Any health care professionals can refer children to the Splash service.Lainee’s mother Claire said working with Splash had had a dramatic effect on her daughter’s appearance and enabled to her increase her daily activity levels too.”She would struggle to climb up the slide, but since losing the weight she’s able to freely do things like that,” she said.”I would sit there and think ‘is she going to fit in the swing or is she going to get on the slide?’ because I was always worried about how big she was. Now I don’t have that worry at all.”Follow BBC Somerset on Facebook and, X. Send your story ideas to us on email or via WhatsApp on 0800 313 4630.More on this storyNearly half of NHS workers looking to move jobsPublished1 day agoHospitals using AI to diagnose prostate cancerPublished19 MarchRelated Internet LinksSPLASHNHS AdviceThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

Published2 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesBy Mary McCoolBBC Scotland newsScotland’s only gender identity clinic for under 18s has paused prescribing puberty blockers to children.The Sandyford clinic in Glasgow said new patients aged 16 or 17 would no longer receive the treatment until they were 18.It follows a landmark review of gender services for under-18s in England.Dr Hilary Cass’s review said children had been let down by a lack of research and there was “remarkably weak” evidence on medical interventions.NHS England confirmed it would stop prescribing puberty blockers in March.NHS England to stop prescribing puberty blockersChildren let down by ‘weak’ gender care – reviewPuberty blockers work by suppressing the release of hormones that cause puberty and are often prescribed to children questioning their gender as a way of stopping physical changes such as breast development or facial hair.Like other parts of the UK, Scotland has seen a rapid rise in the number of young people questioning their identity or experiencing gender dysphoria.The only specialist service for under-18s is the Sandyford clinic in Glasgow, where people can self-refer or can be referred through their GP.Figures released to BBC Scotland News under a freedom of information request, showed that at the end of 2023, 1,100 patients were on the waiting list.In the NHS in England, fewer than 100 children – who had already started a prescription – are now taking puberty blockers.In Scotland, the number is likely to be far smaller.Following the position taken by NHS England, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC) and NHS Lothian deferred starting new patients on the treatment in mid-March.The Glasgow health board said patients had now been formally notified, however existing patients currently receiving treatment would not be affected.Dr Emilia Crighton, NHSGCC’s director of public health said: “The findings informing the Cass review are important, and we have reviewed the impact on our clinical pathways. “The next step from here is to work with the Scottish government and academic partners to generate evidence that enables us to deliver safe care for our patients.”The Scottish government previously said it had closely monitored Dr Cass’s review and had met her on a number of occasions to share information about improvement work in Scotland.Earlier this week, First Minister Humza Yousaf said the government would not spend an “inordinate” amount of time deciding whether to follow Dr Cass’s recommendations.He said: “There’s a number of recommendations – all of them will be given consideration.”However, he added that the prescription of treatments should be one made by clinicians rather than politicians.More on this storyChildren let down by ‘weak’ gender care – reviewPublished10 AprilNHS England to stop prescribing puberty blockersPublished12 March

Have your out-of-network insurance bills skyrocketed? Chris Hamby, an investigative reporter for The Times, may have an explanation.Navigating the health care system in the United States can often feel like being lost in a maze. What kind of doctor should I see? Who takes my insurance? What even is a co-pay, anyway?For that reason, Chris Hamby, an investigative reporter, has devoted much of his five-year career at The New York Times to guiding readers through such dizzying questions. His latest article, which was published online this month, explored the complex subject of insurance bills.Last year, Mr. Hamby began investigating MultiPlan, a data firm that works with several major health insurance companies, including UnitedHealthcare, Cigna and Aetna. After a patient sees an out-of-network medical provider, the insurer often uses MultiPlan to recommend how much to reimburse the provider.Mr. Hamby’s investigation revealed that MultiPlan and the insurers are incentivized to reduce payments to providers; in doing so, they score larger fees, which are paid by the patient’s employer. Many patients are forced to foot the rest of the bill. (MultiPlan said in a statement to The Times that it uses “well-recognized and widely accepted solutions” to promote “affordability, efficiency and fairness” by recommending a “reimbursement that is fair and that providers are willing to accept in lieu of billing plan members for the balance.”)In an interview, Mr. Hamby shared his experience poring over more than 50,000 pages of documents and interviewing more than 100 people. This conversation has been edited.Where did your investigation begin?We were broadly looking at issues in health insurance last year. MultiPlan kept coming up in my conversations with physician groups, doctors and patients. At first, it was unclear what exactly MultiPlan did. There were some lawsuits regarding its work with UnitedHealthcare, but it was difficult to understand the company’s role in the industry. We eventually accumulated more information about MultiPlan’s relationship with big insurance companies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Published2 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesBy Jenny Rees, health correspondent & Ben PriceBBC NewsVape-addicted children should be offered nicotine patches to help wean them off, say health officials.A Public Health Wales (PHW) report also urged a ban on disposable vapes and names like bubblegum or watermelon. PHW’s incident response group (IRG) final report said vaping should be seen as a dependency issue, rather than pupil misconduct.However, the UK Vaping Industry Association has said banning vapes will “turbo-charge the black market”. Classroom violence drives teachers from professionWhat is the new vaping tax and when will it start?Disposable bans will not work, says vape bossThe IRG has been investigating the rapid rise in vaping among children and young people in Wales. As part of the report, the group spoke to a number of young people who said they experienced cravings, shaking and appetite changes when they tried to quit vapes.Chris Emmerson, a PHW consultant, said it was essential the rise in youth vaping must be “addressed with urgency”.”Nicotine replacement therapies, which are already offered to people aged over 12 who are smoking, is one tool that could help… in tandem with other support mechanisms,” he said. What do people think of the proposals?Michael Lindon, 30, said he does not think offering nicotine patches to help young people with a nicotine dependency is the best way forward.”I went to a school in the valleys and if you have a patch on you’d just get ridiculed. I think the best option would be the non-nicotine vapes,” he said. “One way or another, it’s the same with smoking, when I was younger, kids weren’t allowed to do it, but they still find a way.”Curtis Watson, 23, said: “I vape about, all day, every day. It’s quite bad. I feel like once you start, you don’t stop then.”Because of the colourful packages and the flavours, even if I was younger, I think I would have bought them.”Mollie Jones, 22, said seeing her friends using vapes prompted her to start, and now she was addicted.”I think [vapes] are aimed at younger people and 18-year-olds because I wouldn’t go for, like, skittles flavour, I’d go for something more normal.”The generation before us smoked cigarettes, we just smoke vapes, so what’s the difference?”Image source, Getty ImagesIt has been illegal in the UK to sell vapes to under 18 since 2015, although both the UK and Welsh governments have said they plan to bring in further legislation to reduce the appeal and availability of vapes.The IRG has made the following recommendations.vaping should not be permitted in spaces intended for children and young peopleadvertising, packaging and display of vapes should be restrictedthe sale and supply of single use devices should be banned”By implementing these practices, we can better address the complex needs of children and young people struggling with vaping dependency,” added Mr Emmerson.’Pupils unable to get through the day’The report said the vast majority of children and young people in Wales did not vape, but there had been a substantial increase in numbers, particularly among girls.Many felt peer pressure and a strong desire to “fit in” and “look cool”, the group concluded, with an increasing number unable to get through the school day without vaping.Many of the young people questioned as part of the report were aware of “vape dealers” within their social circles.The report highlighted that calculating the amount of illegal and unregulated vapes in circulation was difficult. However, in 2022-23 trading standards officials seized more than 257,000 in Wales alone. Image source, Getty ImagesThese illegal vapes are seen as more dangerous as they can have higher concentrations of nicotine or overheat and cause fires.However, the report also suggested higher taxation on disposable vapes as an alternative to a ban, while keeping them cheaper than tobacco to encourage smokers to take up vapes instead. Robert Sidebottom, of the UK Vaping Industry Association (UKVIA), said it acknowledged that “youth vaping is an issue that needs to be tackled head on”.”However… it is already illegal to sell vapes to children, so rather than introducing restrictions that will undermine the public health benefits of vaping for adult smokers, we need to focus on the law we already have,” he said. “Public Health Wales is calling for a ban on disposable vapes, which will only serve to push the market underground, turbo-charging an already highly active black market.”He said restricting vapes like cigarettes would mean fewer smokers “will quit and more will die. It’s not a complicated equation.”Action on Smoking and Health Wales head Suzanne Cass welcomed the IRG report, and said it “firmly outlines the case for urgent action”.”The unacceptable marketing of vapes to children and the availability of these products has led to a surge in experimentation and an increase in regular use,” she said. “Recommendations in this report strike the balance between promoting actions to reduce the appeal of vapes to young people whilst not preventing access to vapes as a smoking cessation tool for smokers.”A spokesperson for the Welsh government said they “welcomed the investigation” and would consider the recommendations carefully.They added: “We are working with the other UK governments to tackle youth vaping by reducing the appeal and availability of vapes to children through the UK Tobacco and Vapes Bill.”More on this storyClassroom violence drives teachers from professionPublished31 MarchDisposable bans will not work, says vape bossPublished26 MarchWhat is the new vaping tax and when will it start?Published6 March

Autism spectrum disorder has yet to be linked to a single cause, due to the wide range of its symptoms and severity. However, a study by University of Virginia researchers suggests a promising new approach to finding answers, one that could lead to advances in the study of other neurological conditions.
Current approaches to autism research involve observing and understanding the disorder through the study of its behavioral consequences, using techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging that map the brain’s responses to input and activity, but little work has been done to understand what’s causing those responses.
However, researchers with UVA’s College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences have been able to better understand the physiological differences between the brain structures of autistic and non-autistic individuals through the use of Diffusion MRI, a technique that measures molecular diffusion in biological tissue, to observe how water moves throughout the brain and interacts with cellular membranes. The approach has helped the UVA team develop mathematical models of brain microstructures that have helped identify structural differences in the brains of those with autism and those without.
“It hasn’t been well understood what those differences might be,” said Benjamin Newman, a postdoctoral researcher with UVA’s Department of Psychology, recent graduate of UVA School of Medicine’s neuroscience graduate program and lead author of a paper published this month in PLOS: One. “This new approach looks at the neuronal differences contributing to the etiology of autism spectrum disorder.”
Building on the work of Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley, who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Medicine for describing the electrochemical conductivity characteristics of neurons, Newman and his co-authors applied those concepts to understand how that conductivity differs in those with autism and those without, using the latest neuroimaging data and computational methodologies. The result is a first-of-its-kind approach to calculating the conductivity of neural axons and their capacity to carry information through the brain. The study also offers evidence that those microstructural differences are directly related to participants’ scores on the Social Communication Questionnaire, a common clinical tool for diagnosing autism.
“What we’re seeing is that there’s a difference in the diameter of the microstructural components in the brains of autistic people that can cause them to conduct electricity slower,” Newman said. “It’s the structure that constrains how the function of the brain works.”
One of Newman’s co-authors, John Darrell Van Horn, a professor of psychology and data science at UVA, said, that so often we try to understand autism through a collection of behavioral patterns which might be unusual or seem different.

“But understanding those behaviors can be a bit subjective, depending on who’s doing the observing,” Van Horn said. “We need greater fidelity in terms of the physiological metrics that we have so that we can better understand where those behaviors coming from. This is the first time this kind of metric has been applied in a clinical population, and it sheds some interesting light on the origins of ASD.”
Van Horn said there’s been a lot of work done with functional magnetic resonance imaging, looking at blood oxygen related signal changes in autistic individuals, but this research, he said “Goes a little bit deeper.”
“It’s asking not if there’s a particular cognitive functional activation difference; it’s asking how the brain actually conducts information around itself through these dynamic networks,” Van Horn said. “And I think that we’ve been successful showing that there’s something that’s uniquely different about autistic-spectrum-disorder-diagnosed individuals relative to otherwise typically developing control subjects.”
Newman and Van Horn, along with co-authors Jason Druzgal and Kevin Pelphrey from the UVA School of Medicine, are affiliated with the National Institute of Health’s Autism Center of Excellence (ACE), an initiative that supports large-scale multidisciplinary and multi-institutional studies on ASD with the aim of determining the disorder’s causes and potential treatments.
According to Pelphrey, a neuroscientist and expert on brain development and the study’s principal investigator, the overarching aim of the ACE project is to lead the way in developing a precision medicine approach to autism.
“This study provides the foundation for a biological target to measure treatment response and allows us to identify avenues for future treatments to be developed,” he said.
Van Horn added that study may also have implications for the examination, diagnosis, and treatment of other neurological disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
“This is a new tool for measuring the properties of neurons which we are particularly excited about. We are still exploring what we might be able to detect with it,” Van Horn said.

Understanding how proteins interact with each other is crucial for developing new treatments and understanding diseases. Thanks to computational advances, a team of researchers led by Assistant Professor of Chemistry Alberto Perez has developed a groundbreaking algorithm to identify these molecular interactions.
Perez’s research team included two graduate students from UF, Arup Mondal and Bhumika Singh, and a handful of researchers from Rutgers University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The team published their findings in Angewandte Chemie, a leading chemistry journal based in Germany.
Named the AF-CBA Pipeline, this innovative tool offers unparalleled accuracy and speed in pinpointing the strongest peptide binders to a specific protein. It does this by using AI to simulate molecular interactions, sorting through thousands of candidate molecules to identify the molecule that interacts best with the protein of interest.
The AI-driven approach allows the pipeline to perform these actions in a fraction of the time it would take humans or traditional physics based-approaches to accomplish the same task.
“Think of it like a grocery store,” Perez explained. “When you want to buy the best possible fruit, you have to compare sizes and aspects. There are too many fruits to try them all of course, so you compare a few before making a selection. This AI method, however, can not only try them all, but can also reliably pick out the best one.”
Typically, the proteins of interest are the ones that cause the most damage to our bodies when they misbehave. By finding what molecules interact with these problematic proteins, the pipeline opens avenues for targeted therapies to combat ailments such as inflammation, immune dysregulation, and cancer.
“Knowing the structure of the strongest peptide binder in turn helps us in the rational designing of new drug therapeutics,” Perez said.
The groundbreaking nature of the pipeline is enhanced by its foundation on pre-existing technology: a program called AlphaFold. Developed by Google Deepmind, AlphaFold uses deep learning to predict protein structures. This reliance on familiar technology will be a boon for the pipeline’s accessibility to researchers and will help ensure its future adoption.
Moving forward, Perez and his team aim to expand their pipeline to gain further biological insights and inhibit disease agents. They have two viruses in their sights: murine leukemia virus and Kaposi’s sarcoma virus. Both viruses can cause serious health issues, especially tumors, and interact with as-of-now unknown proteins.
“We want to design novel libraries of peptides,” Perez said. “AF-CBA will allow us to identify those designed peptides that bind stronger than the viral peptides.”

Thought emerges and is controlled in the brain via the rhythmically and spatially coordinated activity of millions of neurons, scientists argue in a new article. Understanding cognition and its disorders requires studying it at that level.
It could be very informative to observe the pixels on your phone under a microscope, but not if your goal is to understand what a whole video on the screen shows. Cognition is much the same kind of emergent property in the brain. It can only be understood by observing how millions of cells act in coordination, argues a trio of MIT neuroscientists. In a new article, they lay out a framework for understanding how thought arises from the coordination of neural activity driven by oscillating electric fields — also known as brain “waves” or “rhythms.”
Historically dismissed solely as byproducts of neural activity, brain rhythms are actually critical for organizing it, write Picower Professor Earl Miller and research scientists Scott Brincat and Jefferson Roy in Current Opinion in Behavioral Science. And while neuroscientists have gained tremendous knowledge from studying how individual brain cells connect and how and when they emit “spikes” to send impulses through specific circuits, there is also a need to appreciate and apply new concepts at the brain rhythm scale, which can span individual, or even multiple, brain regions.
“Spiking and anatomy are important but there is more going on in the brain above and beyond that,” said senior author Miller, a faculty member in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. “There’s a whole lot of functionality taking place at a higher level, especially cognition.”
The stakes of studying the brain at that scale, the authors write, might not only include understanding healthy higher-level function but also how those functions become disrupted in disease.
“Many neurological and psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, epilepsy and Parkinson’s involve disruption of emergent properties like neural synchrony,” they write. “We anticipate that understanding how to interpret and interface with these emergent properties will be critical for developing effective treatments as well as understanding cognition.”
The emergence of thoughts
The bridge between the scale of individual neurons and the broader-scale coordination of many cells is founded on electric fields, the researchers write. Via a phenomenon called “ephaptic coupling,” the electrical field generated by the activity of a neuron can influence the voltage of neighboring neurons, creating an alignment among them. In this way, electric fields both reflect neural activity but also influence it. In a paper in 2022, Miller and colleagues showed via experiments and computational modeling that the information encoded in the electric fields generated by ensembles of neurons can be read out more reliably than the information encoded by the spikes of individual cells. In 2023 Miller’s lab provided evidence that rhythmic electrical fields may coordinate memories between regions.

At this larger scale, in which rhythmic electric fields carry information between brain regions, Miller’s lab has published numerous studies showing that lower-frequency rhythms in the so-called “beta” band originate in deeper layers of the brain’s cortex and appear to regulate the power of faster-frequency “gamma” rhythms in more superficial layers. By recording neural activity in the brains of animals engaged in working memory games the lab has shown that beta rhythms carry “top down” signals to control when and where gamma rhythms can encode sensory information, such as the images that the animals need to remember in the game.
Some of the lab’s latest evidence suggests that beta rhythms apply this control of cognitive processes to physical patches of the cortex, essentially acting like stencils that pattern where and when gamma can encode sensory information into memory, or retrieve it. According to this theory, which Miller calls “Spatial Computing,” beta can thereby establish the general rules of a task (for instance, the back and forth turns required to open a combination lock), even as the specific information content may change (for instance, new numbers when the combination changes). More generally, this structure also enables neurons to flexibly encode more than one kind of information at a time, the authors write, a widely observed neural property called “mixed selectivity.” For instance, a neuron encoding a number of the lock combination can also be assigned, based on which beta-stenciled patch it is in, the particular step of the unlocking process that the number matters for.
In the new study Miller, Brincat and Roy suggest another advantage consistent with cognitive control being based on an interplay of large-scale coordinated rhythmic activity: “Subspace coding.” This idea postulates that brain rhythms organize the otherwise massive number of possible outcomes that could result from, say, 1,000 neurons engaging in independent spiking activity. Instead of all the many combinatorial possibilities, many fewer “subspaces” of activity actually arise, because neurons are coordinated, rather than independent. It is as if the spiking of neurons is like a flock of birds coordinating their movements. Different phases and frequencies of brain rhythms provide this coordination, aligned to amplify each other, or offset to prevent interference. For instance, if a piece of sensory information needs to be remembered, neural activity representing it can be protected from interference when new sensory information is perceived.
“Thus the organization of neural responses into subspaces can both segregate and integrate information,” the authors write.
The power of brain rhythms to coordinate and organize information processing in the brain is what enables functional cognition to emerge at that scale, the authors write. Understanding cognition in the brain, therefore, requires studying rhythms.
“Studying individual neural components in isolation — individual neurons and synapses — has made enormous contributions to our understanding of the brain and remains important,” the authors conclude. “However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that, to fully capture the brain’s complexity, those components must be analyzed in concert to identify, study, and relate their emergent properties.”

One in every 10 individuals above the age of 65 develops an age-related neurological disorder like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, yet treatment options remain sparse for this population. Scientists have begun exploring whether cannabinoids — compounds derived from the cannabis plant, like well-known THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) and CBD (cannabidiol) — may offer a solution. A third, lesser-known cannabinoid called CBN (cannabinol) has recently piqued the interest of researchers, who have begun exploring the clinical potential of the milder, less psychoactive substance.
In a new study, scientists at the Salk Institute help explain how CBN protects the brain against aging and neurodegeneration, then use their findings to develop potential therapeutics. The researchers created four CBN-inspired compounds that were more neuroprotective than the standard CBN molecule — one of which was highly effective in treating traumatic brain injury in a Drosophila fruit fly model.
The findings, published in Redox Biologyon March 29, 2024, suggest promise for CBN in treating neurological disorders like traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease, and also highlight how further studies of CBN’s effects on the brain could inspire the development of new therapies for clinical use.
“Not only does CBN have neuroprotective properties, but its derivatives have the potential to become novel therapeutics for various neurological disorders,” says Research Professor Pamela Maher, senior author of the study. “We were able to pinpoint the active groups in CBN that are doing that neuroprotection, then improve them to create derivative compounds that have greater neuroprotective ability and drug-like efficacy.”
Many neurological disorders involve the death of brain cells called neurons, due to the dysfunction of their power-generating mitochondria. CBN achieves its neuroprotective effect by preventing this mitochondrial dysfunction — but how exactly CBN does this, and whether scientists can improve CBN’s neuroprotective abilities, has remained unclear.
The Salk team previously found that CBN was modulating multiple features of mitochondrial function to protect neurons against a form of cell death called oxytosis/ferroptosis. After uncovering this mechanism of CBN’s neuroprotective activity, they began applying both academic and industrial drug discovery methods to further characterize and attempt to improve that activity.
First, they broke CBN into small fragments and observed which of those fragments were the most effective neuroprotectors by chemically analyzing the fragment’s properties. Second, they designed and constructed four novel CBN analogs — chemical look-alikes — in which those fragments were amplified, then moved them on to drug screening.

“We were looking for CBN analogs that could get into the brain more efficiently, act more quickly, and produce a stronger neuroprotective effect than CBN itself,” says Zhibin Liang, first author and postdoctoral researcher in Maher’s lab. “The four CBN analogs we landed on had improved medicinal chemical properties, which was exciting and really important to our goal of using them as therapeutics.”
To test the chemical medicinal properties of the four CBN analogs, the team applied them to mouse and human nerve cell cultures. When they initiated oxytosis/ferroptosis in three different ways, they found that each of the four analogs 1) were able to protect the cells from dying, and 2) had similar neuroprotective abilities compared to regular CBN.
The successful analogs were then put to the test in a Drosophila fruit fly model of traumatic brain injury. One of the analogs, CP1, was especially effective in treating traumatic brain injury — producing the highest survival rate after condition onset.
“Our findings help demonstrate the therapeutic potential of CBN, as well as the scientific opportunity we have to replicate and refine its drug-like properties,” says Maher. “Could we one day give this CBN analog to football players the day before a big game, or to car accident survivors as they arrive in the hospital? We’re excited to see how effective these compounds might be in protecting the brain from further damage.”
In the future, the researchers will continue to screen and characterize these CBN analogs and refine their chemical designs. They will also begin looking more closely at age-related neurodegeneration and changes in brain cells, particularly in mitochondria, asking how we can better suit these drug-like compounds to promote cellular health and prevent neuronal dysfunction with age.
Other authors include David Soriano-Castell and Wolfgang Fischer of Salk; and Alec Candib and Kim Finley of the Shiley Bioscience Center at San Diego State University.
The work was supported by the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at the Salk Institute, the Bundy Foundation, the Shiley Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (R01AG067331, R21AG064287, R01AG069206, RF1AG061296, R21AG067334, NCI CCSG P30CA01495, NlA P30AG068635, S10OD021815), and the Helmsley Center for Genomic Medicine.