Nicolas Hubacz

Once Thought To Support Neurons, Astrocytes Turn Out To Be in Charge | Quanta Magazine New experiments reveal how astrocytes tune neuronal activity to modulate our mental and emotional states. The results suggest that neuron-only brain models, such as connectomes, leave out a crucial la...

A look the papers and the original article: www.quantamagazine.org/once-thought...

🧠 The brain isn’t just neurons.

New Science papers (2025) show astrocytes actively regulate brain state; tuning arousal, mood, sleep, and even when an animal gives up.

You can change brain activity without changing wiring.

Credit to Frank Reiser for the great image!

Visualizing the human tongue 👅

This image reveals its dense blood-vessel network using a historical vascular injection technique.

The tongue is one of the most vascularized muscles in the body supporting speech, taste, swallowing, and rapid healing.

Cell death isn’t failure...it’s biology doing its job.

This video shows programmed cell death, a regulated process that shapes development, removes damaged cells, and keeps tissues healthy. Too little leads to cancer. Too much drives degeneration.

Life depends on knowing when to let go. 🧬

A 16-hour time-lapse of neurulation, the process that forms the neural tube, precursor to the brain and spinal cord.

Coordinated cell folding, cytoskeletal forces, and SHH/BMP/Wnt signaling build the nervous system’s central axis in under a day. 🧠🧬

TMS-induced modulation of brain networks and its associations to rTMS treatment for depression: a concurrent fMRI-EEG-TMS study Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (L-DLPFC) is an established intervention for treatment-resistant …

Paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Same TMS pulse, different brain state → different outcome.

Using TMS + fMRI + EEG, researchers show that timing stimulation to prefrontal alpha phase boosts engagement of control & limbic circuits in TRD.

Not just where we stimulate....but when. ⚡️🧠

#TMS #EEG #BrainStimulation

Rapid local and systemic jasmonate signalling drives the initiation and establishment of plant systemic immunity - Nature Plants A novel reporter captured spatial temporal dynamics of effector-triggered-immunity (ETI)-induced systemic immunity, revealing that signal propagation and establishment in systemic acquired resistance ...

Video: Infected leaves—and then uninfected ones—light up with jasmonate signaling. GAIKWAD ET AL./NATURE PLANTS (2026)

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Flu season = avoid sick people. Plants can’t, so they warn themselves 🌱

New research shows plant immunity is two-step:

⚡ Fast jasmonate + electrical signals within hours
⏳ Slower salicylic acid for lasting defense

Earlier alerts could mean tougher, more disease-resistant crops.

A bioelectrical phase transition patterns the first vertebrate heartbeats - Nature The first heartbeat of a zebrafish was captured, and development of cardiac excitability and conduction around this singular event were analysed, showing how development of single-cell properties prod...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Scientists captured the exact moment cardiac cells self-organize into a coordinated rhythm—seconds before the first heartbeat.

Early beats are irregular and shift in origin, yet spread coherently across the heart.

Credit to Bill Jia!

Over 90% of anxiety-driven worries never come true.

Connection and communication between the nervous and immune systems - Nature Reviews Immunology Here, Swirski and colleagues explore how the nervous and immune systems connect and collaborate to respond to internal and external stimuli. In particular, they consider how the exchange of informatio...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧠 The brain and immune system aren’t separate—they form one integrated network. Shared signals let neurons shape immune development and responses, while immune activity feeds back to affect mood and behavior.

Brain–body health depends on this dialogue.

A Brain Cancer Cell 🧠 The actin cytoskeleton (cyan) shapes the cell and drives movement, while the endoplasmic reticulum (red) manages protein production and stress as the tumor adapts and grows.

📸 Credit: Halli Lindamood & Dr. Eric Vitriol

🧠 Neuroplasticity 🔄 (Shocking Visualization)

The brain isn’t fixed — it constantly rewires.

From whole-network shifts to circuit tuning to new synapses forming, plasticity happens at every scale. It’s the engine behind learning, recovery, and adaptation.

🌸 Texas A&M scientists found a way to boost energy in aging cells.

Tiny nanoflowers added to stem cells double mitochondrial output, letting them deliver extra power to damaged tissue. Early but promising—animal trials next.

🎥 Video: Texas A&M

Whole Organ Imaging 🧠 (Never Seen Before)

HiP-CT can scan an entire human organ at 25 μm/voxel, then zoom to 1.5 μm to reveal individual cells — a true multi-scale map of human anatomy.

Video: Paul Tafforeau

#CTScan #Imaging

A sleepless fish 🐟 is challenging what we know about aging.

Cavefish sleep ~1–2 hrs/day, show more DNA damage and oxidative stress, yet age more slowly than surface fish. They carry the signs of sleep loss but not the consequences — a model of biological resilience.

Credit: Evan Lloyd et. al.

Shrink to 10 nm & step inside your axon⚡

Axonal cytoskeleton:

🛡️ Spectrin-actin lattice every 190 nm
🚀 Parallel microtubule highways
🌀 Neurofilaments for strength & diameter
🔋 Mitochondria docked on-site Silent nano-architecture running every thought.

(Ribosomestudio)

A stunning neuron reconstruction from the Lichtman Lab + Google Connectomics.

🟣 Magenta = dendrites
🔵 Blue = spines
🟡 Yellow = synapses

All mapped from EM data with AI segmentation.

An unreal look at how dense and complex cortical wiring really is.

Multi-omic profiling reveals age-related immune dynamics in healthy adults - Nature This multi-omic longitudinal analysis of the healthy human peripheral immune system constructs the Human Immune Health Atlas and assembles data on immune cell composition and state changes w...

Full Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Immunity isn’t static.

It rewires itself across your entire life.

This is what a memory T cell looks like up close.

🧬 2024 Nobel laureate David Baker has done the unthinkable — building proteins that never existed in nature.

From self-assembling nanostructures to molecular rotors, his work is turning biology into an engineering discipline.

#ProteinDesign #NobelPrize

🧠 Microglia are the brain’s living sensors — extending and retracting their fine “feet” to shape synapses, sense activity, and repair tissue.

In this clip from Forrest Collman’s EM team, a microglia (purple) reaches across a neuron (gold), revealing the brain’s hidden choreography.

🧠 MRI or monster? 👻

No filters. No effects. Just science — and it’s terrifyingly real.

These are T2-weighted MRI scans of a human head — fluid glows white, turning anatomy into nightmare fuel.

Happy Halloween from the inside out 🎃🩻

#Halloween #MRI #Neuroscience #SpookyScience

Our eyes are extraordinary—but evolution shaped vision in wildly different ways.

🦅 Eagles see miles away.
🐈 Cats rule the dark.
🐙 Octopuses have no blind spot.
🦐 Mantis shrimp see colors we can’t imagine.

So many ways to see—one goal: make sense of light.

#Eyes #Life #Evolution

Credit to Stella Whittaker for the great image!

Thanks for letting me know!