Rotem Falach @falach.bsky.social

1/8. New preprint! Using fUSi in head-fixed mice🐭, we found that arousal events trigger a brain-wide wave of activity 🌊🧠. Surprisingly, this pattern was preserved during manipulations of the locus coeruleus, pointing to a minor role for noradrenaline. biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

New Alzheimer’s research just caught my attention. Scientists at Northwestern found that levetiracetam, a decades-old FDA-approved seizure drug, may stop Alzheimer’s before it starts. Instead of clearing plaques after damage happens, it blocks the production of the toxic amyloid-beta 42 protein that forms plaques in the first place. The study shows the drug works during the neuron signaling cycle by binding to SV2A, keeping APP on the neuron surface and diverting it away from the pathway that creates the toxic peptide. Key insight: the intervention would likely need to happen very early, potentially 10–20 years before symptoms. Early data from patient records also suggests people taking levetiracetam had a small but meaningful delay in Alzheimer’s progression. Still early science, but this shifts the conversation from treating plaques to preventing them entirely.

White noise cuts sleep disruptions up to 67% in the ICU. It reduced ICU noise-related arousals from 48.4/hr to 15.7/hr and restored slow-wave sleep to baseline. It's not loud peaks that wake you, it's sudden changes. White noise masks these shifts.

I couldn't find a tool to plot different #neuroimaging data in one consistent style, so I made one! Meet yabplot (yet another brain plot) - a #Python package for (sub)cortex & tracts.🧠 - Simple API - Built-in atlases - Custom atlas support 🔗 github.com/teanijarv/yabp… (drop a ⭐️!)

New paper is out in @CommsBio We describe the effects of the psychedelic 5-MeO-DMT on brain states and sleep via EEG, LFP & freely moving oculometry. Read more: #citeas" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">nature.com/articles/s4200… #Sleep #EEG #Neuroscience #Psychedelics

🧠Our New preprint: We propose a “neuro-bridge” framework linking #spiking neural networks with biophysical brain simulations for Alzheimer’s detection from #EEG. 📉 1/f slope as key biomarker (E/I balance) 🔁 ML predictions ↔ circuit mechanisms #NeuroAI arxiv.org/abs/2602.07010

Entrained cortical delta–spindle activity, not periodic synchrony, prevents arousal by NREM thalamic bursts nature.com/articles/s4200…

🧠💤 New lab paper in @PNASNews Sleep loss doesn’t just make neurons tired - it slows the communication between them. We show that chronic sleep loss impairs myelin integrity, slows neural signal conduction, and affects cognition & motor behavior. 👉pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

Interpreting EEG requires understanding how the skull smears electrical fields as they propagate from the cortex. I made a browser-based simulator for my EEG class to visualize how dipole depth/orientation change the topomap dbrang.github.io/EEG-Dipole-Dem… Github: github.com/dbrang/EEG-Dip…

Locus coeruleus noradrenaline elicits response profiles distinct from natural arousal in hippocampal neurons and astrocytes biorxiv.org/content/10.648… #biorxiv_neursci

Nature research paper: Distinct neuronal populations in the human brain combine content and context go.nature.com/3LgYFWl

A new drug in the middle of clinical trials just increased REM sleep by 90% without making people sleep longer! This is the first medication ever to specifically enhance REM only and the implications go far beyond seizure control. Here's what just happened. 🧵

Today in @NatureMedicine we report that AI can predict 130 diseases from 1 night of sleep🛌 We trained a foundation model (#SleepFM) on 585K hours of sleep recordings from 65K people—brain, heart, muscle & breathing signals combined. AI learns the language of sleep🧵

Sleep-dependent infraslow rhythms are evolutionarily conserved across reptiles and mammals nature.com/articles/s4159…

TransBrain: a computational framework for translating brain-wide phenotypes between humans and mice nature.com/articles/s4159… Finally, a quantitative bridge for cross-species brain mapping! TransBrain tackles the critical gap between rodent models and human studies with a clever two-part framework. Its core novelty is a *detached* deep neural network, trained separately on integrated human cortical and subcortical transcriptomics. This region-specific approach isn't just a tweak—it boosted homology mapping accuracy by 89.5% over standard transcriptomic methods, revealing two evolutionarily conserved transcriptional gradients. The second pillar integrates this with anatomical hierarchies and structural connectivity via a graph-based embedding, creating a unified cross-species representational space. The toolbox isn't just a proof-of-concept; it delivers. They quantitatively map resting-state networks, infer human cognitive functions from mouse optogenetic circuits, and translate molecular insights from autism mouse models to individual-level human mechanisms. This moves us from qualitative analogy to a rigorous, computational translation layer for brain-wide phenotypes. The code and interactive platform are already public. A major step for translational neuroscience.

Sleep and digital health in autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions: nature.com/articles/s4159… Happy new year to all

HIP-CT JUST TURNED THE HUMAN BRAIN INTO A GOOGLE MAP This isn’t CGI. It’s not AI. It’s HiP-CT - Hierarchical Phase-Contrast Tomography - and it’s quietly breaking anatomy. One scan lets researchers zoom from a full human organ down to micron-scale detail. Blood vessels. Cellular architecture. Structural patterns you normally only see after cutting tissue apart. Except here, nothing is destroyed. The brain footage is the flex: intact hemispheres rendered so clean you can trace vascular networks like street grids. No stains. No dyes. Just synchrotron X-rays, and obscene resolution. Traditional histology gives detail but loses context. MRI keeps context but sacrifices precision. HiP-CT does both. Whole-organ truth, no trade-off. This is a new baseline for studying neurodegeneration, tumors, stroke damage, and developmental disorders. Pathology without guesswork. Anatomy without amputation. Within a decade, HiP-CT-style imaging becomes the gold standard for post-mortem research and drug validation - and forces medicine to rewrite parts of the anatomy textbooks we thought were “settled.” The body didn’t change. Our ability to see it just did. Source: Paul Tafforeau, @_fluxfeeds

fMRI signals “up,” but neural metabolism might be going “down.” In our @NatureNeuro paper, we show that about 40% of voxels with robust BOLD responses exhibit opposite oxygen metabolism, revealing two distinct hemodynamic modes. rdcu.be/eUPO8 funding @ERC_Research 🧵:

Circadian rhythm dysfunction is highly prevalent in ADHD Up to ~75% of patients have delayed sleep and wake timing, and shifting the clock earlier is linked to symptom improvement I just published a paper on what this means for treatment. Here’s what we found 🧵1/12

A hippocampal ‘sharp-wave sleep’ state that is dissociable from cortical sleep nature.com/articles/s4159…