The ongoing closure of obstetric units in the United States poses challenges to maternal care access, especially in rural communities. These closures leave patients with limited options for obstetric services and may force them to travel longer distances or rely on low-volume facilities, both associated with adverse maternal outcomes. While policymakers have proposed interventions to […]

Epidemics are shaped by the interplay between host and pathogen population characteristics, which are themselves intertwined. In particular, host behavior and immunity profile shape pathogen population structure by affecting both the likelihood of new variant emergence and its subsequent dynamics. Theoretical studies provided a fragmented description of this complex dynamical dependency, and the empirical evidence […]

Background Living evidence syntheses (LES) represent continual updates for an important topic for decision-making where there is uncertainty in the evidence. Whereas best practices for traditional evidence syntheses in health care are well established, they are not for LES. This study aimed to establish globally relevant, agreed-upon standards for considering, conducting, publishing, and implementing LES […]

Loss of striatal interneurons expressing parvalbumin (PV+) is associated with impulsive and uncontrolled behaviors, yet how these cells contribute to striatal information processing is poorly understood. We compared spiking of five identified neuron types in sensorimotor striatum, as unrestrained rats waited for a cue then performed brief, well-practiced actions. During waiting PV+ selectively increased firing, […]

Extracting relevant features of a complex sensory signal typically involves sequential processing through multiple brain regions. However, identifying the logic and mechanisms of these transformations has been difficult, due to the challenges of measuring both activity within and long-range connectivity between multiple neural populations. Here, we investigate the reformatting of odor information across two stages […]

The neural mechanisms underlying the emergence of functional connectivity in resting-state fMRI remain poorly understood. Recent studies suggest that resting-state activity consists of brief periods of strong co-fluctuations among brain regions, which reflect overall functional connectivity. Others report a continuum in co-fluctuations over time, with varying degree of correlation to functional connectivity. These findings raise […]

Perceptual decisions unfold over time, requiring neural circuits to evaluate sensory evidence, track elapsed time, and commit to an action. To investigate how these computations are distributed across corticostriatal circuits, we recorded neural population activity using Neuropixels probes in the rat frontal orienting field (FOF) and anterior dorsal striatum (ADS) during a free-response auditory change […]

Neuroscience-inspired neural networks bridge biology and technology, offering powerful tools to model brain function while enabling adaptive, efficient control in robotics. In this work, we present a neuroscience-inspired synaptic learning rule based on the synchronization of synaptic inputs to single excitatory neurons within a feedforward spiking neural network. The model consists of three excitatory layers […]

Behavioural ecologists aim to understand the causes of animal social structure. Connecting theoretical models of social structure with empirical observations remains, however, a formidable challenge. While most of the current statistical methods for animal social network analysis rely on data that are aggregated over time and summarised as one behavioural dimension (e.g., an adjacency-matrix), common […]

Animals can associate events with their outcomes, even if there is a long delay between the two. For example, in conditioned taste aversion, animals gain an aversion to a taste (the conditioned stimulus, CS) if sickness (an unconditioned stimulus, US) is induced up to 12 hours later. Established correlational plasticity mechanisms, operating on timescales of […]