The research team, led by scientists from the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR), used an innovative model that allows for higher-resolution simulations of hurricane formation than ever before. This allowed researchers to study the effects of increased regional moisture over Africa, which is the birthplace of weather systems that later produce hurricanes over the Atlantic.

Past research has suggested that warmer ocean water and a moister atmosphere could cause hurricanes to become more intense with greater amounts of rainfall. But how atmospheric moisture, which is predicted to increase in a warming climate, may be impacting hurricane formation itself has not been studied in detail until now.

The researchers found that a moister environment produced weaker and slower-moving African easterly waves, or disturbances which are the primary precursor or “seed” for hurricanes in the Atlantic. The addition of moisture moved the location of thunderstorms within the wave, making it harder for the wave to grow. Increased moisture also slowed the movement of the wave resulting in weaker and delayed hurricane seed formation by the time it reached eastern Atlantic waters.

“Considerable work during the last two decades has emphasized the role of deep moist convection to explain the development of African easterly waves,” said NSF NCAR scientist and lead author Kelly Núñez Ocasio. “But, the precise role of moisture has proven somewhat elusive. With the development of new modeling capabilities, I was able to focus on the role of moisture in cyclogenesis stemming from the hurricane seed.”

The study is funded by NSF NCAR and published in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems. Núñez Ocasio pursued the research through the NSF NCAR Advanced Study Program which allows graduate and postdoctoral students to focus on emerging areas of science.

Next-gen modeling

The birth of hurricanes and other tropical cyclones, known as cyclogenesis, is a complex process where small-scale weather events and large-scale atmospherics happen simultaneously. This complexity has made it difficult to study and model the formation of tropical cyclones. Most climate models provide only a grainy picture of what is happening with localized weather, which makes it difficult to learn anything about the role of individual ingredients, like moisture, that mix together to create cyclogenesis.

To address this, the research team turned to the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS). MPAS has the ability to model weather both locally and globally. This capability allowed Núñez Ocasio and her colleagues to zoom out and simulate global moisture and then zoom in to see how that would interact with localized weather events that lead to the formation of tropical cyclones.

The researchers started the experiment by using MPAS to reproduce a moisture-driven African easterly wave that became hurricane Helene in 2006. The team used that base to add or take away moisture and study what happened with those changes.

“When I increased the moisture we saw more convection and thunderstorms, which is to be expected; however, we discovered that the waves struggled to pair with the more intense and deep convection,” said Núñez Ocasio. “With increased moisture, the energy source of tropical cyclone seeds moved north and further away, reducing the kinetic energy available to the African easterly wave, which led to weak, energy-starved tropical cyclone seeds.”

Studying the evolution of tropical cyclones after this initial phase was outside the scope of this study. More research is needed to discover whether these weaker seeds lead to weaker tropical cyclones and hurricanes or if it will just take them longer to form.

The conditions leading to tropical cyclone formation are complex, but researchers hope these newer modeling techniques will lead to better predictions. For instance, Núñez Ocasio is beginning to run simulations where she alters other atmospheric variables key to generating tropical cyclones.

“In addition to moisture, I’m altering other variables in the model to more realistically reproduce a future climate scenario in collaboration with Erin Dougherty, NSF NCAR project scientist,” she said. “So far, I’m seeing similarities to the results of this study even as I alter those other significant pieces.”

Carbonate fragments provide remarkable information

Professor Cees W. Passchier and Dr. Gül Sürmelihindi from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), in collaboration with colleagues from France and Austria, have now unraveled the history of the mill complex using calcium carbonate deposits that are now stored in the Archaeological Museum of Arles. These deposits had formed towards the end of the roughly 100-year operational life of the Barbegal water mills on the sides and base of the wooden supply system that conveyed the water to the wheels. “We show that it is possible to reconstruct to a large extent the history of a water mill on the basis of such carbonate deposits,” stated Passchier, head of the JGU team. First, the researchers had to fit some of the total of 140 stored pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle, then they analyzed the layers using various techniques, including mass spectrometry.

Wooden water wheels and gutters were replaced

The researchers have now published their results in Geoarchaeology. “We were able to show, for example, that wooden water wheels and water channels had to be replaced after three to eight years. In at least one case, an old water wheel was replaced by a larger one,” said Passchier. The researchers drew this conclusion from the unusual shape of the carbonate deposits that had formed in the water channel. While the lower and earlier layers indicate that water levels must have originally been relatively low, upper and later carbonate layers indicate a higher water level. The possibility that there was originally less water flowing through the water channel which was subsequently increased was rejected by the researchers. They established that — for a gently sloping water channel and low water level — the amount of water provided would not have been sufficient to drive a mill wheel. Therefore, the inclination of the water channel must have been altered, from what was at first a steeper angle with a low water level to a shallower slope transporting water at a correspondingly higher level. “The entire structure of this water mill must have been modified,” said Passchier. “If you uplift the water channel alone, the water tends to splatter, losing the power to drive the wheel efficiently. Thus, when you uplift the water channel, you also need a larger water wheel.” In fact, a section of carbonate deposit formed on the water wheel corroborates this conclusion as it does not contain all the carbonate layers but only those of the latter years of operation.

Results of isotope analysis provide evidence of the mill’s service life

Using isotope analysis of the carbonate layers, the researchers were even able to ascertain the operating periods before which parts of the mill required renewal. Carbonate contains oxygen and the relative ratios of oxygen isotopes differ depending on water temperature. Based on the isotope composition in the carbonate layers, the researchers were able to infer water temperatures and thus identify the seasons in which the layers were deposited. They concluded that the carbonate from the samples in the Archaeological Museum in Arles had been deposited in the water channels over a period of seven to eight years. “The uppermost and thus youngest carbonate layer contains mollusk shells and fragments of wood, showing that the mill must have been abandoned by then and was disintegrating. The water continued to flow for a while so that carbonate deposits also continued to form, but maintenance of the water channels ceased,” said Passchier.

The researchers were able to answer yet another question. It was not previously known whether the mills had been run in combination by a single operator or whether the 16 water wheels had been used independently of each other. Judging from the layers of three investigated water channels, which are clearly different from each other, the mills were in operation separately — at least towards the end of their lifetime. Moreover, the western side of the complex was abandoned earlier than the eastern side. Finally, long pieces of carbonate from the water channels were later used as partition screens in a water basin for other industrial purposes after the mills had already been abandoned.

“Our study shows that the environmental resilience of S. caninervis is superior to that of some of highly stress-tolerant microorganisms and tardigrades,” write the researchers, who include ecologists Daoyuan Zhang and Yuanming Zhang and botanist Tingyun Kuang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “S. caninervis is a promising candidate pioneer plant for colonizing extraterrestrial environments, laying the foundation for building biologically sustainable human habitats beyond Earth.”

A small number of previous studies have tested the ability of microorganisms, algae, lichens, and plant spores to withstand the extreme environments of outer space or Mars, but this is the first study to test whole plants.

Syntrichia caninervis is a common moss species with a widespread global distribution. It grows in remarkably extreme desert environments including Tibet, Antarctica, and the circumpolar regions as part of the biological soil crust — a widespread and resilient type of ground cover often found in arid lands. Given the moss’s ability to survive extreme environmental conditions, the researchers decided to test its limits in the lab.

To test the moss’s cold tolerance, the researchers stored plants at −80°C (in an ultra-cold freezer) for 3 and 5 years and at −196°C (in a liquid nitrogen tank) for 15 and 30 days. In all cases, the plants regenerated when they were defrosted, though their rebound was less rapid compared to control specimens that had been dehydrated but not frozen, and plants that were not dehydrated prior to freezing rebounded more slowly than plants that were dried, then frozen.

The moss also demonstrated the ability to survive gamma radiation exposure that would kill most plants, and doses of 500 Gy even seemed to promote the plants’ growth. For comparison, humans experience severe convulsions and death when exposed to around 50 Gy. “Our results indicate that S. caninervis is among the most radiation-tolerant organisms known,” the researchers write.

Finally, the researchers tested the moss’s ability to endure Mars-like conditions using the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Planetary Atmospheres Simulation Facility. The simulator’s Martian conditions included air composed of 95% CO₂, temperatures that fluctuated from −60°C to 20°C, high levels of UV radiation, and low atmospheric pressure. Dried moss plants achieved a 100% regeneration rate within 30 days after being subjected to the Martian conditions for 1, 2, 3, and 7 days. Hydrated plants, which were only subjected to the simulator for one day, also survived, though they regenerated more slowly than their desiccated counterparts.

“Although there is still a long way to go to create self-sufficient habitats on other planets, we demonstrated the great potential of S. caninervis as a pioneer plant for growth on Mars,” the researchers write. “Looking to the future, we expect that this promising moss could be brought to Mars or the Moon to further test the possibility of plant colonization and growth in outer space.”

This research was supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Leading Talents in Technological Innovation Program, and The Third Xinjiang Scientific Expedition Program.

At water depths greater than 3,000 meters, the remote-controlled submersible vehicle MARUM-QUEST took samples from the newly discovered hydrothermal field. Named after Jøtul, a giant in Nordic mythology, the field is located on the 500-kilometer-long Knipovich Ridge. The ridge lies within the triangle formed by Greenland, Norway and Svalbard on the boundary of the North American and European tectonic plates. This kind of plate boundary, where two plates move apart, is called a spreading ridge. The Jøtul Field is located on an extremely slow spreading ridge with a growth rate of the plates of less than two centimeters per year. Because very little is known about hydrothermal activity on slow spreading ridges, the expedition focused on obtaining an overview of the escaping fluids, as well as the size and composition of active and inactive smokers in the field.

“The Jøtul Field is a discovery of scientific interest not only because of its location in the ocean but also due to its climate significance, which was revealed by our detection of very high concentrations of methane in the fluid samples, among other things,” reports Gerhard Bohrmann. Methane emissions from hydrothermal vents indicate a vigorous interaction of magma with sediments. On its journey through the water column, a large proportion of the methane is converted into carbon dioxide, which increases the concentration of CO₂ in the ocean and contributes to acidification, but it also has an impact on climate when it interacts with the atmosphere. The amount of methane from the Jøtul Field that eventually escapes directly into the atmosphere, where it then acts as a greenhouse gas, still needs to be studied in more detail. There is also little known about the organisms living chemosynthetically in the Jøtul Field. In the darkness of the deep ocean, where photosynthesis cannot occur, hydrothermal fluids form the basis for chemosynthesis, which is employed by very specific organisms in symbiosis with bacteria.

In order to significantly expand on the somewhat sparse information available on the Jøtul Field, a new expedition of the MARIA S. MERIAN will start in late summer of this year under the leadership of Gerhard Bohrmann. The focus of the expedition is the exploration and sampling of as yet unknown areas of the Jøtul Field. With extensive data from the Jøtul Field it will be possible to make comparisons with the few already known hydrothermal fields in the Arctic province, such as the Aurora Field and Loki’s Castle.

An international team, led by Penn State researchers, using the NIRSpec instrument aboard JWST as part of the RUBIES survey identified three mysterious objects in the early universe, about 600-800 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 5% of its current age. They announced the discovery today (June 27) in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The team studied spectral measurements, or intensity of different wavelengths of light emitted from the objects. Their analysis found signatures of “old” stars, hundreds of millions of years old, far older than expected in a young universe.

The researchers said they were also surprised to discover signatures of huge supermassive black holes in the same objects, estimating that they are 100 to 1,000 times more massive than the supermassive black hole in our own Milky Way. Neither of these are expected in current models of galaxy growth and supermassive black hole formation, which expect galaxies and their black holes to grow together over billions of years of cosmic history.

“We have confirmed that these appear to be packed with ancient stars — hundreds of millions of years old — in a universe that is only 600-800 million years old. Remarkably, these objects hold the record for the earliest signatures of old starlight,” said Bingjie Wang, a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State and lead author on the paper. “It was totally unexpected to find old stars in a very young universe. The standard models of cosmology and galaxy formation have been incredibly successful, yet, these luminous objects do not quite fit comfortably into those theories.”

The researchers first spotted the massive objects in July of 2022, when the initial dataset was released from JWST. The team published a paper in Nature several months later announcing the objects’ existence.

At the time, the researchers suspected the objects were galaxies, but followed up their analysis by taking spectra to better understand the true distances of the objects, as well as the sources powering their immense light.

The researchers then used the new data to draw a clearer picture of what the galaxies looked like and what was inside of them. Not only did the team confirm that the objects were indeed galaxies near the beginning of time, but they also found evidence of surprisingly large supermassive black holes and a surprisingly old population of stars.

“It’s very confusing,” said Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and co-author on both papers. “You can make this uncomfortably fit in our current model of the universe, but only if we evoke some exotic, insanely rapid formation at the beginning of time. This is, without a doubt, the most peculiar and interesting set of objects I’ve seen in my career.”

The JWST is equipped with infrared-sensing instruments capable of detecting light that was emitted by the most ancient stars and galaxies. Essentially, the telescope allows scientists to see back in time roughly 13.5 billion years, near the beginning of the universe as we know it, Leja said.

One challenge to analyzing ancient light is that it can be hard to differentiate between the types of objects that could have emitted the light. In the case of these early objects, they have clear characteristics of both supermassive black holes and old stars. However, Wang explained, it’s not yet clear how much of the observed light comes from each — meaning these could be early galaxies that are unexpectedly old and more massive even than our own Milky Way, forming far earlier than models predict, or they could be more normal-mass galaxies with “overmassive” black holes, roughly 100 to 1,000 times more massive than such a galaxy would have today.

“Distinguishing between light from material falling into a black hole and light emitted from stars in these tiny, distant objects is challenging,” Wang said. “That inability to tell the difference in the current dataset leaves ample room for interpretation of these intriguing objects. Honestly, it’s thrilling to have so much of this mystery left to figure out.”

Aside from their unexplainable mass and age, if part of the light is indeed from supermassive black holes, then they also aren’t normal supermassive black holes. They produce far more ultraviolet photons than expected, and similar objects studied with other instruments lack the characteristic signatures of supermassive black holes, such as hot dust and bright X-ray emission. But maybe the most surprising thing, the researchers said, is how massive they seem to be.

“Normally supermassive black holes are paired with galaxies,” Leja said. “They grow up together and go through all their major life experiences together. But here, we have a fully formed adult black hole living inside of what should be a baby galaxy. That doesn’t really make sense, because these things should grow together, or at least that’s what we thought.”

The researchers were also perplexed by the incredibly small sizes of these systems, only a few hundred light years across, roughly 1,000 times smaller than our own Milky Way. The stars are approximately as numerous as in our own Milky Way galaxy — with somewhere between 10 billion and 1 trillion stars — but contained within a volume 1,000 times smaller than the Milky Way.

Leja explained that if you took the Milky Way and compressed it to the size of the galaxies they found, the nearest star would almost be in our solar system. The supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, about 26,000 light years away, would only be about 26 light years away from Earth and visible in the sky as a giant pillar of light.

“These early galaxies would be so dense with stars — stars that must have formed in a way we’ve never seen, under conditions we would never expect during a period in which we’d never expect to see them,” Leja said. “And for whatever reason, the universe stopped making objects like these after just a couple of billion years. They are unique to the early universe.”

The researchers are hoping to follow up with more observations, which they said could help explain some of the objects’ mysteries. They plan to take deeper spectra by pointing the telescope at the objects for prolonged periods of time, which will help disentangle emission from stars and the potential supermassive black hole by identifying the specific absorption signatures that would be present in each.

“There’s another way that we could have a breakthrough, and that’s just the right idea,” Leja said. “We have all these puzzle pieces and they only fit if we ignore the fact that some of them are breaking. This problem is amenable to a stroke of genius that has so far eluded us, all of our collaborators and the entire scientific community.”

Wang and Leja received funding from NASA’s General Observers program. The research was also supported by the International Space Science Institute in Bern. The work is based in part on observations made with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Computations for the research were performed on Penn State’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences’ Roar supercomputer.

Other co-authors on the paper are Anna de Graaff of the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie in Germany; Gabriel Brammer of the Cosmic Dawn Center and Niels Bohr Institute; Andrea Weibel and Pascal Oesch of the University of Geneva; Nikko Cleri, Michaela Hirschmann, Pieter van Dokkum and Rohan Naidu of Yale University; Ivo Labbé of Stanford University; Jorryt Matthee and Jenny Greene of Princeton University; Ian McConachie and Rachel Bezanson of the University of Pittsburgh; Josephine Baggen of Texas A&M University; Katherine Suess of the Observatoire de Sauverny in Switzerland; David Setton of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research; Erica Nelson of the University of Colorado; Christina Williams of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory and the University of Arizona.

The device consists of a soft, stretchable electrode attached to a silicone patch. It can be worn like a sticker on either the fingertip or forearm. The electrode, in direct contact with the skin, is connected to an external power source via wires. By sending a mild electrical current through the skin, the device can produce sensations of either pressure or vibration depending on the signal’s frequency.

“Our goal is to create a wearable system that can deliver a wide gamut of touch sensations using electrical signals — without causing pain for the wearer,” said study co-first author Rachel Blau, a nano engineering postdoctoral researcher at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

Existing technologies that recreate a sense of touch through electrical stimulation often induce pain due to the use of rigid metal electrodes, which do not conform well to the skin. The air gaps between these electrodes and the skin can result in painful electrical currents.

To address these issues, Blau and a team of researchers led by Darren Lipomi, a professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at UC San Diego, developed a soft, stretchy electrode that seamlessly conforms to the skin.

The electrode is made of a new polymer material constructed from the building blocks of two existing polymers: a conductive, rigid polymer known as PEDOT:PSS, and a soft, stretchy polymer known as PPEGMEA. “By optimizing the ratio of these [polymer building blocks], we molecularly engineered a material that is both conductive and stretchable,” said Blau.

The polymer electrode is laser-cut into a spring-shaped, concentric design and attached to a silicone substrate. “This design enhances the electrode’s stretchability and ensures that the electrical current targets a specific location on the skin, thus providing localized stimulation to prevent any pain,” said Abdulhameed Abdal, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego and the study’s other co-first author. Abdal and Blau worked on the synthesis and fabrication of the electrode with UC San Diego nano engineering undergraduate students Yi Qie, Anthony Navarro and Jason Chin.

In tests, the electrode device was worn on the forearm by 10 participants. In collaboration with behavioral scientists and psychologists at the University of Amsterdam, the researchers first identified the lowest level of electrical current detectable. They then adjusted the frequency of the electrical stimulation, allowing participants to experience sensations categorized as either pressure or vibration.

“We found that by increasing the frequency, participants felt more vibration rather than pressure,” said Abdal. “This is interesting because biophysically, it was never known exactly how current is perceived by the skin.”

The new insights could pave the way for the development of advanced haptic devices for applications such as virtual reality, medical prosthetics and wearable technology.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Disability and Rehabilitation Engineering program (CBET-2223566). This work was performed in part at the San Diego Nanotechnology Infrastructure (SDNI) at UC San Diego, a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (grant ECCS-1542148).

In a study published June 26 in Nature Communications, the team reported finding major differences between postmortem and living prefrontal cortex brain tissues as they relate to one of the most abundant RNA modifications in the brain, known as adenosine-to-inosine (A-to-I) editing. This discovery will play a significant role in shaping the development of diagnostics and therapies for brain diseases.

While DNA holds the genetic blueprint for humans, RNA actually carries out its instructions to create functional proteins that play important roles in how the body functions, including the complex functions of the central nervous system. RNA’s function and stability are controlled by many modifications, each holding a specific purpose. These modifications, known as RNA editing, are a continuous process occurring in all our cells and tissues, facilitated by enzymes known as ADAR. This process can continue to occur in individual cells for some time after the death of the person whose tissues the cells were part of.

The conversion of adenosine nucleosides to inosine (A-to-I) is a common and well-studied RNA modification and is orchestrated by proteins in the ADAR family, primarily ADAR1 and ADAR2. In the mammalian brain, thousands of highly regulated A-to-I editing sites have been discovered across anatomical regions and cell types, some by Mount Sinai researchers. These sites are known to be involved in neuronal maturation and brain development. Aberrant regulation of A-to-I editing has been linked to neurological disorders.

“Until now, the investigation of A-to-I editing and its biological significance in the mammalian brain has been restricted to the analysis of postmortem tissues. By using fresh samples from living individuals, we were able to uncover significant differences in RNA editing activity that previous studies, relying only on postmortem samples, may have overlooked,” said Michael Breen, PhD, co-senior author of the study and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, and Genetics and Genomic Sciences, at Icahn Mount Sinai. “We were particularly surprised to find that RNA editing levels were significantly higher in postmortem brain tissue compared to living tissue, which is likely due to postmortem changes such as inflammation and hypoxia that do not occur in living brains. Additionally, we discovered that RNA editing in living tissue tends to involve evolutionarily conserved and functionally important sites that are also dysregulated in human disease, emphasizing the need to study both living and postmortem samples for a comprehensive understanding of brain biology.”

After death, the lack of oxygen quickly damages brain cells, causing an irreversible cascade of damage that can alter ADAR expression and A-to-I editing. “We hypothesized that molecular responses to postmortem-induced hypoxic and immune responses can significantly alter the landscape of A-to-I editing. This can lead to misunderstandings about RNA editing in the brain if we only study postmortem tissues,” said Miguel Rodríguez de los Santos, PhD, co-first author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai. “Studying living brain tissue provides us with a clearer picture of RNA editing biology in the human brain.”

To investigate, the research team anchored their study around the Living Brain Project, in which dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) tissues from living people are obtained during neurosurgical procedures for deep brain stimulation, an elective treatment for neurological illness. For comparison, a cohort of postmortem DLPFC tissues across three brain banks was assembled to match the living cohort for key demographic and clinical variables. The team investigated multiple genomic data types from the Living Brain Project, including bulk tissue RNA sampling, single-nuclei RNA sequencing, and whole-genome sequencing. The generation of this data is being described in multiple forthcoming Living Brain Project manuscripts.

The researchers identified more than 72,000 locations where A-to-I editing occurs more often or differently in postmortem than in living DLPFC brain tissue. They found higher levels of the enzymes ADAR and ADARB1, which are responsible for elevated editing patterns in postmortem brain tissues. Interestingly, they also found hundreds of sites with higher levels of A-to-I editing in living brain tissue. These sites are mostly found in the connections between neurons (called synapses) and are typically conserved through evolution, suggesting they play important roles in brain activity. Some well-known A-to-I editing sites were highly edited in living brains, indicating they may be involved in critical neuronal processes like synaptic plasticity, which is essential for learning and memory. However, many other A-to-I editing sites found in living brain tissues have unclear functions, and further research is needed to understand their impact on brain health.

“Utilizing fresh brain tissue from living human donors provided us the opportunity to investigate the brain without the confounds inherent to postmortem tissue analysis,” said Alexander W. Charney, MD, PhD, co-senior author of the study and Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Genetic and Genomic Sciences, Neuroscience, and Neurosurgery at Icahn Mount Sinai and co-lead of the Living Brain Project. “In doing so, we revealed more accurate insights into the prevalence and roles of A-to-I editing in the human brain. It is critical to note that our findings do not negate but instead provide missing context for using postmortem brain tissues in researching A-to-I regulation. Understanding these differences helps improve our knowledge of brain function and disease through the lens of RNA editing modifications, which can potentially lead to better diagnostic and therapeutic approaches.”

The research team will further analyze the RNA editing data to understand its implications better and to identify potential therapeutic targets for Parkinson’s disease. They are also expanding the research to include emerging work from this cohort that focuses on gene expression, proteomics, and multi-omics of the living brain.

“By harnessing the unique, transdisciplinary nature of the Living Brain Project, we can turn a cutting edge clinical care modality like deep brain stimulation into a platform for unprecedented insight into human brain biology that will give rise to new therapeutic opportunities,” said Brian Kopell, MD, co-first author of the study, Director of the Center for Neuromodulation at Mount Sinai and co-lead of the Living Brain Project