It’s known that carrying one copy of the APOE4 gene variant increases one’s risk for Alzheimer’s disease threefold and two copies about tenfold, but the fundamental reasons why and what can be done to help patients remain largely unknown. A study published by an MIT-based team in Nature provides some new answers as part of a broader line of research that has demonstrated APOE4’s consequences, cell-type-by-cell-type, in the brain.

Many Covid-19 patients who have been treated for weeks or months with mechanical ventilation have been slow to regain consciousness even after being taken off sedation. A new article in PNAS offers the hypothesis that this peculiar response could be the effect of a hibernation-like state invoked by the brain to protect cells from injury when oxygen is scarce.

A new study from MIT and Harvard University suggests that the brains of the seemingly simple zebrafish are more sophisticated than previously thought. The researchers found that larval zebrafish can use visual information to create three-dimensional maps of their physical surroundings — a feat that scientists didn’t think was possible. In the study, the researchers discovered that zebrafish can move around environmental barriers while escaping predators.