- A new eLife paper identifies a single cell-cycle difference—longer prometaphase-metaphase in apical progenitors and fewer neurogenic basal progenitors—as the main divergence between human and chimp cerebral organoids, suggesting that subtle timing tweaks can drive neocortical expansion.  
- Second Sight has implanted the first human visual-cortex stimulator based on “implantable microcoils for intracortical magnetic stimulation,” described in Science Advances, opening a path to cortical rather than retinal sight restoration.  
- Participants sketched a non-invasive BCI concept pairing short-lived, receptor-targeted inhaled “nano-antenna” drugs with external beam-shaping to achieve neuron-level control without transcutaneous leads.  
- EEG was dismissed as low-resolution “ancient pseudoscience”; the group advocated multi-GSPS digitizers and hyperspectral/hyperparticle tomography to capture richer neural state variables.  
- A Harvard neurology study mapped a brain-stem/cortical “conductor” network (pontine tegmentum, insula, anterior cingulate) whose lesions cause coma; electrical stimulation of the parabrachial nucleus can reverse isoflurane anesthesia in animals, hinting at a shared mechanism for anesthesia and consciousness.  
- An experimental proposal was floated to expand an animal’s cranial volume, seed the cavity with stem cells, and test whether the added neural tissue integrates functionally—an in-vivo trial of scalable brain augmentation.  
- Argonne’s “Brain-X” initiative and Dr. Kasthuri’s lab are using synchrotron X-ray microtomography at 1 µm³ resolution to create mesoscale whole-brain maps without sectioning, aiming to compare healthy and pathological (autism, diabetes, stroke) brains.  
- Marblestone et al.’s “molecular ticker-tape” scheme envisions DNA polymerase in each neuron recording activity into DNA barcodes that are later harvested from blood via heart-implanted nanopore sequencers; alternative readouts (urine, stool, bile, wireless fluorescence) were also debated.  
- Multicolor lineage and activity tracing is evolving from Brainbow to CRISPR-based barcoding, as shown in “In-vivo RGB marking and multicolour single-cell tracking in the adult brain” (Nature Sci. Rep. 2014), enabling long-term single-cell fate mapping in intact brains.  
- An Italian group (Rodolfo Llinás) has kept an animal brain alive ex-vivo for days via whole-brain perfusion, offering unobstructed imaging opportunities free of skull and blood artifacts.