A House Appropriations Subcommittee recently approved a funding bill that would provide NIH with a $35.2 billion budget in FY2018.

Activation of hypothalamic paraventricular oxytocin (OXTPVN) neurons by social or stress stimuli triggers OXT release to promote social investigation and buffer adverse effects of stress, respectively. Astrocytes, a type of glial cells, can bidirectionally interact with hypothalamic neurons to participate in local activity regulation within the paraventricular nucleus (PVN). It remains unknown whether contextual factors related to stimuli, as well as biological factors such as sex, influence OXTPVN neuronal or astrocyte activity and/or their interactions. To address this question, we performed dual-color fiber photometry in freely behaving male and female mice to simultaneously record Ca2+ dynamics in OXTPVN neurons and astrocytes during acute social (i.e., interactions with familiar vs. unfamiliar conspecifics) and stress (i.e., looming shadow) stimuli. During social stimuli, we observed the most pronounced Ca2+ changes in OXTPVN neurons in females, revealing sex and familiarity context specificity. No as...

Donations power mission-critical activities, Trainee Professional Development Awards, and public outreach and education programs.

Donations power mission-critical activities, Trainee Professional Development Awards, and public outreach and education programs.

Donations power mission-critical activities, Trainee Professional Development Awards, and public outreach and education programs.

Over the past year SfN significantly enhanced its efforts to engage U.S. members in advocacy to ensure Congress continues to support robust, sustained funding for scientific research.

These awards honor the work of dedicated scientists who make outstanding contributions to the field of neuroscience - through research, mentorship, and more.

These awards honor the work of dedicated scientists who make outstanding contributions to the field of neuroscience - through research, mentorship, and more.

Auditory masking—the interference of the encoding and processing of an acoustic stimulus imposed by one or more competing stimuli—is nearly omnipresent in daily life and presents a critical barrier to many listeners, including people with hearing loss, users of hearing aids and cochlear implants, and people with auditory processing disorders. The perceptual aspects of masking have been actively studied for several decades, and particular emphasis has been placed on masking of speech by other speech sounds. The neural effects of such masking, especially at the subcortical level, have been much less studied, in large part due to the technical limitations of making such measurements. Recent work has allowed estimation of the auditory brainstem response (ABR), whose characteristic waves are linked to specific subcortical areas, to naturalistic speech. In this study, we used those techniques to measure the encoding of speech stimuli that were masked by one or more simultaneous other speech stimuli. We presented...

We look forward to welcoming attendees to Neuroscience 2025 November 15–19 in San Diego.