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In nature, female mice, like males, display aggression and dominant hierarchy. This study in wild mice identifies oxytocin-expressing neurons as a hub governing these behaviors, influencing the degree of sexual dimorphism in social conflicts.

Bonnavion, Varin and colleagues show that striatal projection neurons that coexpress dopamine D1 and D2 receptors have unique physiological properties and serve as a crucial third output in the striatum for motor control and dopaminergic signal integration.

How aging influences peripheral immune cell infiltration and the role of these cells following traumatic injury of the CNS is unclear. Here, the authors show that aging transforms CNS-associated macrophages into regulators of immune cell trafficking after ischemic stroke, modulating neurological outcomes.

The authors present a feature-specific prediction error model that explains heterogeneity in dopaminergic signals within and across projection-defined populations. Model-derived predictions of dopamine activity align with empirical recordings.

The role of dopaminergic neurons in modulating striatal dynamics on subsecond timescales remains unclear. Long, Lee et al. show that only potentially supra-physiological dopamine levels are capable of strongly and rapidly altering striatal spiking activity.

Neurons in the hippocampus of Egyptian fruit bats modulate their activity during a spatial reward task depending on the identity of the human experimenter at the goal location. A separate subpopulation of neurons carries significant spatial information about the positions and identities of humans traversing the same environment while bats are stationary.

Snyder et al. report that hippocampal neurons in Egyptian fruit bats modulate their activity depending on the position and identity of human experimenters when bats are flying and encode experimenter position and identity when bats are stationary.

The molecular mechanisms underlying direct neuronal reprogramming are unclear. Here the authors show Ngn2-mediated chromatin remodeling and its binding sites underlying mouse astrocyte-to-neuron reprogramming and identify Yy1, a transcription co-factor, as an important regulator.

Recent studies suggest a close interaction between sensory and motor processes across the neocortex. In this Perspective, Rao proposes active predictive coding as a sensory–motor theory that explains the structure of the neocortex as well as some of its diverse computational capabilities.

Using a closed-loop virtual reality system, the authors show that optic flow cues can causally drive and recalibrate the hippocampal place cell system in the absence of an absolute spatial reference frame defined by external landmarks.

The involvement of age-related myelin damage in Alzheimer’s disease is unclear. Kedia et al. show that T cell-mediated microglia activation triggers a response against myelinating oligodendrocytes contributing to neurodegenerative diseases with amyloidosis.

We present a developmental atlas that offers insight into sequential epigenetic changes underlying early human brain development modeled in organoids, which reconstructs the differentiation trajectories of all major CNS regions. It shows that epigenetic regulation via the installation of activating histone marks precedes activation of groups of neuronal genes.

A probe incorporating 1,024 simultaneously recorded channels with shank length up to 90 mm exhibits high chronic recording stability and enables brain-wide large-scale neural population recordings with single-cell resolution in non-human primates.

The mechanisms underlying human cell diversity are unclear. Here the authors provide a single-cell epigenome map of human neural organoid development and dissect how epigenetic changes control cell fate specification from pluripotency to distinct cerebral and retina neural types.

Astrocytes have important roles in the repair of the CNS. However, the underlying mechanisms involved remain incompletely understood. O’Shea et al. report that the functional reprogramming of astrocytes at the borders of traumatic lesions contributes to the re-establishment of CNS integrity by separating the parenchyma from stromal and immune cells.

The features of astrocytes surrounding CNS lesions are unclear. Here the authors show that after spinal cord injury or stroke in mice, mature astrocytes dedifferentiate, proliferate and are reprogrammed to adopt features of wound repair cells and form borders, re-establishing CNS integrity.

This Review provides a framework for incorporating APOE into Alzheimer’s disease (AD) clinical care by bridging recent advances in APOE and AD research with emerging clinical applications for APOE testing and ApoE-targeted therapies.

This theoretical study shows that dopaminergic reward prediction error neurons encode experienced rewards efficiently, which explains four major aspects of the neural population. This efficient code can be learned with local updates for each neuron.