Optogenetics revolutionized neuroscience, but its origins come from an entirely brainless organism--an alga. Nobel Committee Secretary General Thomas Perlmann speaks to the media about this year's laureates--Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel--during the announcement of the winners of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The Karolinska Institute awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine to researchers Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University, Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University in Berlin, and Georg Nagel of the University of Würzburg. Their discoveries led to the development of optogenetics, a technique where scientists can turn individual nerve cells on or off using beams of light. According to Per Svenningsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Medicine, "Optogenetics provides opportunities for mapping the brain in a way that we could once only dream of."

Predicting future neural activity is a core challenge in modeling brain dynamics, with applications ranging from scientific investigation to closed-loop neurotechnology. While recent models of population activity emphasize interpretability and behavioral decoding, neural forecasting--particularly across multi-session, spontaneous calcium recordings--remains underexplored. We introduce POCO, a unified forecasting model that combines a lightweight univariate forecaster with a population-level encoder to capture both neuron-specific and brain-wide dynamics in calcium imaging recordings. Trained across five calcium imaging datasets spanning zebrafish, mice, and C. elegans, POCO achieves state-of-the-art accuracy at cellular resolution in spontaneous behaviors.

Predicting future neural activity is a core challenge in modeling brain dynamics, with applications ranging from scientific investigation to closed-loop neurotechnology. While recent models of population activity emphasize interpretability and behavioral decoding, neural forecasting-particularly across multi-session, spontaneous recordings-remains underexplored. We introduce POCO, a unified forecasting model that combines a lightweight univariate forecaster with a population-level encoder to capture both neuron-specific and brain-wide dynamics. Trained across five calcium imaging datasets spanning zebrafish, mice, and C. elegans, POCO achieves state-of-the-art accuracy at cellular resolution in spontaneous behaviors. After pre-training, POCO rapidly adapts to new recordings with minimal fine-tuning. Notably, POCO's learned unit embeddings recover biologically meaningful structure-such as brain region clustering-without any anatomical labels. Our comprehensive analysis reveals several key factors influencing performance, including context length, session diversity, and preprocessing. Together, these results position POCO as a scalable and adaptable approach for cross-session neural forecasting and offer actionable insights for future model design. By enabling accurate, generalizable forecasting models of neural dynamics across individuals and species, POCO lays the groundwork for adaptive neurotechnologies and large-scale efforts for neural foundation models. Code is available at https://github.com/yuvenduan/POCO.

If you are trying to lose weight, inviting friends round for a dinner party might be a good idea. Dining with other people could make someone eat less, a scientific study suggests. That is because the same part of the brain involved in social engagement also controls food cravings. A study tested this theory in mice, whose brains work in a similar way to those of humans. When scientists stimulated their social brain cells the animals were less interested in consuming a high-calorie treat.

As a child, Kay Tye was immersed in a life of science. "I grew up in my mom's lab," she says. At the age of five or six, she earned 25 cents a box for "restocking" bulk-ordered pipette tips into boxes for sterilization as her mother, an acclaimed biochemist at Cornell University, probed the genetics of yeast. Today, Tye runs her own neuroscience lab at MIT. Under large black lights reminiscent of a fashion shoot, she and her team at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory can observe how mice behave when particular brain circuits are turned on or off.