Psychiatrist and clinical researcher Gonçalo Cotovio, MD, PhD, of the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, argues in a new Genomic Press interview that focal brain lesions offer something the field of psychiatry almost never has: a foothold in causality. By mapping the networks connected to lesions that produce mania or obsessive-compulsive symptoms, Cotovio and collaborators aim to move psychiatry beyond correlation toward mechanisms that can be engaged therapeutically. His program ultimately aims to bring together lesion network mapping of psychiatric disorders with connectivity-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation and has already seeded the first therapeutic TMS trial at his unit.

In a Genomic Psychiatry Interview published on 5 May 2026, Dr. Dilek Colak, Associate Professor of Neuroscience and of Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, traces her path from a northern Turkish town where a neighbor boy with mental illness watched the other children from his balcony, to a laboratory that now probes how glial cells and RNA regulation shape autism and schizophrenia. Dr. Colak argues that scientific excellence is measured through too narrow a lens, calls for holistic frameworks that honor clinical expertise and locally relevant research, and names a private fear familiar to many parents in science.

Microplastics and nanoplastics now contaminate every human compartment that has been examined. Decedent brain tissue carries seven to thirty times the concentration found in liver or kidney. The burden rose by approximately fifty percent between 2016 and 2024. The heaviest loads sit in the brains of donors with documented dementia. Recent prospective cohort data link these particles to fourfold increases in the composite risk of myocardial infarction, stroke, or death. A new Perspective in the inaugural issue of Brain Health, published by Genomic Press, argues that the field must now move past alarm and toward the three priorities that follow from the evidence: validated measurement, polymer-specific mechanism, and population-scale removal.

An international research team led by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES-CERCA) has documented the highest-altitude prehistoric cave with evidence of intense human occupation known to date in the Pyrenees. The site, known as Cova 338, is located at 2,235 meters above sea level in the Núria Valley (Queralbs, Ripollès - Girona). The study documents recurrent human occupations spanning more than 5,000 years and provides some of the earliest evidence of copper-rich mineral exploitation in Western Europe. The results forces to rethink the role of high mountain environments in Pyrenean prehistoric societies.

A Mississippi State University faculty member and undergraduate researcher are using eye-tracking technology at MSU-Meridian to study how students see, process and respond in high-pressure training scenarios, helping reshape how future healthcare professionals are educated.