Background: The 7 October 2023 attack in southern Israel was one of the deadliest terror attacks in modern history, with 1,182 fatalities, more than 4,000 wounded individuals, and 251 hostages. The Nova music festival, an all-night outdoor rave near the Gaza border, suffered the highest number of civilian casualties, with more than 370 festival attendees killed. Survivors were exposed to prolonged life-threatening trauma with similar characteristics and within a narrow time window. Many survivors also reported being under the acute influence of psychoactive substances during the attack and the following hours. This tragic combination of civilian mass trauma and naturalistic pharmacological exposure provided a rare opportunity to study trauma processing prospectively.Objective: This paper describes the rationale, design, and methodology of the Nova Protocol, a multimodal longitudinal observational study of survivors of the 7 October 2023 Nova festival attack and a sociocultural comparison group.Methods: The protocol spans from the first weeks to approximately 24 months post-trauma and includes three major assessment time points. It integrates repeated online clinical assessments, prolonged wearable-sensor monitoring, ecological assessments, saliva-based endocrine and inflammatory markers, structural and functional MRI, cardiac interoception paradigms, online and in-scanner reinforcement-learning tasks, and semi-structured qualitative interviews. Primary outcomes are PTSD symptom severity (PCL-5) and general psychological distress (K6), supplemented by a rich battery of secondary measures.Conclusion: The Nova Protocol provides an unusually rich longitudinal framework for characterizing psychological, behavioural, physiological, inflammatory, neural, interoceptive, and subjective mechanisms that shape clinical trajectories after civilian mass trauma. Because psychoactive substance exposure was naturalistic and self-selected, findings will be interpreted as mechanistic and prognostic associations rather than causal effects. The protocol is expected to inform early risk detection and scalable post-disaster monitoring and intervention strategies, while also providing unique insights into how psychoactive substances impact trauma processing.

In 2020, a novel Coronavirus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Covid-2 (SARS-CoV-2), spread globally to provoke a pandemic that infected over 750 million people. The associated disorder, Coronavirus-19 (COVID-19), has caused at least 7 million deaths and around a hundred million people have developed a variable yet sometimes incapacitating condition called Long Covid. This multi-organ syndrome, often referred to as "Brain Fog", encompasses symptoms of extreme fatigue, anxiety, poor sleep and, most prominently, cognitive impairment. Long Covid emerges three or more months after SARS-CoV-2 infection and bears a marked resemblance to the suite of neurological symptoms that evolves several years after infection with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Accordingly, by analogy to "HIV Associated Neurological Disorder" (HAND), the acronym," SAND" is proposed for SARS-CoV-2 Associated Neurological Disorder. Mimicking HIV infection/HAND, SARS-CoV-2 infection/SAND is on a collision course with aging, leading to their mutual aggravation and an increased risk of disorders like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. In contrast to HIV, where the virus crosses the blood-brain-barrier in T-lymphocytes and monocytes to infect microglia and other cell types, there is little evidence that SARS-CoV-2 enters the brain. Nonetheless, in addition to the indirect effects of a somatic hyper-inflammation ("cytokine storm") and the disruption of blood- and CSF-brain barriers, SARS-CoV-2-encoded S1 Spike protein and other virally-encoded proteins enter the brain to directly interfere with cerebral function. Microglia and astrocytes adopt a pro-inflammatory phenotype, neurotoxic proteins accumulate, mitochondrial energy generation declines, and synaptic transmission is perturbed. These findings for SAND mirror observations seen with aging and dementia. A broad-based programme of "R and D", healthcare and social support would appear desirable to better understand the complex set of interacting mechanisms underlying SAND, to prevent its onset, to alleviate the debilitating symptoms, and to improve our readiness for countering the impact of those novel, brain-damaging viruses that will inevitably arise in the future.

The autoimmune regulator (Aire) gene is essential for the establishment of central tolerance by promoting the ectopic expression of tissue-restricted antigens in medullary thymic epithelial cells (mTECs). Although Aire deficiency impairs negative selection, its impact on thymic architecture, output, and early T cell development remains incompletely understood. Here, we used a murine Aire-deficient model carrying a CRISPR-Cas9-induced deletion within exon 6, disrupting the SAND domain, to investigate the consequences of Aire loss on thymic structure and function. Aire-deficient mice exhibited focal alopecia and marked disorganization of the thymic medulla. T cell receptor excision circle (TREC) analyses revealed altered peripheral TREC dynamics and a reduced sj/betaTREC ratio, indicating altered thymic output and impaired intrathymic precursor expansion. Complementary flow-cytometric analysis showed a significant reduction in the proportion of CD4[+]CD8[+] double-positive thymocytes in heterozygous mutants, supporting altered intrathymic maturation. Serum IL-27, IL-28B, and IL-31 were decreased in homozygous mutants, whereas IL-22 and IL-23 remained unchanged. Despite these alterations, TCRVbeta repertoire sequencing revealed no significant differences in rearrangements, clonality, or V/J gene usage. Together, these findings indicate that Aire deficiency disrupts thymic architecture and output, while preserving overall TCR repertoire diversity.

The conservation of the animals of the shifting-sand deserts requires a thorough understanding of the physiological mechanisms that not only enable them to function in the desert, but also may buffer them against future change. The animals there contend with little water and poor food resources. The animals of shifting-sand deserts also must move on and in loose sand and cannot construct unsupported burrows. Most are invertebrates, but the deserts also are home to many vertebrate species, mainly lizards. We describe the biomechanics of their locomotion on and in the sand. Some are quiescent buriers that remain near the surface, but remarkably, small desert mammals can swim to depths of more than 500 mm. Diurnally active animals retreat into the sand beneath their feet to avoid overheating in summer and freezing in winter, but burial and emergence are not determined by selection of the best thermal or hygric environment. We address the conundrum of why so many species that are active in the sun are black. The sand provides a fortress that resists invasion, but from which the residents cannot escape. The animals are under threat from climate change and from human use and abuse of the shifting-sand deserts, even though the sand is unsuitable for concrete. We argue that efforts to combat desertification do not absolve us from a need to conserve shifting-sand deserts. In a companion review, we discuss how the physiology of breathing, the acquisition of metabolic energy and the management of body water impacts the conservation of the animals of shifting-sand deserts.

The many invertebrates and reptiles of the shifting-sand deserts, and their rare mammals, live in and on the sand. Their conservation requires a thorough understanding of the physiological mechanisms that not only enable them to function, but that may buffer them against future change. The almost-spherical shape of the aeolian sand grains of shifting-sand deserts enables gas diffusion from the surface to maintain a normoxic environment deep in the sand, with sufficient volume to sustain sand-swimming animals, even the mammals. In the resource-poor desert landscapes, cellulose is the dominant source of metabolic energy for herbivores, much of it contained in detritus that can originate hundreds of kilometres from the desert. Carnivores and omnivores consume mainly detritivores, with termites often contributing substantially to their diets. Many animals of shifting-sand deserts manage their body water by the acquisition of metabolic and preformed water, balanced against limited loss of body water via integument, excreta and respiration. Those that do drink usually use droplets from fog or dew. Some small invertebrates extract water vapour from unsaturated air. The animals have evolved mechanisms to counteract osmotic shock when they consume pure water that can constitute more than 40% of body mass in a single drink. In a companion review, we discuss how the animals move and how they cope with potentially lethal desert heat and cold in and on the sand. We need to conserve their fortresses in the sand, and, anomalously, it is food, not water, that requires attention.

Suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STB) are among the leading causes of death worldwide. Although previous research has consistently documented elevated risk-taking in individuals with STB and identified mood disturbances as central features of suicidality, the precise cognitive and affective computational mechanisms underlying this increased risky behavior remain poorly understood. Here, 83 adolescent inpatients with affective disorders-including 58 patients with STB (S[+]) and 25 without STB (S[-])-and 118 age- and sex-matched healthy controls (HC) completed a decision-making task involving choices between certain and gamble options, alongside momentary mood ratings. Behavioral analyses showed that S[+] exhibited greater risk-taking than both S[-] and HC. Computational modeling of choice behavior using a prospect-theory framework augmented with value-insensitive approach-avoidance parameters indicated that this increase in risky behavior was specifically driven by an elevated approach parameter in S[+]. In addition, mood-model analyses revealed reduced sensitivity to certain rewards in S[+] relative to S[-] and HC. Importantly, these computational signatures predicted suicidal symptom severity and showed generalizability in an independent general-population sample (n = 747). In S[+], lower mood sensitivity to certain rewards was associated with greater gambling, providing a computational affective account of increased risk-taking in STB. These findings remained robust after adjusting for demographic, clinical, and medication-related variables. Overall, our study identifies cognitive and affective computational mechanisms contributing to elevated risk-taking in STB and highlights their potential relevance for the early identification and prevention of suicidality.

This review aims to provide a summary of treatment strategies for hypothalamic obesity (HO) and the latest data on pharmacologic interventions for HO.

Testing hypotheses of phenotypic modularity involves assessing whether groups of traits covary more strongly with each other than with parts outside the group. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is a flexible statistical framework for interrogating complex relationships between sets of variables, making it ideally suited to studies of hierarchical modularity and integration. However, quantifying the modular organization of high-dimensional traits using SEM in a phylogenic context has only recently become possible through new methodological advances. Here, we applied SEM to investigate patterns and correlates of phenotypic modularity in the skull and brain of birds. Birds independently evolved relatively large brains multiple times, as well as a wide range of different skull and brain morphologies. While some have proposed the bird skull is composed of several functional or developmental modules, others have suggested the skull is highly integrated, with allometric scaling structuring trait correlations. The data best supported a model in which brain shape is influenced by a hard tissue module consisting of neurocranium and rostrum (RS) shape, as well as the jaw musculature. RS itself does not strongly covary with other aspects of the skull and brain however, suggesting decoupling of beak morphology from the rest of the avian cranium. All variables, with the exception of RS, are strongly influenced by size, supporting the idea that allometry is a major influence on craniofacial integration in birds. These results provide new insights into likely drivers shaping the evolution of the skull in birds and highlight the usefulness of phyloSEM testing hypotheses of evolutionary modularity and integration.

The goal of this paper is to synthesise recent research on sensory reactivity differences in autism across the lifespan, using He et al.'s sensory taxonomy as an organising framework. The review aims to address how behavioural, affective, perceptual, physiological, and neural levels of processing contribute to sensory reactivity differences, and how these differences relate to broader outcomes such as mental health, adaptive functioning, and quality of life.

Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology, integrating neuroscience and artificial intelligence, has been widely applied in neural rehabilitation. However, hand kinematics decoding via electroencephalography (EEG) is constrained by limited precision and cross-subject adaptability. This study proposes the Spectral-Attention Neural Decoder (SAND) - a hybrid framework synergizing spectral decomposition and adaptive deep learning for robust 2D/3D trajectory reconstruction. Systematic analysis of the WAY EEG Grasp-and-Lift dataset revealed that hand movement information is primarily encoded in low-frequency EEG bands. Therefore, a dual-branch continuous decoding architecture was developed: (1) a frequency-domain pathway for noise-resistant spectral embedding, and (2) a temporal-attention pathway utilizing transformer networks to capture dynamic neural modulations. Five-fold cross-validation results demonstrate that SAND achieves state-of-the-art performance in hand-trajectory decoding. The Pearson correlation coefficients for the x, y, and z axes reach 0.9595 ± 0.0148, 0.9534 ± 0.0151, and 0.9293 ± 0.0250, respectively, representing an improvement of 0.07-0.13 over baselines. To assess cross-task generalization, we validate SAND on a self-collected dataset, where it attains average correlation coefficients of 0.90 (x-axis) and 0.96 (y-axis) in 2D trajectory reconstruction. The temporal alignment with ground-truth kinematic recordings was validated by remarkable performance in dynamic time warping analysis. These results confirm SAND as an effective solution for precise hand motion decoding advances non-invasive BCI applications.