Daily briefing: Brain-immune crosstalk worsens the damage of heart attacks

"Frenzied crosstalk between the heart, the brain and the immune system could be what damages the heart after a myocardial infarction, a study in mice suggests. Researchers found that during a heart attack, a set of neurons in the vagus nerve relay signals between the heart and the brain, which activates immune and inflammatory responses and causes widespread damage to the heart. Blocking these signals improved outcomes after heart attacks, which could pave the way for developing new therapies."

"Blue manakins ( Chiroxiphia caudata) decorate their nests with elaborate 'tails' of organic material to confuse visually-oriented predator birds. These tails, which can be up to two metres long, are an example of 'disruptive camouflage' - the adornments don't hide the nest, but alter its shape so predators are less likely to recognize them. Researchers set up nests containing fake eggs in the blue manakins' usual nesting spots and found that those without tails were raided by predators 10 times more often than those with them."

"Posts on social-media platform X (née Twitter) that are critical of scientific research can act as early warning signs of problematic articles. Two separate analyses found that articles that went on to be retracted were more likely to have had at least one critical X post than articles that weren't retracted, and that tweets about a paper that included 'red flag' words, such as fraud or flawed, were also associated with an increased risk of retraction."

During myocardial infarction, neurons in the vagus nerve relay signals between the heart and the brain that activate immune and inflammatory responses and cause widespread heart damage in mice; blocking those signals improves outcomes and could enable development of new therapies. Blue manakins adorn nests with up to two-metre organic 'tails' that alter nest shape and confuse visually oriented predators, with nests lacking tails suffering tenfold higher predation in fake-egg experiments. Critical posts on social-media platform X often precede article retractions; papers with critical posts or 'red flag' words like "fraud" or "flawed" show increased retraction risk, so post-publication critique can help spot suspect papers while publishers should avoid undue weight on such posts.

Read at Nature