Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This important study examines the effects of diet and exercise on brain structure and behaviour in the 3xTg mouse model of Alzheimer's disease. They show that combined access to a low-fat diet and exercise improves regional brain volume and behaviour in transgenic and wild-type control mice in a sex-specific manner, with analyses linking functional improvements to glucose homeostasis. Although some claims are well supported, the overall strength of the evidence is incomplete and hampered by a lack of clarity regarding the statistical analyses chosen. The work may be of interest to researchers studying neurodegenerative disease, particularly in preclinical contexts.

eLife Assessment

The paper presents a valuable finding that the human brain and models that incorporate sentence structures can capture sentence-level semantics beyond word meaning, while large language models behave differently. The evidence supporting the authors' claims is solid, though the stimuli are highly controlled and some analyses could be more thorough. This work will be of interest to researchers in language neuroscience and those developing language models.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript presents a useful mean-field model for a network of Hodgkin-Huxley neurons retaining the equations for ion exchange between the intracellular and extracellular space. The mean-field model derived in this work relies on approximations and heuristic arguments that, on the one hand, allow a closed-form derivation of the mean-field equations, but also raise questions about their justifications and the degree to which the results agree with experiments as well as direct numerical simulations. While the revised manuscript is much improved, reviewers continue to question the methodology for reducing model dimensionality and therefore the evidence for the utility of this approach remains incomplete at present.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study uses large-scale 7T naturalistic fMRI data and nonlinear pRF modeling to map the tonotopic organization of the human auditory cortex, linking spectral tuning to speech selectivity and cortical hierarchy. The evidence is solid, demonstrating that movie-based stimuli can recover robust population-level auditory maps and offering tools for leveraging existing datasets, although there is room for improvement in relating static tonotopy to dynamic speech processing and in presentation clarity. The study will be of interest to a broad audience working on auditory cortex organization and mapping.