Despite significant strides in gender equity, the Nobel Prizes in STEM fields continue to exhibit glaring disparities in the recognition of women’s contributions to science. Thirty years ago, only 3% of Nobel laureates in science were women; today, that number has increased marginally to 4%, raising the critical question: Why “still” so few? This opinion piece examines systemic inequities and structural barriers that hinder the equitable acknowledgment of women’s and underrepresented groups’ contributions to science. Data reveal that while women now comprise a significant proportion of degree recipients and workforce entrants in fields such as biomedical research and chemistry, their representation among Nobel laureates remains disproportionately low. Furthermore, racial inequities exacerbate the lack of diversity, with no Black individuals receiving a Nobel Prize in STEM fields to date. The article advocates for transformative changes in academic and research ecosystems to dismantle t

Mapping the Early Developmental Timeline for Auditory Neural Coding Bahar Saadatmehr, Mohammadreza Edalati, Fabrice Wallois, Ghida Ghostine, Guy Kongolo et al. (see article e0398242024) An important stage of mammalian neurodevelopment is the onset of sound and auditory rhythm processing by the brain. The human brain responds to sounds as early as the beginning of the third trimester of pregnancy. To extend this finding in a new study, Saadatmehr et al. explored the development by the end of pregnancy. They used EEG to …

Odor information arrives first in the main olfactory bulb and is then broadcasted to the olfactory cortices and striatum. Downstream regions have unique cellular and connectivity architectures that may generate different coding patterns to the same odors. To reveal region-specific response features, tuning and decoding of single-unit populations, we recorded responses to the same odors under the same conditions across regions, namely, the main olfactory bulb (MOB), the anterior olfactory nucleus (AON), the anterior piriform cortex (aPC), and the olfactory tubercle of the ventral striatum (OT), of awake male mice. We focused on chemically closely related aldehydes that still create distinct percepts. The MOB had the highest decoding accuracy for aldehydes and was the only region encoding chemical similarity. The MOB had the highest fraction of inhibited responses and narrowly tuned odor-excited responses in terms of timing and odor selectivity. Downstream, the interconnected AON and aPC