Hi @AWGall
Shout out to Brain AWG members @esilakeskin Esila Keskin, @windymc Windy McNerney, and @nilufarali Nilufar Ali on their new open-access paper, just out online:
The Social Cognition Paradox in Long-Duration Spaceflight: A VEN Fatigue Hypothesis for Duration-Dependent Emotion Recognition Decline
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lssr.2026.10.007
The paper tackles how emotion recognition speed holds steady on 6-month ISS missions but drops in the 340-day Twins Study. The authors propose von Economo neurons as the vulnerable cell type and test the idea across rodent frontal cortex, spaceflown organoids, SOMA astronaut blood data, and cosmonaut fMRI, with OSD-202 as the ground analogue.
A few things I love here 
- All three authors are Brain AWG, and the paper credits the group’s discussions directly
- The gene panel and predictions went into the Brain AWG GitHub before the data were touched
- Everything is public: OSDR, GEO, PRIDE, SOMA, NeuroVault
This is the AWG model doing what it is meant to do. Great example for any subgroup heading toward a manuscript 
Want in on brain and behavior in spaceflight? The Brain AWG meets every other Monday, 12:30-1:30p PT. Ping @windymc or @nilufarali, or check the AWG calendar.
Congrats again, team! 