Meaghan Creed is the winner of the Science & PINS Prize for Neuromodulation for research that helps make sense of the biology underlying addiction.

Combining the use of light and genetics to control the behavior of cells in living tissue, optogenetics may lead to a more precise understanding of the brain's hugely complex neural network.

Researchers have created mice with some vocal communication and social behavior problems that parallel those seen in autistic patients. The findings pave the way toward understanding exactly how genes cause some of the symptoms of autism, and appear in the 5 October issue of Science Translational Medicine.