Summary
Researchers report Airscope, a 1.0-gram wireless mesoscope that records calcium activity across the mouse cortex during free behaviour. The system enabled neural recordings during social interactions, maze exploration and fear conditioning.
Researchers have developed Airscope, a wireless mesoscope weighing 1.0 gram that records activity across the cortex of freely moving mice. In a Nature paper published on 19 October 2026, the team reports a 6 mm field of view, 4 μm lateral resolution and imaging at 12.5 Hz. The researchers used the device to study cortical activity during social competition, maze exploration and fear conditioning.
The work addresses a practical constraint in neuroscience: many small imaging systems limit the brain area that can be observed, the number of neurons recorded, or the animal’s freedom of movement. Airscope combines a broad view of the dorsal cortex with a lightweight, cable-free setup, allowing neural recordings alongside naturalistic behaviour.
A lightweight system for broad cortical recordings
A mesoscope is designed to image a relatively large area of tissue. Airscope uses an aspheric-lens design that, the authors report, makes its total optical track length 2.84 times shorter than those of previous miniaturized microscopes. They say its neuron yield matches that of benchtop one-photon mesoscopes.
The device records calcium signals, an optical proxy for neuronal activity. Its wireless link enabled the team to record from more than 8,500 neurons per animal; the researchers report this as a 25-fold increase in neuron yield. The instrument’s 12.5 Hz rate means it acquires 12.5 images per second, while its 6 mm field of view covers a wide area of the cortex at once.
Paired with a zero-shot behaviour-analysis system, Airscope was used in settings that included room-scale enriched arenas, swimming assays and recordings from multiple animals at the same time. The authors also describe simultaneous brain and spinal-cord recordings, extending the approach beyond imaging the cortex alone.
Reading neural activity alongside behaviour
In social-dominance experiments, the researchers identified activity patterns across multiple dorsal cortical regions that correlated with behavioural signatures of dominance. They also report that population activity recorded from paired animals could prospectively decode the outcome of competition. These findings show how broad recordings can be analysed alongside interaction behaviour; they do not establish that the observed cortical patterns cause an animal’s social position or the contest outcome.
During maze exploration, the team observed cortical activity patterns associated with reward locations. In fear-conditioning experiments, simultaneous brain and spinal-cord recordings revealed a Granger-causal influence from the spinal cord to the cortex. Granger causality describes a directional statistical relationship in which the history of one signal helps predict another; it is not, by itself, evidence from an intervention that one region biologically causes changes in the other.
Airscope’s main contribution is therefore a research tool for studying distributed neural activity while animals move and interact without a tether. The demonstrations are in mice, and the reported neural-behaviour relationships are experimental findings in those settings. Nature describes the paper as an early, peer-reviewed accepted version that may be further edited before its final Version of Record.