Given the task definition and input, reply with output. In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.

In a stunning discovery that overturns decades of textbook teaching, researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have determined that the brain is directly connected to the immune system by vessels previously thought not to exist. 
  
 That such vessels could have escaped detection when the lymphatic system has been so thoroughly mapped throughout the body is surprising on its own, but the true significance of the discovery lies in the effects it could have on the study and treatment of neurological diseases ranging from autism to Alzheimer’s disease to multiple sclerosis. 
  
 “Instead of asking, �?How do we study the immune response of the brain?,’ �?Why do multiple sclerosis patients have the immune attacks?,’ now we can approach this mechanistically – because the brain is like every other tissue connected to the peripheral immune system through meningeal lymphatic vessels,” said Jonathan Kipnis, a professor in U.Va.’s Department of Neuroscience and director of U.Va.’s Center for Brain Immunology and Glia . “It changes entirely the way we perceive the neuro-immune interaction. We always perceived it before as something esoteric that can’t be studied. But now we can ask mechanistic questions." 
  
 He added, “We believe that for every neurological disease that has an immune component to it, these vessels may play a major role. [It’s] hard to imagine that these vessels would not be involved in a [neurological] disease with an immune component.” 
  
 Kevin Lee, who chairs the Department of Neuroscience, described his reaction to the discovery by Kipnis’ lab: “The first time these guys showed me the basic result, I just said one sentence: �?They’ll have to change the textbooks.’ There has never been a lymphatic system for the central nervous system, and it was very clear from that first singular observation – and they’ve done many studies since then to bolster the finding – that it will fundamentally change the way people look at the central nervous system’s relationship with the immune system.” 
  
 Even Kipnis was skeptical initially. “I really did not believe there are structures in the body that we are not aware of. I thought the body was mapped,” he said. “I thought that these discoveries ended somewhere around the middle of the last century. But apparently they have not.” 
  
 The discovery was made possible by the work of Antoine Louveau, a postdoctoral fellow in Kipnis’ lab. The vessels were detected after Louveau developed a method to mount a mouse’s meninges – the membranes covering the brain – on a single slide so that they could be examined as a whole. “It was fairly easy, actually,” he said. “There was one trick: We fixed the meninges within the skullcap, so that the tissue is secured in its physiological condition, and then we dissected it. If we had done it the other way around, it wouldn’t have worked.” 
  
 After noticing vessel-like patterns in the distribution of immune cells on his slides, he tested for lymphatic vessels and there they were. The impossible existed. 
  
 The soft-spoken Louveau recalled the moment: “I called Jony [Kipnis] to the microscope and I said, �?I think we have something.’” 
  
 As to how the brain’s lymphatic vessels managed to escape notice all this time, Kipnis described them as “very well hidden” and noted that they follow a major blood vessel down into the sinuses, an area difficult to image. “It’s so close to the blood vessel, you just miss it,” he said. “If you don’t know what you’re after, you just miss it. 
  
 “Live imaging of these vessels was crucial to demonstrate their function, and it would not be possible without collaboration with Tajie Harris,” Kipnis noted. Harris is an assistant professor of neuroscience and a member of the Center for Brain Immunology and Glia. Kipnis also saluted the “phenomenal” surgical skills of Igor Smirnov, a research associate in the Kipnis lab whose work was critical to the imaging success of the study. 
  
 The unexpected presence of the lymphatic vessels raises a tremendous number of questions that now need answers, both about the workings of the brain and the diseases that plague it. 
  
 For example, take Alzheimer’s disease. “In Alzheimer’s, there are accumulations of big protein chunks in the brain,” Kipnis said. “We think they may be accumulating in the brain because they’re not being efficiently removed by these vessels.” He noted that the vessels look different with age, so the role they play in aging is another avenue to explore. 
  
 And there’s an enormous array of other neurological diseases, from autism to multiple sclerosis, that must be reconsidered in light of the presence of something science insisted did not exist. 
  
 The findings have been published online by the prestigious journal Nature and will appear in a forthcoming print edition. The article’s authors are Louveau, Smirnov, Timothy J. Keyes, Jacob D. Eccles, Sherin J. Rouhani, J. David Peske, Noel C. Derecki, David Castle, James W. Mandell, Lee, Harris and Kipnis. 
  
 The study was funded by National Institutes of Health grants R01AG034113 and R01NS061973. Louveau was a fellow of Fondation pour la Recherche Medicale. ||||| A team of researchers from the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Medicine has made a landmark discovery of vessels that connect the brain with the lymphatic system – something that wasn't previously thought to exist. The breakthrough has significant implications on the study of major neurological diseases, from multiple sclerosis to Alzheimer's. 
  
 The link between the brain and the immune system has long been shrouded in mystery – up until now that is. The new research makes a direct connection between the two, showing that the brain is in fact connected to the immune system through lymphatic vessels, just like every other tissue in the body. 
  
 The discovery was made during the study of the meninges – the membranes that cover the brain – of a mouse. The researchers developed a new method to mount the meninges on a single slide, fixing it within the skullcap before dissection. This allowed them to examine it as a whole, which is when they noticed a pattern of vessels in the distribution of immune cells. Testing confirmed that they were lymphatic vessels. 
  
 The lymphatic vessels have eluded discovery up until now thanks to their close proximity to a major blood vessel that leads down into the sinuses. The area is difficult to image, making the vessels easy to miss. 
  
 "Instead of asking, 'How do we study the immune response of the brain?' 'Why do multiple sclerosis patients have the immune attacks?' now we can approach this mechanistically," says Prof. Jonathan Kipnis. "It changes entirely the way we perceive the neuro-immune interaction. We always perceived it before as something esoteric that can't be studied. But now we can ask mechanistic questions." 
  
 The confirmed presence of the lymphatic vessels will lead to significant reassessment of our understanding of the workings of the brain and diseases that affect it. For example, the researchers believe that the findings may have some big implications on the study of Alzheimer's, wherein chunks of protein accumulate in the brain. It's thought possible that this might be due to the lymphatic vessels not doing their job as they're supposed to. 
  
 The findings of the study were published in the journal Nature. 
  
 Source: UVA ||||| TIME Health For more, visit TIME Health 
  
 Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have made a dazzling discovery, published this week in Nature: the brain is directly connected to the immune system by previously unknown vessels. 
  
 “The first time these guys showed me the basic result, I just said one sentence: ‘They’ll have to change the textbooks,'” Kevin Lee, chairman of the UVA Department of Neuroscience, told Science Daily. He added that the discovery “will fundamentally change the way people look at the central nervous system’s relationship with the immune system.” 
  
 The discovery of these new vessels has enormous implications for every neurological disease with an immune component, from Alzheimer’s to multiple sclerosis. It could open up entirely new avenues for research and treatment alike, all stemming from the kind of discovery that has become extraordinarily rare in the 21st century. 
  
 “I really did not believe there are structures in the body that we are not aware of. I thought the body was mapped,” said director of UVA’s Center for Brain Immunology and Glia Jonathan Kipnis, who worked on the research. “I thought that these discoveries ended somewhere around the middle of the last century. But apparently they have not.” 
  
 Read more at Science Daily ||||| Antoine Louveau, a post-doctoral researcher, peered into a microscope and noticed something strange. Courtesy University of Virginia Antoine Louveau was looking through his microscope at thin membranes that protect the brain when he saw something that absolutely shouldn't be there: a lymphatic vessel. 
  
 The lymphatic system is part of the circulatory system but, instead of blood, it carries lymph — a clear liquid that ferries immune cells and rids the body of toxins and waste. As a 2009 research review notes, it is "an undisputed anatomical fact" that the brain is the only major organ that lacks a direct connection to the lymphatic system. 
  
 Now that claim is disputed. If confirmed, the discovery may have huge implications for studying brain diseases like Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis (MS). 
  
 "All the textbooks said there were not supposed to be any lymphatic vessels in that area," said Louveau, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Virginia. But after he and UVA neuroscientist Jonathan Kipnis ran a battery of tests, they discovered Louveau had been right. "It was exactly what we thought it couldn't be," Louveau said. 
  
 The elusive lymphatic vessel hid in plain sight, throughout decades of research, because it was very small and tucked behind a major blood vessel. 
  
 Experts greeted the resulting study, published Monday in the journal Nature, with a mixture of excitement and caution. The main hurdles: Other researchers must replicate the work and confirm the vessel exists in humans, since the study primarily examined mouse brains. 
  
 The old map of the lymphatic system, left, which didn't connect to the brain, and the updated map based on the new discovery. Courtesy University of Virginia 
  
 Staci Bilbo, a Duke University neuroscientist who studies connections between the brain and the immune system, wasn't involved in the study but quickly heard about it when several colleagues emailed her. "It's generating quite a bit of excitement in the field," she said. 
  
 Maiken Nedergaard, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester Medical Center who discovered a related system in the brain in 2012 (and also wasn't involved in the work) said she was "pretty excited" but "not awfully surprised." 
  
 Still, Nedergaard said the implications for diseases involving the brain and the immune system — not only Alzheimer's and MS, but also meningitis — could be significant. "It gives us a new tool," she said. "In biology and medicine, if you understand something, you [can start to] find new targets for treatments." 
  
 Immune system cells (T-cells) are shown in red; the lymphatic vessel is shown blue. Courtesy University of Virginia Scientists used to think that the brain was totally cut off from the immune system and that if immune cells were found there, "something was going wrong," Kipnis told The Scientist. 
  
 Work by Nedergaard and others has changed that in recent years, but a lot of confusion about how the brain and the immune system communicated remained, since there seemed to be no direct access. How did immune cells get in, and how did they leave? No one knew. 
  
 The new study stands to resolve this and lead to new understanding of and treatments for vexing diseases. 
  
 Take multiple sclerosis, for example, a mysterious ailment that affects about 2.3 million people worldwide. Many researchers believe whatever triggers its attacks on nerves in the spine, brain, and eye starts in the body and somehow moves to the brain, Bilbo said. "This [discovery] suggests MS might actually start in the brain," she said. "It reverses our understanding of that pathology." 
  
 Then there are neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. The new vessel might be a good place to look for something going wrong. "In Alzheimer's, there are accumulations of big protein chunks in the brain," Kipnis said in a statement. "We think they may be accumulating in the brain because they're not being efficiently removed by these vessels." 
  
 That's just speculation — an intriguing possibility Kipnis, Louveau, and most likely others will explore in future studies. The brain's newfound lymphatic drainage system, and all the possible ways it can malfunction, may well be critical in these diseases. But there's also a chance at this early stage of research that it's a red herring: an interesting anatomical finding that's exciting for scientists but leads to little for patients. 
  
 For now, the researchers are hard at work on two major follow-up questions to try to figure out how the research might be relevant and useful. First, does this system definitely exist in humans? And second, what is the potential role of these vessels in Alzheimer's, MS, and meningitis? 
  
 The lymphatic vessels are shown in red, almost invisible beside the blood vessels (in green). Courtesy University of Virginia 
  
 Other scientists will scramble to replicate the results and build on the finding. If the discovery holds up, it could open a number of exciting new avenues for research. 
  
 Bilbo said, for example, there has hardly been any research on the brain's "portal areas" — those foggy zones where the brain connects to yet is shielded from the rest of the body. "[These are] really underexplored parts of neuroscience and neurology ... [These] pathways are really misunderstood. Not even misunderstood, but ignored." 
  
 The idea that an entire part of the lymphatic system was hiding in plain sight should ensure that these potentially crucial areas are ignored no longer. With any luck, this might help us solve more mysteries behind the brain — and fight some of its greatest foes. |||||

It may not sound like much to those without neuroscience degrees: A researcher at the University of Virginia spotted a lymphatic vessel while studying the brain of a mouse. But the reason words like "stunning," "dazzling," and "landmark" are being used to describe the finding is that these vessels aren't supposed to be present in brains. Their presence suggests that our brain is directly connected to our immune system, a discovery that overturns previously accepted medical knowledge and has "significant implications" for the study of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis, reports Gizmag. “The first time these guys showed me the basic result, I just said one sentence: ‘They’ll have to change the textbooks,'" says Kevin Lee, chair of UVA's department of neuroscience. So how could scientists mapping the human body all these years have missed this? "The elusive lymphatic vessel hid in plain sight, throughout decades of research, because it was very small and tucked behind a major blood vessel," explains Business Insider. The website says the study in Nature is creating a buzz in the field, though it's not being met with total surprise because previous research had at least hinted at such a result. The next big step will be to try to confirm the findings in humans. As for the potential health implications: "In biology and medicine, if you understand something, you [can start to] find new targets for treatments," says one researcher not involved with the study. (Other research suggests that the brains of vets are aging prematurely because of bomb blasts.)