Neuroscience
- Animals
To understand the origins of pain, ask a flatworm
A danger-sensing protein responds to hydrogen peroxide in planarians, results that hint at the evolutionary origins of people’s pain sensing.
- Neuroscience
There’s no rest for the brain’s mapmakers
Navigational grid cells stay on the job during sleep.
- Neuroscience
New book offers a peek into the mind of Oliver Sacks
The wide-ranging essays in Oliver Sacks’ ‘The River of Consciousness’ contemplate evolution, memory and more.
- Neuroscience
Kay Tye improvises to understand our inner lives
To figure out how rich mental lives are created by the brain, neuroscientist Kay Tye applies “a new level of neurobiological sophistication.”
- Animals
To test sleep, researchers don’t let sleeping jellyfish lie
Upside-down jellyfish are the first known animals without a brain to enter a sleeplike state.
- Health & Medicine
From day one, a frog’s developing brain is calling the shots
Frog brains help organize muscle and nerve patterns early in development.
- Neuroscience
Gene variant linked to Alzheimer’s disease is a triple threat
A genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease works on multiple aspects of the disease, researchers report.
- Animals
Bat brain signals illuminate navigation in the dark
New lab technologies that let bats fly freely allow scientists to track nerve cell signals as the animals dodge and weave.
- Animals
A researcher reveals the shocking truth about electric eels
A biologist records the electrical current traveling through his arm during an electric eel’s defensive leap attack.
- Neuroscience
Brain chemical lost in Parkinson’s may contribute to its own demise
A dangerous form of the chemical messenger dopamine causes cellular mayhem in the very nerve cells that make it.
- Science & Society
Learning is a ubiquitous, mysterious phenomenon
Acting Editor in Chief Elizabeth Quill talks about the science of learning and how our brains process new knowledge.
- Neuroscience
Learning takes brain acrobatics
Brains that learn best seem able to reconfigure themselves on the fly, a new line of research suggests.
