The thing is narrower than a single human hair, and along its silicon length sit close to a thousand tiny recording points and twenty-eight microscopic windows that spit out light. Slide it into the brain of a mouse and it does two jobs that neuroscientists have, for years, been forced to do separately. It eavesdrops … Read more
Start with a skin cell. Bathe it in the right cocktail of chemical signals and it forgets what it is, regressing to a state of biological openness, capable of becoming almost anything. Over the next several months, coax it toward a neural fate. What you end up with, roughly a year after you started, is … Read more
Inside every cell in your body, a chemical clock is running. Not ticking exactly, more like drifting: patterns of methyl groups latching onto DNA, accumulating and shifting in ways that reflect everything you’ve done, breathed, eaten, and been exposed to across a lifetime. Researchers have spent the better part of two decades trying to read … Read more
The brain scans look unambiguous. After 18 months of treatment, the amyloid plaques that riddle the brains of early Alzheimer’s patients are visibly reduced, sometimes dramatically so. The drug is doing exactly what it was designed to do: hunting down those sticky protein deposits and clearing them away. So why aren’t the patients getting better? … Read more
You probably can’t explain how you ride a bike. Not properly, anyway. You could tell a beginner where to sit, when to push off, roughly how the gears work. But the subtle business of how hard to pedal to stay upright, when to shift your weight through a turn, the thousand tiny corrections your body … Read more
Somewhere in the visual cortex of a macaque monkey, a single neuron fires every time a small dot appears in the right location. Not a circle, not a line — a dot, specifically, at a specific size. For decades, neuroscientists could describe this selectivity without really explaining it. Now, for the first time, they can … Read more
Picture a task so simple it takes four minutes. Generate ten words. That’s all. Make them as different from each other as possible, in every way that matters (meaning, usage, the way they sound in the mouth). This isn’t a test you’d find in an IQ exam or written into the competitive frameworks that sort … Read more
The next time someone hooks you up to a sleep study, those sensors tracking your brain waves and heartbeat may not just be looking for snoring problems. They could be capturing something far more revealing: a physiological signature that can forecast whether you’ll develop Parkinson’s disease, suffer a heart attack, or face dementia, sometimes years … Read more
About 20 percent of neurons in a learning brain seem to be doing something counterintuitive. When these cells become more active, mistakes follow. A new computational model of the brain, built to mirror real neural circuits rather than optimize performance, stumbled onto this pattern while learning a simple visual task. Only then did researchers realize … Read more
For many autistic people, a crowded cafe isn’t just noisy. Every clinking spoon sounds like a bell. Every flickering light feels like a strobe. Clinicians have diagnosed autism through behavioral observation for decades, but the biological mechanisms behind these differences have remained elusive. Now, researchers at Yale School of Medicine report a concrete molecular signature … Read more