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
Before these systems ever see a single cat photo or traffic sign, some AI models are already humming in tune with the visual cortex. In new work from Johns Hopkins University, scientists showed that carefully designed, biologically inspired architectures can mimic activity in human and primate visual brain areas even when the networks are untrained. … Read more
Recommendation algorithms don’t just show you more of what you like. They actually change what you learn and how confident you feel about it, according to a new study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Researchers at Ohio State University tested this with 346 people learning to categorize fake aliens: crystal-like creatures with six … Read more