Ingrid Wickelgren

Contributing Writer

Latest Articles

Once Thought To Support Neurons, Astrocytes Turn Out To Be in Charge

January 30, 2026

New experiments reveal how astrocytes tune neuronal activity to modulate our mental and emotional states. The results suggest that neuron-only brain models, such as connectomes, leave out a crucial layer of regulation.

How ‘Event Scripts’ Structure Our Personal Memories

February 21, 2025

By screening films in a brain scanner, neuroscientists discovered a rich library of neural scripts — from a trip through an airport to a marriage proposal — that form scaffolds for memories of our experiences.

The Poetry Fan Who Taught an LLM to Read and Write DNA

February 5, 2025

By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s “ChatGPT for genomes” could pick up patterns that humans can’t see, accelerating biological design.

Q&A

Pleasure or Pain? He Maps the Neural Circuits That Decide.

April 16, 2024

The work of the neuroscientist Ishmail Abdus-Saboor has opened up a world of insights into precisely how much pleasure and pain animals experience during different forms of touch.

Epigenetic ‘Clocks’ Predict Animals’ True Biological Age

August 17, 2022

A statistical analysis of chemical tags on DNA may help unify disparate theories of aging.