Latest Articles
How AI Revolutionized Protein Science, but Didn’t End It
Three years ago, Google’s AlphaFold pulled off the biggest artificial intelligence breakthrough in science to date, accelerating molecular research and kindling deep questions about why we do science.
Electric ‘Ripples’ in the Resting Brain Tag Memories for Storage
New experiments reveal how the brain chooses which memories to save and add credence to advice about the importance of rest.
New AI Tools Predict How Life’s Building Blocks Assemble
Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold3 and other deep learning algorithms can now predict the shapes of interacting complexes of protein, DNA, RNA and other molecules, better capturing cells’ biological landscapes.
New Cell Atlases Reveal Untold Variety in the Brain and Beyond
Recent efforts to map every cell in the human body have researchers floored by unfathomable diversity, with many thousands of subtly different types of cells in the human brain alone.
She Studies How Addiction Hijacks Learning in the Brain
Erin Calipari works to understand how drugs like opioids and cocaine alter learning circuits and neurochemistry in one of the country's epicenters of substance use disorder and addiction.
In the Gut’s ‘Second Brain,’ Key Agents of Health Emerge
Sitting alongside the neurons in your enteric nervous system are underappreciated glial cells, which play key roles in digestion and disease that scientists are only just starting to understand.
Why the Human Brain Perceives Small Numbers Better
The discovery that the brain has different systems for representing small and large numbers provokes new questions about memory, attention and mathematics.
Fossilized Molecules Reveal a Lost World of Ancient Life
A new analysis of ancient sediments fills a gap in the fossil record — revealing a massive dynasty of ancient eukaryotes, which may have reigned for 800 million years and shaped the history of life of Earth.
Nobel Prize Honors Inventors of ‘Quantum Dot’ Nanoparticles
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three researchers who harnessed the quantum behaviors of semiconductor nanocrystals.