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biology
neuroscience
New Brain Maps Can Predict Behaviors
Rapid advances in large-scale connectomics are beginning to spotlight the importance of individual variations in the neural circuitry. They also highlight the limitations of “wiring diagrams” alone.
Quantized Columns
Will We Ever Get Rid of COVID-19?
No matter how much we’d like to eradicate SARS-CoV-2, it may be better to settle for other forms of control.
biodiversity
Wildfires of Varying Intensity Can Be Good for Biodiversity
The spate of furious wildfires around the world during the past decade has revealed to ecologists how much biodiversity and “pyrodiversity” go hand in hand.
origins of life
At the Dawn of Life, Heat May Have Driven Cell Division
A mathematical model shows how a thermodynamic mechanism could have made protocells split in two.
neuroscience
To Be Energy-Efficient, Brains Predict Their Perceptions
Results from neural networks support the idea that brains are “prediction machines” — and that they work that way to conserve energy.
immunology
The Brain Can Recall and Reawaken Past Immune Responses
The brain not only helps to regulate immune responses, but also stores and retrieves “memories” of them.
evolution
Sponge Genes Hint at the Origins of Neurons and Other Cells
A new study of gene expression in sponges reveals the complex diversity of their cells as well as some possibly ancient connections between the nervous, immune and digestive systems.
Q&A
Her Machine Learning Tools Pull Insights From Cell Images
The computational biologist Anne Carpenter creates software that brings the power of machine learning to researchers seeking answers in mountains of cell images.
neuroscience
The Brain Processes Speech in Parallel With Other Sounds
Scientists thought that the brain’s hearing centers might just process speech along with other sounds. But new work suggests that speech gets some special treatment very early on.