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Stimulating brain waves prompts immune cells to fight against Alzheimer’s disease

Douglas Fields | Quanta | 
Discoveries that transcend boundaries are among the greatest delights of scientific research, but such leaps are often overlooked because they ...
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Brain organoids becoming ‘more human’, forcing researchers to grapple with ethical concerns

Jordana Cepelewicz | Quanta | 
Though no bigger than a pea, organoids hold enormous promise for improving our understanding of the brain: They can replicate ...
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Can computers develop human-like intelligence by imitating our own evolutionary path?

Matthew Hutson | Quanta | 
Evolutionary algorithms have been around for a long time. Traditionally, they’ve been used to solve specific problems. In each generation, ...
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Machines now read faster than we can. But do they understand the words?

John Pavlus | Quanta | 
In an April 2018 paper coauthored with collaborators from the University of Washington and DeepMind, the Google-owned artificial intelligence company, [computational linguist ...
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Inherited learning appears to be real, through epigenetics. But we still aren’t sure how it happens

Viviane Callier | Quanta | 
[S]ome researchers have found evidence that even some learned behaviors and physiological responses can be epigenetically inherited. None of the new ...
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Why your brain filters out things you don’t need to see

Jordana Cepelewicz | Quanta | 
Scientists have long known that our sensory processing must automatically screen out extraneous inputs — otherwise, we couldn’t experience the ...
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When it comes to vision, computers are beating us at our own game

Kevin Hartnett | Quanta | 
Does computer vision need inspiration from human vision at all? In some ways, the answer is obviously no. The information ...
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‘Are Neanderthals just another version of us’?

Jordana Cepelewicz | Quanta | 
As scientists peer further back in time and uncover evolutionary relationships in unprecedented detail, their findings are complicating the narrative ...
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How math could explain the ‘great mystery of human vision’

Kevin Hartnett | Quanta | 
This is the great mystery of human vision: Vivid pictures of the world appear before our mind’s eye, yet the ...
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‘Wild theory’: Can aggressive cancers evolve into new species?

Christie Wilcox | Quanta | 
Aggressive cancers can spread so fiercely that they seem less like tissues gone wrong and more like invasive parasites looking ...
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Environmental DNA offers glimpses of the ‘ancient world in a few grains of sand’

Monique Brouillette | Quanta | 
Somewhere in a remote cave in western Georgia, a few dozen miles east of the Black Sea shore, scientists on ...
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Our powers of perception are boosted by our brain that guesses what’s about to happen

Jordana Cepelewicz | Quanta | 
Imagine picking up a glass of what you think is apple juice, only to take a sip and discover that ...
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Using genetic data to examine differences between populations just ran into a problem

Jordana Cepelewicz | Quanta | 
Various innovations in the field of genomics over the past few decades have given researchers hope that resolutions to long-lasting ...
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Glowing squid’s genome sheds light on how animals and microbes evolve to work together

Laura Poppick | Quanta | 
Every evening, nocturnal Hawaiian bobtail squids ... emerge from their burrows in shallow waters of the Pacific to hunt for ...
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We know how the brain perceives shapes and colors. But what about time?

Jordana Cepelewicz | Quanta | 
Marc Howard, a cognitive neuroscientist now at Boston University, and Karthik Shankar, who was then one of his postdoctoral students, wanted ...
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‘Arrival of the fittest’: Fragile DNA ‘hot spots’ play key role in mutations, evolution

Viviane Callier | Quanta | 
Against the odds, separate species and populations independently evolve the same solutions to life’s challenges, and the same genes are ...
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How the brain maps out ideas and memories

Jordana Cepelewicz | Quanta | 
As the philosopher Immanuel Kant put it, the concept of space serves as the organizing principle by which we perceive ...
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What jellyfish can show us about complex evolution through simple genomes

Jonathan Lambert | Quanta | 
You might expect that as bodies became more complex, genomes did as well. But a recent study appearing in Nature Ecology & Evolution ...
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Computer scientists turn to evolutionary biology for inspiration

Jordana Cepelewicz | Quanta | 
Creationists love to insist that evolution had to assemble upward of 300 amino acids in the right order to create just ...
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‘Stemness’ and the downside of limiting our definition of stem cells

Jordana Cepelewicz | Quanta | 
As more sophisticated technology has revealed just how plastic and heterogeneous cell populations can be, some researchers have transitioned from ...
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Are our microbes part of us? ‘Radical upgrade’ of evolutionary theory

Jonathan Lambert | Quanta | 
Look closely enough at any plant or animal and you will discover a riot of bacteria, fungi and viruses forming ...
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Stem cells’ ‘memories’ of past injuries may contribute to chronic inflammation

Monique Brouillete | Quanta | 
Stem cells, famous for replenishing the body’s stockpile of other cell types throughout life, may have an additional, unforeseen ability ...
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Evolved adaptation: Challenges to Darwin’s belief that mutations are random and neutral

Viviane Callier | Quanta | 
When Charles Darwin articulated his theory of evolution by natural selection in On the Origin of Species in 1859, he ...
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Your brain has its own unique ‘functional fingerprint’

Raleigh McElvery | Quanta | 
The physical links between brain regions, collectively known as the “connectome,” are part of what distinguish humans cognitively from other ...
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Explaining hallucinations through math

Jennifer Ouellette | Quanta | 
[Researcher Heinrich Klüver] classified [hallucinogenic patterns he experienced] into four distinct types that he dubbed “form constants”: lattices (including checkerboards, ...
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Why our brains are in the business of predicting the future

Jordana Cepelewicz | Quanta | 
According to [the] “predictive coding” theory, at each level of a cognitive process, the brain generates models, or beliefs, about ...
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Will we soon be able to regenerate limbs?

Elizabeth Preston | Quanta | 
[Axolotl] salamanders stand out as the only vertebrates that can replace complex body parts that are lost at any age, ...
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Delving into theories about the brain’s balancing act

Jennifer Ouellette | Quanta | 
Gerardo Ortiz remembers well the time in 2010 when he first heard his Indiana University colleague John Beggs talk about the hotly debated ...
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