Quanta
Delving into theories about the brain’s balancing act
Gerardo Ortiz remembers well the time in 2010 when he first heard his Indiana University colleague John Beggs talk about the hotly debated ...
We may owe our existence to plate tectonics
[T]here’s more to plate tectonics than earthquakes and eruptions. A wave of new research is increasingly hinting that Earth’s external ...
Are vaccines creating viral resistance?
[Researcher Andrew] Read and his colleagues are studying how the herpesvirus that causes Marek’s disease — a highly contagious, paralyzing ...
Video: Innovative brain-mapping techniques could unlock neuroscience secrets
What [neuroscientist Tony] Zador showed me was a map of 50,000 neurons in the cerebral cortex of a mouse. It ...
What spurred the Cambrian explosion? Evolving animals may have led to more oxygen, not other way around
Scientists have long sought to determine what caused the Cambrian explosion, and to explain why animal life didn’t take this ...
Is cancer the evolutionary ‘price’ complex animals pay for living in an oxygen rich environment?
Like many biologists, [Emma] Hammarlund wondered why it took so long for complex animals to emerge — and why, when ...
Can we boost memory through brain stimulation?
In a study appearing [February 6] in Nature Communications, [...] a team of researchers succeeded at enhancing memory more reliably, by stimulating ...
We’re about to see an expansion of life’s genetic code
With recent innovations in gene editing, it may seem as if the field of synthetic biology is just starting to ...
Plant evolution: Compact genomes and tiny cells helped flowering plants take over the world
When people consider evolutionary events related to the origin and diversification of new species and groups, they tend to emphasize ...
Evolutionary tradeoffs: How DNA works so living things have a ‘competitive advantage’ to survive
Evolution is a game of trade-offs. Every trait an organism inherits may have benefits and drawbacks; what matters to natural ...
New species may be created by cellular ‘mitonuclear conflict’
In the complex cells of humans and other organisms, two different genomes collaborate to sustain life. The larger genome, with ...
‘Information bottleneck’ theory could help crack human learning mysteries
Even as machines known as “deep neural networks” have learned to converse, drive cars, beat video games and Go champions, dream, paint pictures ...
Neanderthal population estimate increases tenfold
Some gene-based estimates put the Neanderthals’ effective population at a measly 1,000; others claim they hovered at a few thousand ...
Physicist Nigel Goldenfeld: Life started with physics, not biology
[Editor's note: The following is part of an interview with Nigel Goldenfeld, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute for Universal Biology ...
Older mini-brains could boost study of autism, schizophrenia
[Sergiu Paşca, a neuroscientist at Stanford University] has joined other researchers in growing little balls of human brain tissue, about ...
Bear love affair: Grizzly and polar–Interbreeding neighboring species played key role in evolution
In 2006, a hunter shot what he thought was a polar bear in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Closer examination, ...
Could we artificially create mutations that might aid cells in battling cancer?
The scientific challenge has not just been to demonstrate convincingly that harsh environments cause nonrandom mutations. It has also been ...
Cell’s waste bins: Lysosomes’ role stretches beyond ‘trash collector’ to importance in gene activity, cancer
In this loftier reckoning of lysosomes, the organelles deftly integrate metabolic information from throughout the cell and communicate it to ...
Did life start with the simple division of droplets in Earth’s primordial soup?
A collaboration of physicists and biologists in Germany has found a simple mechanism that might have enabled liquid droplets to ...
Analysis finds Neanderthal genome ‘less fit’ than humans, likely contributed to their demise
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Interbreeding with Neanderthals was ...
Genes’ mechanisms for protein production called into question
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. The millimeter-long roundworm Caenorhabditis ...
Are Y chromosomes, and men, really on road to extinction?
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Jennifer Marshall Graves, an ...
Stomach bug just a few small mutations away from Black Plague
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Each year, 4 million ...
How do new genes arise within genome?
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Genes, like people, have ...
Individuality might be a measureable genetic trait
Benjamin de Bivort's lab at Harvard University is Groundhog Day for fruit flies. In de Bivort’s version, a fly must choose to ...
How a small stretch of DNA can keep species separate — even when they interbreed
Sometimes, two distinct species interbreed, even though they're technically not supposed to. But what stops these rare cases of hybridization ...
What is a ‘species,’ exactly?
Most people do not get to use the tree-climbing skills they perfected as children once they’re adults. But for Jochen Wolf, ...
Does competition drive diversity of species?
In Darwinian evolution, organisms compete for resources, and the winners get to pass their genome to future generations. According to ...
