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‘Wild theory’: Can aggressive cancers evolve into new species?
Aggressive cancers can spread so fiercely that they seem less like tissues gone wrong and more like invasive parasites looking ...
Environmental DNA offers glimpses of the ‘ancient world in a few grains of sand’
Somewhere in a remote cave in western Georgia, a few dozen miles east of the Black Sea shore, scientists on ...
Our powers of perception are boosted by our brain that guesses what’s about to happen
Imagine picking up a glass of what you think is apple juice, only to take a sip and discover that ...
Using genetic data to examine differences between populations just ran into a problem
Various innovations in the field of genomics over the past few decades have given researchers hope that resolutions to long-lasting ...
Glowing squid’s genome sheds light on how animals and microbes evolve to work together
Every evening, nocturnal Hawaiian bobtail squids ... emerge from their burrows in shallow waters of the Pacific to hunt for ...
We know how the brain perceives shapes and colors. But what about time?
Marc Howard, a cognitive neuroscientist now at Boston University, and Karthik Shankar, who was then one of his postdoctoral students, wanted ...
‘Arrival of the fittest’: Fragile DNA ‘hot spots’ play key role in mutations, evolution
Against the odds, separate species and populations independently evolve the same solutions to life’s challenges, and the same genes are ...
How the brain maps out ideas and memories
As the philosopher Immanuel Kant put it, the concept of space serves as the organizing principle by which we perceive ...
What jellyfish can show us about complex evolution through simple genomes
You might expect that as bodies became more complex, genomes did as well. But a recent study appearing in Nature Ecology & Evolution ...
Computer scientists turn to evolutionary biology for inspiration
Creationists love to insist that evolution had to assemble upward of 300 amino acids in the right order to create just ...
‘Stemness’ and the downside of limiting our definition of stem cells
As more sophisticated technology has revealed just how plastic and heterogeneous cell populations can be, some researchers have transitioned from ...
Are our microbes part of us? ‘Radical upgrade’ of evolutionary theory
Look closely enough at any plant or animal and you will discover a riot of bacteria, fungi and viruses forming ...
Stem cells’ ‘memories’ of past injuries may contribute to chronic inflammation
Stem cells, famous for replenishing the body’s stockpile of other cell types throughout life, may have an additional, unforeseen ability ...
Evolved adaptation: Challenges to Darwin’s belief that mutations are random and neutral
When Charles Darwin articulated his theory of evolution by natural selection in On the Origin of Species in 1859, he ...
Your brain has its own unique ‘functional fingerprint’
The physical links between brain regions, collectively known as the “connectome,” are part of what distinguish humans cognitively from other ...
Explaining hallucinations through math
[Researcher Heinrich Klüver] classified [hallucinogenic patterns he experienced] into four distinct types that he dubbed “form constants”: lattices (including checkerboards, ...
Why our brains are in the business of predicting the future
According to [the] “predictive coding” theory, at each level of a cognitive process, the brain generates models, or beliefs, about ...
Will we soon be able to regenerate limbs?
[Axolotl] salamanders stand out as the only vertebrates that can replace complex body parts that are lost at any age, ...
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 ...
