Stanford researchers argue the forebrain and hindbrain come from separate origins. “We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain arises from a totally different progenitor cell than the back of the brain.” This explains why past […]
Sleep has an architecture. Researchers used a week of wrist accelerometer data from just under 100,000 UK Biobank participants and found sleep patterns tied to 156 conditions. “This suggests the nature, or ‘architecture’, of sleep you get is more important […]
CRISPR came from viruses. “Two new studies, published in Science, describe a similar RNA-guided system that originated in the viruses themselves and appears to be a precursor to CRISPR.” The system is called VIPR, and it uses a weird “skip-one” […]
Whiskers for drones. “Our entire tactile perception pipeline runs onboard using just 34 kilobytes of memory, allowing a tiny drone to sense and respond to its environment in real time.” Delft researchers built a <100g drone that navigates in darkness, […]
Maybe stop chasing protein. A review of 350+ papers argues many sedentary people are overdoing it: “because most people are relatively sedentary, many people are likely consuming more protein than they actually need, which probably has negative health consequences.” The […]
Aging brains blend memories. The punchline here is that older adults may not just “forget,” they confuse categories. In the study, stronger overlap between learning and recall brain patterns in older adults predicted “confusing items across entirely different categories, like […]
Voluntary attention regulates acute immune responses. “Internal attention (INT, green) yielded smaller and faster-resolving inflammatory responses than distraction (DIS, pink).” The researchers triggered a standard histamine skin reaction, then had people either focus on the bodily sensations or get distracted […]
Studying brain activity on psychedelics. “What makes psychedelics unusual is that the experience itself may be a substantial part of how the treatment produces lasting psychological change,” one of the researchers says. A big five-year brain-imaging study found psilocybin’s “chaos” […]
Metasurfaces: Tiny tech with big potential. “Imagine manipulating light with ultra-thin, flat sheets instead of bulky lenses and mirrors.” Metasurfaces are engineered nanostructures that can control “the amplitude, phase, and polarization of light waves” in a tiny footprint. ~ learn […]
A controversial Alzheimer’s surgery is said to reverse symptoms. “It basically started a frenzy of this surgery being performed left and right.” Nature follows the rapid spread of dcLVA, a neck microsurgery marketed as reversing Alzheimer’s symptoms, and why many […]