Archive

Studies of sleep are usually neurological. But some of nature’s simplest animals suggest that sleep evolved for metabolic reasons, long before brains even existed.

Eve Marder’s research into the plasticity and resilience of nervous systems finds universal principles guiding life’s responses to stress.

Advances in brain-computer interface technology are impressive, but we’re not close to anything resembling mind control.

A mathematical shortcut for analyzing black hole collisions works even in cases where it shouldn’t. As astronomers use it to search for new classes of hidden black holes, others wonder: Why?

Transcription factors that act throughout the genome can arise from mashups of transposable elements inserted into established genes.

Originally devised as a rigorous means of counting holes, homology provides a scaffolding for mathematical ideas, allowing for a new way to analyze the shapes within data.

The secret to making a qubit for future quantum computers might depend on knowing how to tie knots in unusual materials, argues the physicist Charlie Marcus.

New work shows that histones, long treated as boring spools for DNA, sit at the center of the origin story of eukaryotes and continue to play important roles in evolution and disease.

Math teachers have stymied students for hundreds of years by sticking goats in strangely shaped fields. Learn why one grazing goat problem has stumped mathematicians for more than a century.