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How Animals Build a Sense of Direction
Researchers recorded the neurons that shape directional navigation as bats explored a remote island off the coast of Tanzania.
Cells Use ‘Bioelectricity’ To Coordinate and Make Group Decisions
The discovery that tissues use electricity to expel unhealthy cells is part of a surge of renewed interest in the currents flowing through our bodies.
How Dad’s Fitness May Be Packaged and Passed Down in Sperm RNA
Research into how a father’s choices — such as diet, exercise, stress, nicotine use — may transfer traits to his children has become impossible to ignore.
The Year in Biology
Take a jaunt through a jungle of strange neurons underlying your sense of touch, hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution and the dense neural networks of brains and AIs.
The Polyglot Neuroscientist Resolving How the Brain Parses Language
Is language core to thought, or a separate process? For 15 years, the neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko has gathered evidence of a language network in the human brain — and has found some parallels to LLMs.
A Cell So Minimal That It Challenges Definitions of Life
The newly described microbe represents a world of parasitic, intercellular biodiversity only beginning to be revealed by genome sequencing.
Mixing Is the Heartbeat of Deep Lakes. At Crater Lake, It’s Slowing Down.
The physics of mixing water layers — an interplay of wind, climate and more — makes lakes work. When it stops, impacts can ripple across an ecosystem.
How Your Brain Creates ‘Aha’ Moments and Why They Stick
A sudden flash of insight is a product of your brain. Neuroscientists track the neural activity underlying an “aha” and how it might boost memory.
Shark Data Suggests Animals Scale Like Geometric Objects
Despite their wide variety of sizes, niches and shapes, sharks scale geometrically, pointing to possible fundamental constraints on evolution.