Biology

No matter how much we’d like to eradicate SARS-CoV-2, it may be better to settle for other forms of control.

The spate of furious wildfires around the world during the past decade has revealed to ecologists how much biodiversity and “pyrodiversity” go hand in hand.

A mathematical model shows how a thermodynamic mechanism could have made protocells split in two.

Results from neural networks support the idea that brains are “prediction machines” — and that they work that way to conserve energy.

The brain not only helps to regulate immune responses, but also stores and retrieves “memories” of them.

A new study of gene expression in sponges reveals the complex diversity of their cells as well as some possibly ancient connections between the nervous, immune and digestive systems.

The computational biologist Anne Carpenter creates software that brings the power of machine learning to researchers seeking answers in mountains of cell images.

Scientists thought that the brain’s hearing centers might just process speech along with other sounds. But new work suggests that speech gets some special treatment very early on.

When animals move through 3D spaces, the neat system of grid cell activity they use for navigating on flat surfaces gets more disorderly. That has implications for some ideas about memory and other processes.