Neuroscience

Efforts to build a better digital “nose” suggest that our perception of scents reflects both the structure of aromatic molecules and the metabolic processes that make them.

When the brain encodes memories as positive or negative, one molecule determines which way they will go.

Dreams are subjective, but there are ways to peer into the minds of people while they are dreaming. Steven Strogatz speaks with sleep researcher Antonio Zadra about how new experimental methods have changed our understanding of dreams.

Self-supervised learning allows a neural network to figure out for itself what matters. The process might be what makes our own brains so successful.

Perineuronal nets, rigid structures that hold certain neurons in place, affect a surprising amount of brain activity, including some associated with chronic pain.

Neuroscientists uncovered an energy-saving mode in vision-system neurons that works at the cost of being able to see fine-grained details.

Some animal neuropeptides have been around longer than nervous systems.

Vijay Balasubramanian investigates whether the fabric of the universe might be built from information, and what it means that physicists can even ask such a question.

The reasons why sleep is so vital often hide in unexpected parts of the body, as host Steven Strogatz discovers in conversations with researchers Dragana Rogulja and Alex Keene.