Optogenetics has come in for some stick lately, with a number of people criticising the hype that this technique generates in some quar...

Viruses are ubiquitous mobile genetic elements that are obligate symbionts of cellular life forms and replicate exclusively within host cells. The ...

Die Deutsche Zoologische Gesellschaft zeichnet den Biopsychologen der Ruhr-Universität Bochum für seine hervorragenden und originellen Leistungen aus.

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems have achieved remarkable capabilities, but at an extraordinary energy cost. Training and running large-sca…

It’s incredibly hard to watch someone you love fight the batt… Banas Araujo braucht deine Unterstützung für Help fund life-extending treatment for Constanze and her fam

"Love makes fools of all of us," wrote 19th-century novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. A moment spent watching the pigeons at your local park suggests he was right: males with puffed-up, shimmering necks hop, pirouette, coo, and bow to capture the attention of unimpressed females.

The biological age of individual cell types can be evaluated using plasma proteomics, revealing diverse aging profiles across more than 40 cell types and links between the accelerated aging of specifi...

It is widely believed that starvation favours the processing of food-related cues, a notion here called the ’adaptive specificity hypothesis’. Indeed, in Drosophila melanogaster starvation is required...

A toxicology journal has retracted a 16-year-old study linking hepatitis B vaccines to autism in children following an independent statistical review that found a half-dozen concerns with the study…

With no training, bumblebees can work out how to use a ball like a ladder to feed on sugar from an out-of-reach flower.

Standard animal learning studies minimize individual reward magnitudes to maximize the repetitions of reinforced behaviors. We investigated how reward magnitude influences initial learning across five...

PubMed link

Beyond its classical role in gating reward processes, dopamine (DA) also contributes to the orchestration of feeding and energy balance. This review synthesizes and discusses recent advances in unders...

Failure is part and parcel of research, but discussing it sometimes seems to be taboo in science. It doesn’t need to be.

Scientific breakthroughs often emerge from experiments that go wrong – but modern research culture rewards only success

A highly efficient navigation strategy taking inspiration from the visual learning flights of honeybees is described, which enables drones to quickly return from longer flights by means of path integration and uses a neural network as a view memory to reach the home location.

Consciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world.

The "digital twins" helped doctors spot good targets for heart ablation in 10 patients. Months later, all of them are free of sustained faulty rhythms.

Sleep is a widespread yet incompletely understood phenomenon, and animals exhibit diverse arousal states beyond the simple binary of sleep and wake. Essential behaviors such as feeding, courtship, and...

Even though one set of experiments did not hold up, the authors stand by the original conclusions of the work and plan to resubmit it as a new paper.