Mathematicians are facing the sudden shift with grief, anger, and a desperate search for fresh ideas: “If we don’t adapt, there’s just no more math in 50 years.”

Knox et al. compare and contrast the biological effects of endogenous serotonin with psychedelics.

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

New analysis refutes James Watson’s claim he was first to recognize significance of famed photograph 51

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026 was awarded jointly to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.”

PEN America today reported nearly 12,000 book bans in public schools nationwide during the 2025-2026 school year—the largest number in a single year. New state censorship laws accounted for much of th...

Neural circuits may sometimes calculate confidence in a decision simultaneously with the choice itself.

It’s a powerful analogy that captured the popular imagination, but the biological reality is quite different

The individuation problem for large language models asks which entities associated with them, if any, should be identified as minds. We approach this problem through mechanistic interpretability, enga...

A weekly dispatch exploring the latest news in math and AI…

Nature Medicine - Embryo editing and embryo selection need joint governance

We studied the effects of prioritization in a two-step retrocuing task in which male and female humans hold two items in working memory, and the item not cued by the first cue cannot be dropped becaus...

Google DeepMind team inserts identifiable pattern into protein’s sequence without compromising its structure or function

The whole-brain map—the first of its kind in a vertebrate—identifies five distinct neuron groups.

Maggie Miller explains why our intuition about three dimensions breaks down in four, and how she visualizes 4D spaces as a reel of three-dimensional snapshots.

General anesthetics seem to work in all living species. This raises the question of whether there are common changes in neural activity that occur during transitions between wakefulness and anesthesia...

Unexpected patterns traveling across the human brain may be reorganizing its activity in real time.

Unexpected patterns traveling across the human brain may be reorganizing its activity in real time.

OpenAI chief scientist also among authors of report on prospect of ‘most consequential technological development in history’

The findings provide a new perspective on how granule cells in the cerebellum help to generalize across tasks.

Extracting interpretable mathematical models from complex dynamical systems is difficult, especially for chaotic dynamics observed with noisy experimental data. We present PEM-UDE, a method that combi...

An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.

The assumption that waking life consists of a stream of conscious representations has inadvertently led consciousness science to its current impasse.

Some of the least understood phenomena in the brain emerge from interactions between local and global brain states, yet representing their joint activity is a considerable computational challenge. As ...

The transcription factors a <em>Drosophila</em> neuron expresses offer clues to its lineage and birth order—and ultimately how neural circuits emerge.

Scientific Reports - Two distinct excitability types delineate the partition between normal brain function, engram encoding, and the two phases of hyperexcitability/epileptic susceptibility

The organoids show shifts in gene expression along the anterior-posterior axis that match those seen during the second trimester of fetal development.

Essential cognitive processes like attention, memory, and decision-making require the brain to perform many operations simultaneously. Disentangling the neural mechanisms underlying these processes is...

Biocomputational method; Bioinformatics; Biological sciences; Computer science; Neural networks; Neuroscience

Scientists have a history of trying — and failing — to link biology and quantum mechanics. The real connection between them may be in the math.

Various genes show distinct exits and entrances with age in the open- source dataset, the largest of its kind to date.

The models recapitulate many key developmental processes, but some radial glial cells in mouse organoids make neurons earlier than they should.

Hundreds of physicists (and a few journalists) journeyed to Helgoland, the birthplace of quantum mechanics, and grappled with what they have and haven’t learned about reality.

Random noise can break symmetries and enhance the stability of collective behaviors

A 1987 Cell paper inspired Ardem Patapoutian to think about the molecular codes that define neuronal subtypes.

Today’s computers need safeguards against random energy fluctuations. Thermodynamic computers would put those fluctuations to use.

Scaffolded DNA Computer performs diverse computations while thermodynamically relaxing towards equilibrium, demonstrating simplicity, reusability, speed,&nbsp;robustness and scalability of the approac...

New experiments reveal how astrocytes tune neuronal activity to modulate our mental and emotional states. The results suggest that neuron-only brain models, such as connectomes, leave out a crucial la...